Random hotel thoughts at the end of a long trip

I haven’t counted, but have probably stayed at a dozen hotels or more on this trip, ranging from simple to luxurious, in 3 countries: Thailand (developed), Myanmar (undeveloped) and, in Laos, Luang Prabang (in between).

• Having glass (clear or frosted) between a hotel room and its bathroom makes a lot of sense when the electricity is unreliable.
• Having a refrigerator in a hotel room where all the power goes off when the room key is removed from its slot does not make sense, however.
• Having an electric hot water pot in the room is nice – but only if there’s an outlet someplace other than behind the TV, and one that fits the pot’s plug.
• All-in-one bathroom/showers are fine, but the placement of the towel rack needs careful thought.  My current hotel solved the problem by having no towel racks at all — not the best choice.
• The one-handle faucet is now very popular. But it stinks in terms of usability. You have a 2-ended lever, and one side of the circle is labeled hot, the other cold. But which end of the level is turned toward the temperature indicator? In my current hotel room, pointing the top of the lever at “cold” yields hot water.
• Why do hotels so rarely restock tea/coffee and minibar?

Things Have Changed — But…

Young women today don’t realize, I think, how things were, and not that long ago. Gail Collins’ new book reminds us of how things were.

When I was in high school I decided to be a “lady lawyer” — that was the term for women lawyers, since there were so few.

In college at a Jesuit university, if we women EVER wore pants, we had to leave campus by the shortest route possible.  My dorm roommate could go to breakfast in her nightgown with a coat over it, but not in pants.  This wasn’t just about what we wore — it was about control.

When I got an “honorary” scholarlship at my first choice Jesuit university — i.e. no money — a male friend who was a student there told me they never gave scholarships to women.

In one of my first jobs, at a bank, a woman co-worker in a low-level clerical job pointed out to me that she had exactly the same educational credentials as the male junior executive in our dept.  Our dept. was managed by a woman, who said that she got into management because she couldn’t type.  If she could have typed they would have made her a secretary.

When I was married and tried to apply for a credit card in my own name, I had to fight with the bank.  And some friends had to fight with the hospital when their first child was born — the wife had kept her own name, and the hospital wasn’t about to register a child with a different last name than its mother.

When I got my PhD and went on the academic job market, at the major job-hunting conference someone I interviewed with (fortunately) told me my dean was undermining me. He was telling people that I had a husband in SF and so wasn’t mobile, even though I was interviewing for jobs all over the country.

And in today’s NY Times, an op-ed by a woman who went to college in the 80’s who says “My generation was wrong to think the fight for equality was over.”

“She’s Geeky” conference in Bay Area – and call for volunteers

From the “She’s Geeky” organizers:

Dear She’s Geeky Women,

We are really pleased to announce that Early Bird Registration is open for:

DC – November 13-14, 2009  Friday – Saturday
Announcement:
http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeeky.org/sg/2009/09/annoucing-shes-geeky-dc-nov-13-14/
Registration: http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeekydc.eventbrite.com/

Bay Area – January 29-31, 2010  Friday – Sunday
Announcement:
http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeeky.org/sg/2009/09/shes-geeky-bay-area-3/
Registration: http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeekybayarea3.eventbrite.com/

We are looking for Bay Area “Host/Organizing Team Members” – if you live in the Bay Area and would like to/are able to volunteer some time (up to several hours a week over the 12 weeks leading up to the event) to help us with outreach, marketing/PR, or event production please contact us at info@http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeeky.org and we’ll get back to you.

To make our vision of making it to at least 10 cities next year our goal is to raise $200,000 by the end of the year.  We have plans to meet with several dozen successful women in tech to ask them to contribute to this vision. If you know of any successful women you think might be interested in supporting the growth of She’s Geeky please let us know. We will also be launching a Grassroots Campaign and we are designing a special edition She’s Geeky T-Shirt that will be for this event.

