Banned for Doping

According to Google, I am currently ineligible to participate in the Olympics (or any other professional sport) because of doping.

I'd admittedly really bad at "staying off my feet" and since I don't watch soap operas, I tend to only manage to follow these instructions if I can surf the internet.* Yesterday, I got put on Terbutaline to stop my contractions and when I was googling this drug, I was amused that articles about the this substance being banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency** routinely include the factoid that it is used to stop labor as well.

Given that Terbutaline isn't even usually prescribed until the third trimester of pregnancy, I'm wondering if this is a case of Wikipedia providing a little too many random bits of information for newspaper reporters or if there is a large number of women who are 7 and 8 months pregnant and also competing in professional supports. Clearly this news means that my plans of becoming an Olympic gymnast must be put on hold until I receive my Theraputic Use Exception.


*In December I had to stay on my left side for about a week which was extremely inconvenient for web surfing even on a laptop.
**It's primarily an asthma drug that increases your lung capacity by relaxing the smooth muscles in the lungs.

Google This

My post about beer pong and herpes generated more web traffic in one day than I have ever had before. When I checked my Analytics this morning, the keywords really amused me. Here's some of the funnier things people googled to find yesterday's post.

• getting herpes at college
• dirty fudge herpes
• getting herpes on spring break
• herpes in Mexico
• Do I have herpes
  
• herpes on road trip
• herpes from fox
• beer pong road trip
• Stephen Colbert has herpes
  
• lungs for sale*

I'm not sure that any of these people found what they were looking for, but they provided me with a source of entertainment. I <3 Google Analytics

*okay, this one wasn't related to yesterday's post, but was a link to my post about my crappy lungs and sinuses.

Google Made Me Do It...

A few weeks ago, I posted a status on Twitter about how I was vowing to never abuse my drafts folder ever again. I abuse my Gmail in many ways, but probably my worst Gmail habit is using my drafts folder as an electronic junk drawer. Rarely are any of the items in the folder actual drafts that need to be sent, but I recently I was looking for a copy of a Eng 101 handout and found an email that I had actually drafted to send out months ago that had been buried in my drafts folder and had never actually gotten sent.

While I will take full credit for many of my less than productive and organized habits, I blame this one on Google. They make it too easy for me to abuse my Gmail and use it for non-email related purposes.* In some ways I miss the lack of functionality and limited storage capacity of Missouri State's old Bearmail system.** With that email account, I literally ran out of space a couple of times a semester, so I had to be vigilant about deleting old emails and prioritizing what I really needed to keep. I couldn't email myself multiple drafts of a paper and store them all on my email.

Somewhere along the way, I got a Gmail account and instantly fell in love. I didn't have to worry about Bearmail being down or getting overrun with spam. Most of all, though I didn't ever have to delete email or empty the trash ever again.

I instantly developed some bad habits. I stopped distinguishing between important and unimportant email, but more importantly, I began using Gmail as a replacement for disks and flashdrives. Early on this wasn't really a problem because I didn't have that many documents that I had emailed to myself and digging through a handful of emails was so much nicer than having to constantly regret deleting something because of space concerns. I liked that the drafts folder was a convient place to put attached files without cluttering my inbox, so I started putting stuff there and never really stopped.

Fastforward 6 years... Same bad habits as above, plus add:

• emails that I drafted but never listed a recepient because they were responses that I knew I could never send
• hyperlinks that I'm sure I'm going to need in the future
  
• reminders for everything from meeting times to grocery lists
• files that I emailed to myself for later access but failed to include a specific subject line***
• emails that I used as templates for things like responding to student proposals
• nearly 100 blank emails****
  

When I went into my drafts folder to look for something a couple of weeks ago, I knew that I had to work on cleaning out my email. Even Google's wonderful search capabilities were being hindered by the sheer volume of email I had kept. My problem is how to tackle this reorganization of email without becoming completely overwhelmed.

I haven't gotten my email completely organzied yet, but I did make some progress. I completely deleted nearly 6,000 emails in the last two weeks and created some filters and labels to help sort the new mail, but I'm still quite a ways away from undoing 6 years of abuse. I really wish I could set up a feature on Gmail that would say things like "is this really a draft?" or "do you really mean archive?" or better yet, I need gmail to create an option to have all email that I create but don't send to self-destruct in 30 days.

I know once again relying on Google to fix my problem isn't really fair, but seriously 7,000+ MB of space is not helping me be a more organzied person.

