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I’m looking at an enormous pile of stuff that I’ve somehow got to try to cram into a suitcase. Hum.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about travel tips. I’m sure that you’ve all got your own essential rules when travelling, but here are a few I’ve gathered over the years, tuned to stays in somewhat remote areas, doing field work:

• Always plan for the worst. Losing anything you’ve brought with you is going to be a pain. However if your passport, tickets or other important documents get stolen/go up in flames, you’re going to have a lot of work to do to convince the authorities that you ever had them. So I take a belt and braces approach: I scan all the important documents, then print copies to take in a different bag from the actual documents, and also upload the documents (as PDF files) to a web server. I’ve just started using Strongspace™—-developed by people at TextDrive—-and it’s a fantastic way to keep this kind of stuff safe and secure while you’re away. If all my possessions are lost, I can always get the authorities to let me log on to my Strongspace and download copies of my stuff. You can also use it to backup on the road, which will be useful if I manage to find some network access somewhere.
• There’s some kind of unwritten rule which states that however leak-proof you believe your bottles and jars of liquids to be, the effect of changes of temperature and pressue will prove you wrong. I put all containers of liquid inside one of those zip-up, airtight plastic bags, just in case.
• In fact, I use those zip-bags to keep together all the little things that tend get lost in your suitcase or rucksack. When you’re horribly jet-lagged on arrival and rummaging blearily in your luggage to find a particular cable or socket adapter, you’ll be glad that they’re all in one easy-to-find bag.
• Special breathable, lightweight, packable clothes are wonderful, but they’re also very expensive and likely to get ruined if you spend your days crawling around in the wilderness. I use Army surplus stores for a lot of my field work clothes. They tend to be very tough, have lots of pockets and are extremely cheap. I also look on the recycling of Forces uniforms as a kind of ‘swords to ploughshares’ thing.
• You can never have too many bandanas. They can keep the sun off your head or neck, keep the dust out of your mouth and nose, and they’ll also work as emergency towels, bandages or slings. They are lightweight, cheap (a stall in the indoor markets sells them for £1 a go), and you can scrunch them into a little corner of your luggage.

I think that’s about it—-what are your top tips for maintaining your safety, comfort and sanity when you travel?

In the process of setting up The Emperor I installed GNU Midnight Commander, otherwise known as mc. It’s a two-pane file manager (with a built in previewer and editor) with a great, stripped-down interface which can be driven entirely from the keyboard. I’d seen it some time ago, but never managed to install it successfully on the Mac. However, it installed very easily with apt-get install on the Emperor, and I’ve been really enjoying it—-so much so that I’d love to have it on my Mac.

I tried this hint on MacOSXHints, but the compilation failed at the last hurdle. Despite the Smart Folder features and much improved searching in Tiger, Finder is still irritating to work with if you have a deeply nested folder structure. I’m a big fan of Path Finder, and am waiting impatiently for version 4 which will exploit Tiger features fully—-I just hope that it’s possible to view Smart Folders in the new Path Finder. Although it isn’t as keyboard-driven as mc, it has much of the same feeling of easy control over your files. One feature I love is that you can open a Terminal in a drawer which automatically has the working directory set to the path of the selected file or folder. That’s really convenient if you need to tinker with an invisible configuration file in a deeply-nested folder.

[The Great Escape, day three: written 13th August, 2005]

Coming around the rim of the former quarry in which the Eden Project is situated feels like entering the set of a Doctor Who episode. The two enormous Biodomes sit in the bottom of the quarry like giant alien eggs. At any moment, I expected to see Christopher Eccleston striding along in his leather coat. Well, a girl can dream…

I think that Tim Smit is one of my new heroes. As well as renovating the excellent Lost Gardens of Heligan, he was also the instigator of the Eden Project. Somehow, he managed to persuade investors that he could build two giant bubbles in a former quarry, one of which would house a tropical rainforest, complete with a waterfall. Oh, and it would be educational, informing people about conservation issues all over the world. Eden somehow manages to get these messages across—-along with a passion for plants—-without it ever sounding like you need to be someone who knits their own muesli to appreciate it.

The exhibits and labels show wit, creativity and scholarship, and include folklore and myths about plants, as well as scientific facts. The whole place is playful (as you can see from some of my photos here), and you explore each area with a genuine curiosity to see what’s around the corner—-just like Heligan.

The giant tropical biodome is a marvel, that rivals some cathedrals for its ability to inspire awe. However, I managed to come away with a more tangible reminder of the day; I got badly bitten by mosquitoes (goodness only knows how). That doesn’t seem to bode well for my trip to the real tropics in September.