Some things are new this year for our events:

• You can bring your daughters / young women you know. We have a special low price for young women so please take advantage of it and bring your daughters, nieces and young friends.   We currently don’t have the capacity to offer child care but are considering our options for providing this.

• We are now offering a Personal Brand Sponsorship Level at $50.  This rate is on top of the ticket you choose to purchase  and for this contribution your personal brand/blog name will be listed and linked to on our Event Announcement Pages for the event & your logo will be printed out and on display at the conference.

• Community Sponsorships of $250 and $500 are also available through registration.  The $250 level includes one full event ticket (all the days of the unConference) and the $500 level includes two full event tickets. These are for small companies and firms who want to support the event or for an individual if they choose.

Corporate Sponsorship is available for both events contact us to learn more – info@http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeeky.org

Thank you for your continued support and interest in She’s Geeky!

She’s Geeky convenes to inspire women technologists for the future and advance systemic change in tech culture, providing a space to create enduring communities that foster collaboration and innovation among women professional women working in Science Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
——————–

To reply to this message, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?inbox/readmessage.php&t=1045856682682&mid=12cc97eG12e6f0G606069aG0

Kindle Review

Update 10/1/09: Amazon has quietly raised the price of most new books to $15.  They are, more or less, a monopoly provider, so they can and no doubt will raise the price of books as they gain market share.

There has recently been  discussion about using Kindle for student textbooks. I got a Kindle 2 this summer and have been using it.  Here’s my review of the Kindle, with special attention to its potential for textbooks.  (The Kindle DX has a larger screen, but not so much larger that my points below don’t apply.)

IN SUMMARY:

What I like about the Kindle:

• portability, the ability to carry a lot of text with me and read whenever, wherever;
• syncing with iPhone, so that I have my Kindle books with me on the phone — e.g., waiting at the vet today I read some of the novel I’m reading, on the iPhone;
• string searching within the text (but with problems — see below);
• the ability to change text size: e.g., I use it on cardio machines at the gym and make the text large enough to see whatever the distance;
• built-in dictionary: highlight a word and the definition pops up. For specialized vocabularly such as used in a scholarly book or textbook, however, it’s not very useful;
• And price: $10 for most books from Amazon.  But this varies: Routledge has started putting out scholarly books on Kindle an the prices range from $15 to $30 and more.

There are limits on what’s available.  For my upcoming trip to Burma, of the fiction and non-fiction books about Burma that I’m trying read. only one, a novel, is available in Kindle edition.  I’d really like a couple of the more important non-fiction books on the Kindle: easier to carry; easier to search for place names; and less likely to incite the interest of authorities who might confiscate those books as I enter the country.

What I find most difficult for textbook-like or scholarly reading:

• the decontextualization of the content, and
• the near-impossibility of highlighting and annotating in a meaningful way.

For my own purposes, I like the Kindle for reading fiction.    I would not use it for professional reading that I want to understand, annotate, and go back to. I would not use it for books I want to keep; only those I will read and delete.

——-

For those who want to read more:

The Kindle is, like a computer screen, a small window on the text, considerably less than a page, even of a small book; and suffers from the computer screen’s lack of context.  It’s hard to see how a topic is related to others; to flip through a lot of pages quickly; to know where you are in the text; or see how long a section is.  The Kindle has a progress bar on the bottom of the screen and the text locations are numbered, but it doesn’t give the intuitive sense of location that a book does.  If I’m 70% of the way through my book – that doesn’t tell me whether it’s a big book or a small one, and how many pages that represents.  It’s even harder to know how many pages until a chapter break or the end of a section.

It does offer the option of looking at a table of contents, and searching for text strings, and you can page through the text, but, again, it’s more like moving through an online document, although a little slower than on a computer.  It doesn’t scroll, it pages.  It’s quite fast enough for reading, but not for skimming or thumbing.

Although text can be highlighted or annotated, it’s slow and tedious. The Kindle control for highlighting text is a tiny button.  The highlight itself is merely a light gray underline. I use a variety of kinds of highlights to mark my own texts, to distinguish major and minor points, outline the author’s argument, or number the topics or points made; not possible on Kindle.