*Yes, I realize that it is not Google's responsiblity to keep me organized, and that they create many other tools that could theoretically help me get more organized, but if my students don't ever have to take personal responsiblity, why should I? :)
**To clarify here, I mean the one that couldn't automatically empty the trash, didn't have a spam filter, and often ran out of space if you emailed too many Word documents (pictures were not even an option). That system didn't even warn you that you had run out of space, you had to verbally tell people that you tried to email them and got a message back that they were out of space.
***I have tried to stop doing this in the last couple of years, but have since found that I my solution (i.e. 170 handout) is not much more help.
****seriously, I guess when I hit compose and then get distracted or decide to do something else and Google asks if I want to discard, I subconsciously save them all. Sometimes, these have an addressee, but no subject line or message. Most of them are just blank.

Gmail Prez

I love Gmail, but apparently so does the current administration.

Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.

Oddly reminiscent of the move back into the-not-quite-completed-Stevenson-Hall move we experienced August, I can't even imagine trying to run the country with outdated or non-existent technology. Clearly they only way to tackle the bureaucracy is to call on Google.

officials in the press office were prepared: In addition to having their own cellphones, they set up Gmail accounts, with approval from the White House counsel, so they could send information in more than one way.

New staff find White House in tech Dark Ages - Washington Post- msnbc.com

Themes and Snarkiness

I discovered two Google "related" products that I am now in love with.

Yesterday, my Gmail account magically asked me what "theme" I would like. I love my gmail account for many reasons, and technically, I don't need a pretty background, but I'm not going to say no. I wasn't totally enthralled with the options. Most are just color scheme, much like you can have the same Windows set up in different colors. I was very interested in the "Tree" theme that supposedly changes based on the location you input, when I couldn't actually get the tree to change*, I quickly lost interest in this theme. I wasn't exactly wowed by any of them (says the woman who has yet to find a blog template that she is completely happy with either), but I really like the personalization aspect. I spend more time looking at my Gmail account than any other website, so at least I can pick the color.

What made me even happier, however, was Let Me Google That For You.** This site is designed for all of those who are too lazy to look something up themselves. It's snarky and passive agressive, but it's also genius. It basically provides a link that you can share with the offending lazy party that not only provides the actual Google results, but also provides an annimation that demonstrates the very complex process of conducting a Google search. This makes me wonder if I should devote my break to developing a "Here let Me Check the Syllabus For You" service that demonstates a similar skill.

Yay, for Google products that don't actually serve any function purpose, but make me happy.

Notes:
* Update: I finally figured this out. The tree does not change, the weather at the top changes, but it only changes if Google recognizes your city. Even though it appears to accept lots of places, if you put in the nearest "large" city, it seems to work better.
**This is not actually a Google product.

Wikipedia makes me feel smart

I don't like not knowing/understanding things. This has led to a slightly obsessive habit of "googling" random words which usually lands me on Wikipedia.

An Example...
When I walked in Williams Hall this morning there was a sign that read: Welcome to the International Conference on Vertex Operator Algebras and Related Areas:
A Conference to Mark the Occasion of Geoffrey Mason's 60th Birthday. For the next two hours I tried to imagine what vertex operator algebras were.

On my way out of the building I stopped to copy the title onto a piece of scrap paper because I was pretty sure that in order to find out what it meant I would need those terms exactly, and I was also pretty sure I wouldn't remember them exactly.*

My first search landed me on ISU's math department's homepage which provided a program that told me nothing other than the fact that it is studied by people in Croatia, Japan, and China among other countries.

Wikipedia, however, tells me that vertex operator algebra is

an algebraic structure that plays an important role in conformal field theory and related areas of physics. They have proven useful in purely mathematical contexts such as monstrous moonshine and the geometric Langlands correspondence.

Okay, so I don't know that I would go so far as to say that I understand it, but I do know that Geoffry Mason is an important guy in the area and that the only Geoffry Mason that wikipedia lists is a dead bobsledder.

Therefore, I now know something that wikipedia does not know and have some idea what vertex operator algebra is. If only I could imagine how this knowledge endeavor might help me in life, it would have been a truly useful experience.


*While writing this down, a group of mathematicians came down the hall and looked at me while I was writing and saying outloud, "I know what algebra is." They didn't laugh; they just looked confused. I'm not sure if they were confused because they couldn't imagine why a person would copy down the title of the conference on the back of a grocery receipt or confused because they couldn't imagine someone who didn't know what they were talking about.

