Catching a (Google) Wave

I got an invite for Google Wave a while ago, and after I joined, I didn't use it that much.  It turns out that if you want to make the most of Google Wave, you have to know other people who are on it as well.  And since I didn't know many people with whom I'd want to "collaborate," I didn't see any real reason for it.

Today I logged on and found out that Google had given me eight invitations for Wave.  I sent out a Twitter/Facebook status asking who wanted them, and was soon bombarded by randoms on Twitter asking for one.

And then it hit me:  if you want Google Wave to be useful, you have to approach it in a way that will make it useful for you.  That means two major things:

1.) Don't look for invites in random places online.  Would you ever get in contact with these random people again?  Instead, ask around to your friends and co-workers to see who might have an invite.  If you're really desperate for an invite and no one you know has one, look for invites in places that have people you might collaborate with.  If you're a blogger, for example, looking for invites from fellow bloggers of the same genre (mommy blogs, sci-fi blogs, academic blogs) might yield you some interesting contacts.  Because otherwise, you're going to log on and see maybe three people you know, and none of them are people who would interact with each other, and then what's the point compared to email?

2.) If you have invites to give out, don't just throw them out to random people.  When I got my eight invitations today, I decided to give priority to people I know and would most likely interact with on Wave.  The first three went out to people I used to work with (and am friends with) and still do contract work with occasionally.  Another one went out to someone the four of us interact with, because we thought he would find it useful.  And the last four went out to friends and fellow bloggers.  Now I actually feel like I have enough contacts to really give it a go and put it to good use.

If you're on Google Wave and have no one to talk to, don't worry - it seems like the number of users is picking up now.  And with mere mortals (read: non-Google employees and non-developers like myself) being allowed to send invites, it's becoming more likely that you'll find someone you know on there.

I'd be interested to hear how people are putting Google Wave to use out there! 

Ch-ch-change

Living between two different countries for the past four or so years has given me a weird perspective on money. Sometimes I think in dollars, sometimes in pounds, sometimes in a weird combination of both. Whenever I travel to a Euro-using country, I never know how much anything costs because I can't remember if the exchange rate in my head is for pounds or dollars. It's kind of confusing.

But sometimes the exchange rate works in my favor in unexpected ways. Earlier this month, I bought a coat online from a British website. The coat cost £69, and I paid with my US credit card. It was too big, so I returned it and got a refund on my card.

The coat cost me $113.86 on my card. The refund was for $114.24.

And to make it even better, they now carry the coat in the local store, and it's £10 cheaper. Huzzah.

A-ha moment

So I'm working on a chapter of my thesis and I discovered a big note to myself: FIX REFERENCE. I look it up and discover that I originally cited an online version of Horace's The Art of Poetry as a placeholder and needed to go back and cite the hard copy instead, meaning I'd have to correct the wording to match my edition.

Here is the passage that I cited:

Poems in the main (I'm speaking to a father and his excellent sons)
are baffled by the outer form of what's right. I strive to be brief,
and become obscure; I try for smoothness, and instantly lose
muscle and spirit; to aim at grandeur invites inflation;
excessive caution or fear of the wind induces grovelling.
The man who brings in marvels to vary a simple theme
is painting a dolphin among trees, a boar in the billows.
Avoiding a fault will lead to error if art is missing.

-Horace, Ars Poetica, in The Satires of Horace and Perseus, trans. by Niall Rudd (London: Penguin Classics, 2005), ll. 24-31, p. 122.

Why do I find this blog-worthy? Because I think it's good advice for how I should approach my thesis. Sometimes I try too hard to meet certain style requirements (length, not citing too much, etc.) and I lose out on actually making a decent point. Style for style's sake doesn't work. It's important, but you also need an argument.

I *knew* I was reading this stuff for a reason!

I can't help but wonder (yes, another Betty post)

• If Matt just ended up taking a job from his father, doesn't that render the whole YETI thing pointless? Someone else probably lost that spot to him.
• Do editors (directors, etc.) really take their assistants to awards ceremonies and let them dress up and sit there rather than hurry around the lobby fielding calls?
• Why didn't Marc just go to that Vogue job?
  
• Really, when you think about it, Betty's done a lot more in her time as assistant than Marc. She orchestrated a number of big deal events for Mode and Player, and wrote articles for Mode, Hot Flash and whatever that one was that Salma Hayek ran. What has Marc done other than cover for Wilhelmina?
• I feel like Betty also has a hard time getting a clue. She's been told more than once that sometimes you have to sacrifice your personal life to get ahead. So why does she whine that no one at work respects her when she blows off important work things? And why doesn't she look to Claire as an ally?
• And why didn't she just have Daniel come with her rather than stay at home with him? He might have been able to help.
  
• Wilhelmina banging her shoe on the UN podium a la Khrushchev - totally predictable, but totally necessary. I'm surprised Betty didn't get more of a punishment for her shoot going so badly.
• I'm also surprised that Hilda and Justin can get into the building so easily. They just wander in randomly - don't most big office buildings have you sign in at the front desk?
• The whole thing with Wilhelmina's daughter is going to get interesting, I think.
  

I don't feel sorry for Kate Gosselin

I was browsing through IMDb when I came across some trivia about Jon & Kate Plus 8. I know this is supposed to make you feel like, "Wow, it's a lot of work to have 8 kids," but none of these statistics seem particularly shocking. For example:

Altogether the family can eat up to two full boxes of cereal a day.

Umm, just wait until you have teenage boys, Kate. We have to hide the cereal in my house because my 16-year-old brother could polish off a box in a day, and still whine that he's hungry a few hours later.

The Gosselins average 2-3 loads of laundry per day.

Two loads of laundry? Whoa, Kate! I don't know how you find the time to do all of your other stuff, like sit on the driveway and whine about how you're completely alone and so exhausted but you're happy to have Jenna the "helper" there, who's not a babysitter, she just likes to come over and play with your kids. We easily average 2-3 loads per day, given that some days we don't do any and some days we might do 5 or 6.

In my parents' generation, everyone had 5+ kids. My dad had a neighbor who had 13 kids. And while you say it's not the same as having sextuplets, it's not exactly easy when you've got seven kids who are less than ten years apart. And they all made it out just fine.

Stop whining, Kate.