Adding a note requires several steps: (1) hit menu key (2) use small button to scroll down to “add a note or highlight” (3) click (4) move cursor on page of text to where note should be (5) type on the tiny keyboard (I’m a fast, touch typist and this is slow) (6)  scroll to “save note” on screen and (7) click. Once you’ve added a note, it looks like a linked endnote, a superscript number.  You have to click on the superscript to see the note. Nowhere near as easy or as visible as, say, adding a virtual sticky to a PDF document, let alone writing in the margin.

String searching is useful, but is like using a book indexed by an obsessive-compulsive indexer. You have to (1) hit menu key; (2) scroll to search; (3) click; (4) type the term on small keyboard; (5) click “find.”  The result is a series of 2-line quotes for every use of that term.  if you can’t tell by that snippet whether a section is the one you want versus, say, a passing mention, and the term or phrase is used often, this could be a very long, tedious process.

Finally, a minor point but one that is getting more important as I have more books.  Books on the Kindle are listed by auathor and title.  Again, the lack of physical cues can be a problem: which is the skinny red book you used for X? The big textbook from Prof. B’s course?  This may seem minor, but I find some of my Kindle books sinking into an undifferentiated list — especially the ones I haven’t read yet.  The thumbnails of covers that Amazon uses on its site would be very helpful.

For example, one of the unread books on my Kindle is “The Glass Palace”:  is this a current novel I just read a good review of? A history of Burma? (That phrase has significance in Burma.)  No,  it’s an older novel set in the Burma of the British occupation.

For my own purposes, I like the Kindle for reading fiction.   I would NOT use it for professional reading that I want to understand, go back to, and re-use. I would not use it for books I want to keep; only books I want to read and delete.

Consumer Alert: laptoplcdworld.com

Ordered a laptop screen from them — BAD idea.  Their eBay ad was incomplete — what they advertised as a replacement screen for my Dell Latitude X1 came as glossy, not matte, which was the original. Their ad did not specify glossy or matte.  And they’ve been a pain the ass over trying to get this corrected.  Rude and uncooperative.  And they got downright vindictive when I posted  negative  (and accurate) feedback on eBay. They tried to intimidate me — threatened to report this as an unpaid transaction, but it’s Paypal and the credit card bill hasn’t even come yet!  So their eBay ratings are positively biased — they try to bully people out of leaving negative comments.  Avoid them!

Consumer Complaint: United Airlines

Summary: I was booking an international ticket on United with frequent flyer miles and there was a problem with the info saved on my Mileage Plus account — because the United Visa database got hacked a few years ago.   But the India call center, instead of telling me about the problem, stonewalled me and then hung up on me. I would never have gotten my ticket if I had patiently waited, as they told me too.

If you want to skip the story, here’s the moral: Sometimes being a bitch is necessary. It works. Waiting patiently when people ask you to may leave you — waiting patiently.  Forever. 

Don’t bother reading the rest unless you’re a regular United flyer and/or have a Mileage Plus account –  or enjoy reading about consumer angst. I post these consumer complaints because

1. other people with similar problems find these posts and they may be helpful
2. I hope that at least some of these companies are smart enough to be monitoring how they show in the blogosphere and
3. If, like me, you don’t fly United often but do have miles accumulated with them: the same could happen to you.

(Do I have enough links back to United? Want to make this easy for them to find.  I’ll smear tags all over it, too.)

If this doesn’t apply to you, you can stop here.  Unless you ENJOY reading tales of consumer woe. In which case, read on:

Booked FF ticket online and had to pay for fees plus upgrade.  Got an email that said my flight would be ticketed within 24 hours (huh?), with a # to call if I needed it sooner. A friend is going to book (and pay for) the same flights, so I needed to know my rez went through.  So I  called.

