Librarian of Fortune

Waking up in a strange town...

I remember one three-week on-site training gig that had me staying in a new town every night. One morning, I confess that I had to look for a local phone book in the room to remember where I was.

If only I'd had Loki, I would have been in much better shape. This clever little tool bar calculates your exact location by triangulating from the available wifi networks. (Look here for a how-it-works description from Skyhook Wireless, the company behind Loki.)

The Loki tool bar takes the information on your location and lets you identify local stores on Google or Yahoo Maps or see a map of nearby wifi hot spots, info on gas prices in your neighborhood, nearby apartments for rent... even local geocaches.

So, now that I have Loki, I can roll out of bed in some strange hotel, fire up my laptop and let Loki to tell me where the local Starbucks is, what the weather will be, which local FM stations play classical music, and how bad the traffic is. It can't tell me why I'm there or who I'm supposed to be meeting, but I expect that enhancement any day.

The one complaint I have is that Loki doesn't (yet) work with FireFox v3, although it's fine with Firefox v2, IE and Safari.

Just in time for your summer travels

The Washington Post just pulled together a nice chart of the Checked Baggage Rules of the major airlines. No more having to guess as to whether that second checked bag will fly for free or whether it will cost you.

While I understand that airlines are hemorrhaging money, charging for the second bag seems counterproductive. To me, this just ensures that people will bring on more - and more bulky - carry-ons, meaning that flights will take that much longer to load and unload. Smart move.....

I wish the airlines would catch a clue and start pricing like the Virgin airlines do, instead of having to recoup their lost revenue by nickel and diming us. Virgin has (brace yourself, airline executives) fixed prices for their flights - none of this shell game of guessing which day air fares will spike or plummet. (Relative) transparency in pricing - now that's a concept!

Just when you thought flying couldn't get any worse

The Washington Times, a DC paper owned by the Moonies and one that leans far to the right, published an article a couple of weeks ago that appears to be, um, true.

According to the article "Want some torture with your peanuts?"

A senior government official with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has expressed great interest in a so-called safety bracelet that would serve as a stun device, similar to that of a police Taser®.

If you click through to the promotional video that the "safety bracelet" manufacturer has on its web site, this is not only an ID bracelet to free passengers from the annoyance of having to carry their boarding pass onto the plane but it also can be used to give an "Electro-Muscular Disruption" which will completely immobilize a passenger for several minutes.

Do you feel safer yet?

Companies (not) going "green"

Call me jaded, but I'm getting hacked off at hotels' fake efforts at looking green when they're really just cheap. First it was the notes about "we care about the environment, please don't make us wash your towels", despite the fact that housekeeping replaces the towels regardless of what you do.

I'm at a Marriott now that has plastic glasses in the  bathroom, with a nice note saying that they're "made from corn, environmentally sustainable, and 100% compostable." Let's look at each of those claims.

• First, keep in mind that a real GLASS would have required no environmental cost after the initial manufacture, besides being run in a dishwasher with 100 other glasses. And there are no transportation costs after the first shipment of glasses, as opposed to the trucking cost of an unending supply of disposable cups.

• Making a plastic cup from corn creates artificially high costs for corn. At a time when we're having food riots around the world, we're using corn to make disposable cups. Our generation will live in infamy.

• It's not environmentally sustainable when compared to a glass. And corn is, in fact, NOT an environmentally sustainable crop. It requires more fertilizer, pesticides and energy to produce than other crops. And, um, it's food, folks, at a time when many countries are losing their ability to feed themselves due to climate change.

• It's compostABLE, which is not to be confused with compostED. This cup will go into the general trash flow, which means it will wind up with all the other garbage, and will in all likelihood NOT compost but, rather, will be there for archeologists to discover.

Oh yeah. Instead of a regular coffee maker, with those little paper packets of coffee, this one uses PLASTIC cartridges of coffee, thus generating more material that will never break down. How green can you get here, Marriott?