Evernote v. OneNote

I realize that this is a really obscure question, but first a little background. I've been playing around with notebook programs now that I've become slightly obsessed with tagging and internet organization apps and I have to keep a research log for my very last class ever. I'm not the type of person who keeps pages of notes separate from the original text. I write on the text, highlight, draw arrows, and even sometimes reminders about things not related to the text (Sorry B). So for me the idea of researching and then submitting separate paragraphs about the text sounds like the least kind of helpful research log I could ever use. Nearly all of the readings are in PDF form, so the logical idea was to use some sort of web program that would capture the text, clip it, and then allow me to type in the margin.

Zog told me about Evernote, but while I was waiting on approval from Evernote for an account, I discovered OneNote. Now, Evernote will allow me to import the notebook from One Note, but it lost some of it's editability in the process. I would prefer to actuatly use Google Notebook, but at this point it does not offer the interface with PDFs that I currently need. Thoughts on which application is better...more user friendly...more universal.

Who knew a label was so useful?

When I started blogging, I was well aware of the fact that I was years behind in technology. I surfed the internet, emailed, even had my own course website for a while, and collaborated on Google Docs, but I had never really taken the time to investigate any of the programs I had heard friends talk about. In my mind a label was a piece of sticky material that was sold in sheets.

Part of my aversion to looking into social networking and other technological innovations was the computer situation. My laptop was good, but it was a little dated and I tried to avoid as many ad-ons and processor drains as possible. When that computer died in an unfortunate run in with Diet Dr. Pepper, we bought a new desktop that happened to come while I was on my brief summer break and I discovered the label.

At first there was a lot of set up time that seemed to be yet another way of wasting time, but the product has been well worth it. I went through my web history and bookmarked everything in Google Bookmarks. I generally use the same 2-3 computers and don't access every site on every computer, so I had just used windows bookmarks in the past. As I transferred them, I labeled everything. This accomplished two things, one is made the drop down list much more manageable and two it made me really stop and think about how and why I use various websites. Initially, I had things labeled in fairly specific categories, but what I discovered that I love about labels (as opposed to the older folder systems) is that the same bookmark can appear in two different places. For example, my school email is listed under "teaching" and "email."

By chance, I had explored Google Bookmarks before other applications, but as I moved on to programs such as Reader and Notebook, I discovered that the system I put in place for bookmarks really was helpful in my everyday life. The materials and websites I have gathered for my dissertation can be quickly located under "diss" in all of my applications. While they don't quite all interface as much as I would like--I can't search reader for a label and pull up things in Notebook yet, I've been amazed at how much more organized it has made me. I was worried that like real and electronic folders I would end up with duplicate versions of similar categories (Ex. Children's lit, Children's Literature, children's lit, etc), but since Google references my other labels and suggests an option, this hasn't happened yet.

I'm definitely a fan, and I'm amazed I made it this far without the electronic label.

Computer Update

Greg took the laptop apart and let it dry out completely. Thursday night while M and I watched the LOST season finale, he put it back together. In true Dharma fashion, the green power light came on but nothing else.

The verdict is still out on the hard drive. Thanks to Matt's suggestion, I went out to buy a hard drive enclosure, but Best Buy only had one and it was 4x the price of the ones I found recommended online. I don't need a padded case to carry the drive in, I just need something that will recover my data.

Since then, I added the shortcut address to Google Docs to my address book and am developing a system for backing up all (important) documents. I can live without copies of old conference programs, but I can't afford to lose my dissertation materials or grade books.

Even though we weren't planning on buying a new computer for a while, we ended up buying a new one yesterday. Just last week, I was reading an article about how much energy is wasted in the production of new computers. My laptop was definitely in need of an upgrade, but it wasn't totally useless (at least until it met the cup of Diet Dr. Pepper). Greg has my sister's old laptop, which is a very portable Dell Inspiron 300m that worked better for mobility than my paper weight of a laptop. In order to allow me to grade and write and research and stay married to someone with a computer degree we need two computers. We opted for a Dell desktop this time. Greg doesn't really have a need to take a computer with him anywhere except when we travel, so we opted to maximize the power and speed for our $ with a desktop.

The new computer will be here next week sometime, the hard drive enclosure hopefully sooner.

Library Hours

In my egocentric conception of when everyone else does work, I discovered that the world--or more accurately Milner Library--does not revolve around my schedule. I got up early this morning and was extremely proud of myself for heading off to the library to work at 8:30 on a Saturday morning. Unfortunately, the library does not open until 9:00 on Saturday.

In less frustrating news, I'm a huge fan of Project Gutenberg and Google Books. Instead of having to drive to the Newberry Library in Chicago to look at obscure, early 20th century publications of child diaries, some lovely person had already scanned them in. Likewise the search featured that combs the document for specified words saved me literally years of my life.