The guy was really friendly, said he’d email the seat assignments right away (too long to explain),  then said he had to check with his “help center” about something in his screen, came back and said coldly that I’d hear in 24 hours.   Uh-oh. (I figured I’m on their shit list because of problems I gave them over the problems they gave me the last time I tried to use miles.  See end of post.)

No email. No confirmation. Nothing.

So after several hours I called and got a call center  in India  again — the agent  (Abdul) stonewalled me, then told me I was using someone else’s miles, which I  wasn’t,  so I asked to talk to his supervisor — Jaba, #V059. Jaba  told me everything was fine, and when I said I needed that in writing, said it was fine, and when I again said I needed that in writing, hung up on me. Yes, was I not exactly calm and polite — how many times can I say “I need that in writing!” and stay calm?

(Since my last fiasco with United, I now routinely ask for names and employee id #s at the beginning of a call with United — and ask to speak to the supervisor quickly, rather than keep struggling with an agent who doesn’t know what they’re doing — I’ve had such problems in the past.)

So I  called back and got Abdul AGAIN (really; I recognized his voice) and I heard someone  yelling in the background (not what you expect to hear in a call center) — probably Jaba yelling something like “don’t talk to that bitch.” And Abdul hung up on me.

So rather than call the same number AGAIN and talk to Abdul and Jaba AGAIN — or, rather, have them hang up on me again –  I called the domestic reservations number, not so much to get a US employee (though I did) but to not get Abdul and Jaba.  We know how that would have ended up.

So it turns out that the credit card United had in their database for me was an old Mileage Plus Visa that I had had to cancel because THEIR database got hacked a few years ago – I didn’t pick up that the last 4 digits (which was all that showed on the screen) were wrong. (I never fly United anymore — and if I didn’t have 180,000 miles with them, I never would again — so they still have the old number.)  (BTW, I never save CC #s with online vendors anymore — not that I think that’ll stop a good hacker.) 

But Abdul and Jaba, and the first agent, would not tell me what was wrong, so I couldn’t  straighten it out – what did they think was going to happen?

So the person I talked with in the US/domestic flights center  got it all straightened out — and I filed a complaint  against Abdul and Jaba.

The man I talked to in the US says they have this problem with the India call center — they won’t do conflict.  But whether this was a cultural issue, or personal — if a service person can’t deal with problems, what are they doing in a job like that?

So if I hadn’t gotten mad enough to refuse to wait 24 hours and to find ANOTHER # to call instead of sticking with the number I was given to call if I had a problem with this rez…Who knows whether this ever would have gotten straightened out.

Oh, and by the way: the agent I talked to here passed me on to someone in Mileage Plus to describe the problem and report the agents’ names.  He took all this down, then said something about this needing more something, and put me on hold — and on hold — until I gave up and hung up. They know how to reach me.

(I have visions of him on another line with Jaba  who was telling him how this rude American woman wouldn’t shut up and wait for the email that was never going to come, and kept insisting on getting it in writing — and yelled at him when he repeatedly told her everything was all right even though it wasn’t — what a bitch.)

I’ve had problems in the past with United’s overseas call center people being poorly trained.  The last time I tried to use miles I had to tell the United rep that they have *2* levels of awards; that there was a routing through LAX to where I wanted to go; and other such basics.

(Lest this be seen as trashing overseas call centers, in India or elsewhere: when I had a problem with Dell a few years ago, their Texas call center was rude and unhelpful and the India call center was terrific. My hard drive got fried by a PG&E glitch. Texas  said they couldn’t send a replacement until their local repair person sent back the original.  I argued that I had no control over how long the drive might roll around in his trunk before he sent it back.  The India center sent out a new drive immediately.  If it’s a cultural difference, in that case it was to my advantage: the several people I talked to at the India center actually wanted to be helpful; the Texas people didn’t care.  It may often be a training issue: I’ve talked to helpful people at overseas and domestic centers who just don’t know enough to do their jobs.)

Leukemia Society Telemarketing Overkill – here’s who to complain to

I have received endless telemarketing calls from the Leukemia Society — one every day this week. They have used two different phone #s: 208-991-1209 and 801-618-2059. When I googled these #s, I found LOTS of complaints.