Thank you. I feel much better now. And yes, I flew to Baltimore from Denver, so my carbon footprint to get here is 1,013 pounds of CO2. The irony is not lost on me.

how to avoid hotel AV charges

I do a lot of presentations, and I am just now getting ready for two half-day workshops for the AIIP conference. Unlike most of my talks, at this one I'm paying for all of the expenses myself, so I decided that I didn't feel like paying the hotel $500 for the privilege of using their projector. I discovered  Projector123.com, which will ship a projector to your hotel via FedEx the day before your presentation and provides a pre-paid FedEx label for returning it when you're done. For a fifth of what the hotel wanted to charge me, I've got a perfectly good projector for $100. Comes with instructions, a toll-free panic number, and it plays well with my Thinkpad.

Yeah, in most settings you still have to pay the hotel a usurious rate for a screen and a cart to put the projector on, but that's negotiable if you just ask.... I got mine for free since it was in conjunction with a conference, for example.

Berlin Holocaust memorial

I'm in Berlin to give an all-day workshop on "When Librarians Rule the World" (and for you non-librarians, be afraid.... be very afraid). Today, I re-visited the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. An utterly amazing memorial - I've never seen a place that says so much without words. The photos on their web site don't do it justice, and I haven't yet figured out how to upload photos to my blog, alas.

taxi cab woes

It seems that I've had more than my share of taxi rip-offs over the years, the most memorable one being a ride from the Philadelphia Amtrak station to a hotel. The ride took about 20 minutes and involved several freeways. Whatever. I paid the fare, the cab driver drove off, and then I turned around and looked down the street from the hotel. I could see the Amtrak station about 10 blocks away. Another time, I gave an address and was driven all over town, to wind up 2 blocks from the train station. (And yes, wherever I am, I always ask the dispatcher what the fare will be; the dispatchers in Philly have consistently refused to give me an estimate. I think they're all in on the scam...)

Philly needs the system that the Newark Airport has -- you go to the taxi stand, tell the dispatcher where you're going, and he tells you the price and lets you pre-pay the fare with your credit card, giving you a voucher that you give to the driver at the end of the trip, along with whatever tip you want.

driving in Mexico

While in Mexico a few weeks ago, we were driving down a fairly recent highway (formerly a 2-lane road). The government is obviously trying to teach folks the rules of the road; signs every 500 yards along the road repeatedly reminded drivers:
* An accident changes your life forever
* Do not drive on the shoulder
* Seat belts save lives
* Do not speed
* Go slow, save your life
* Obey the speed limit
* Don't throw trash on the side of the road
* Pay attention to the road

Despite all the reminders, it seemed that the only thing that slowed drivers down were the killer speed bumps as we passed through towns -- they required drivers to slow from 75 mph to about 15 mph.  Otherwise, it's basically "drive fast and pray."

Holy passport, Batman!

I have/had 3 international trips - one last December, one in mid-January and one in late February. And my passport expired in the middle of that last trip. I mailed in my passport for renewal last week, paid an extra $60 for the expedited service, and considered sacrificing small animals to ensure that my passport wouldn't get caught in the well-publicized black hole in the passport office.

Imagine my shock and surprise... I got my new passport (whee - complete with RFID chip to ensure that I leak personal information everywhere I go), eight days after I sent my old one in. Unbelievable.

Now I just need to get some tin foil to keep my personal info secure slightly more secure.

 

Why I {heart} the UK's NHS

I'm in London right now, doing a bunch of speaking at the Online Information show. On Monday, I was stepping down from the speaking platform and I managed to fall and twist my foot. Three hours later, after I finished the workshop, the medical folks looked at the egg-shaped lump on my foot and sent me to the emergency room to have it x-rayed. I was in and out in under two hours, having seen a doctor and gotten two x-rays, and the total cost I incurred was cab fare there and back. In the  US, there's no way they would even see me without first making sure I had adequate insurance or a healthy credit card, and my co-pay would have easily been several hundred dollars.

As always, no one here can understand why, in the US, we tie health insurance to an employer. We don't do that for any other kind of insurance, and IMVHO it's not something that an employer should be providing (or not providing, or providing only a crappy option). 

12/9/07 update:

Ah, now I appreciate my sprained foot. I had to request a wheelchair to get through airports on the way home and I managed to get off the plane, through Customs and Immigration and into the United Red Carpet lounge in 30 minutes flat.