If you’re getting them, too, here are the the emails  at the Leukemia Society to complain to:

JohnWalter@leukemia-lymphoma.org (president)
Nancy.Klein@lls.org (head of marketing)
Bruny.Lynch@lls.org
Marie.McDonough@lls.org

My email to Nancy Klein got a result; the others are people she cc’d on her answer to me.

Kindle, cont.

The other day I wrote a brief post about getting a Kindle.  Here I want to expand on the effect of the Kindle on my reading and book-buying habits.

I love it that I could pre-order a book that was about to be published and have it appear on my Kindle.  I love being able to take it to the gym.  I have some long flights coming up, and traveling around, and it’ll be great.

BUT — I miss real books. And won’t give them up.  But won’t be buying as many, which is real dilemma — I want and NEED bookstores to stay open. And Berkeley, which was once a great bookstore town, is now impoverished, with both Cody’s and Black Oak gone.

As I said in the last post, the Kindle doesn’t work for professional reading. And for books I want to keep and refer back to — professional or other — I’ll want a physical volume.

For leisure reading: the Kindle doesn’t remind me that I’m in the middle of a book, or that I’m getting near the end and so will read more to find out how it turns out.  It doesn’t sit around visibly calling to me the way a book does.  I find myself looking for a newspaper or magazine when, say, I sit down to eat, and not thinking of the Kindle.  It’s taking me a lot longer to read my current book (Netherland) than it normally would, for such a book — I just don’t think about it. Even though it’s a wonderful, superbly-written book.

I was telling someone about Netherland and I had no idea who the author is (Joseph O’Neill) — and I didn’t recognize the book online when I went looking to see if the author had a new book out. I don’t ever see the cover.

I don’t have a pile of books reminding me of what I have yet to read, or what I’m in the middle of — serious books for some moods; light novels (sci fi, of late) for other moods.

I went into Pegasus books looking for something for a gift and felt a longing for REAL books.  I bought a new paperback by a sci fi author I like (Joe Haldeman; The Forever War is a sci fi classic, and rightly so) — I rationalized that it was less than $10 so the savings on the Kindle would be minimal.  But, since that’s the sort of book I read on the cardio machines at the gym, it would be more convenient to have it on the Kindle. But — not the same.

I felt guilty toward Pegasus — that I’ll buy fewer books from them. (This was before I learned that Black Oak had closed — more guilt.)  And I need bookstores around to (1) browse for books to buy in the Kindle (more guilt), and (2) buy books that I want or need in paper.  Yet this means I’ll be buying less and their sales will go down a little more.

We need a business model that both acknowledges the digital reality AND allows us to have local outlets — like bookstores — where we can browse, preview books, and get physical as well as digital copies.  One possibility is that Amazon share its Kindle revenue with bookstores –e.g., I go to Pegasus and “buy” a book for my Kindle (at the same price — else we’d all just go home and order).  Also, I’m still waiting for print-on-demand, which would allow my local bookstore to have a huge inventory without the downsides of physical inventory and the impossibility of perfectly anticipating demand.

Another Bookstore Closing

Belatedly — I’ve learned that Black Oak Books closed in early June.

I guess it says something about Black Oak that I used to be one of their regular customers, and drive past their store all the time, but didn’t know about this until 2 months after it happened.  I’ve shifted to using Pegasus on Solano most of the time — a better inventory, and, especially, a better way of displaying new books.

Usability at large: camera flashes

red and green lights

Just when I think the world has caught onto the idea of usability, I hear this: not my own experience but someone I know.

In a photography workshop we were learning to use flash.  Most flash attachments have a little light to tell you that it’s on and how the battery is doing.  Most light up green for OK and red for low battery.  EXCEPT one person’s flash did the opposite: red was good, green was a warning. And he said that not all flashes by the same manufacturer worked that way — some were the oppposite. ?!?!