Thanks to a link on 2lmc spool, I installed the truly wonderful Electric Sheep screensaver. In fact, it’s a rather superior species of screen saver, in which your own computer becomes part of a huge network of interconnected machines collaboratively creating and rendering lovely fractal-like, abstract, moving images, which constantly shift and morph into one another. These images are called sheep. What’s more, if you like one of the images you see you can vote for it by pressing the up arrow. The votes are then used as part of a weighting process in a genetic algorithm to breed more sheep. Popular sheep live longer (and presumably reproduce more), and so the sheep evolve into ever more beautiful forms.

The still images on the site really don’t do it justice, so it’s worth trying it out for yourself. However, you do need a pretty decent network connection, and you have to be patient while waiting for the first one to appear. Then you’ll be sitting in front of the screen for hours, wide-eyed and saying, “Oh, man—-look at all the pretty patterns and colours. Those electric sheep are really hoopy froods.”

I’m definitely trying to think about too many things at once at the moment. Yesterday, I loaded up my pod coffee machine with water and coffee pods, and then switched it on while I raced to finish an urgent email I was dealing with. A tiny part of my brain commented that the machine seemed to be making an unusual sound, but the rest of my brain told it to shut up and concentrate on the email.

A few minutes later, I reached over to grab my coffee cup, only to realise that it wasn’t there. The tiny drip tray, however, was copiously overflowing with lovely, steaming hot java, and the surface of the filing cabinet on which the machine sits had developed a very fine crema.

Curses.

I was faced with a tricky problem. In a little over a week, I’m going to Brazil (mostly staying in a place a very long way from the nearest city or town) for three weeks. I think that it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll have any way of connecting my own computer to the internet for most of that time (though I may find the odd cybercafe somewhere), but I still wanted to have a computer with me. I need to take notes, analyse results, read papers and so on, all of which would be much easier with a laptop than without.

But here’s where the problem comes in; I really didn’t want to risk taking my PowerBook. I’m likely to be working in fairly rough conditions, and I’m spending a few days at either end of the trip in Sao Paulo, where there is—-let’s face it—-at least some possibility of the computer being stolen. It’s insured, but I can’t face the disruption of hassle of having to get a new one, recreate my system from backups and so on. And I have to admit that I feel terribly attached to my Mac—-I just didn’t feel that I could put my baby my computer in the line of fire like that.

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[The Great Escape, day two: written 12th August, 2005]

There’s something romantic about the ‘Lost’ part isn’t there? Even though The Lost Gardens of Heligan have the usual complement of car parks, gift shops and tea rooms, it still has the air of somewhere that might require a machete and a pith helmet to get into.

Heligan covers an enormous area (about 200 hectares in total), and there’s a surprise around every corner. The Jungle and Lost Valley are a delight, with palms, bananas and giant gunnera crowding the jungle part of the valley, which has a sub-tropical micro-climate. It’s warm, green and humid, and if it weren’t for the hordes of other visitors and the carefully maintained boardwalks, you might believe yourself to be somewhere much more exotic than Cornwall.

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I’ve posted the first batch of photographs from my holiday on flickr, if you’re interested.

“So, you’re a lecturer—-you must get nice long holidays!”

If you’re a lecturer or school teacher, you’re probably wearily familiar with that kind of comment. While it’s true that the students have very long holidays over the summer, so we’re not doing any teaching, the departure of the students is the cue for most of us to roll our sleeves up and actually get our own research done. We do have quite generous leave allocations, but the truth is that most academics never manage to take off all the time that they are entitled to.

Part of the problem is that—-like many other working people—-we don’t have anyone to cover our work when we go on holiday. You know that when you come back, you’ll be facing exactly what was on your desk (real or virtual) when you left, plus whatever has accumulated in your absence. After a while you feel that it might be less work in the long run to simply stay at your desk.

If you take time off, but don’t stray from an internet connection, the temptation to check that nothing urgent has cropped up can corrode your sense of relaxation—-another feature that’s common to many modern jobs.

For these reasons (and many more!) Mr. Bsag and I hadn’t had a proper holiday for more than two years, so last week, we made our escape to Cornwall. It wasn’t a long holiday, but it was a complete break: no car, no email, no internet, and best of all—-no work.

[The Great Escape, day one: written 11th August, 2005]

I love the sea. Some of my happiest moments have been spent beside it, on it, or in it. For me, there’s a special quality of relaxation that comes from sitting or walking by a shore, looking at the waves and breathing in that lovely seaweed smell. So today, as the train rounded a corner at Dawlish to hug the narrow strip of land between the ox blood red cliffs and the petrol blue sea, it was all I could do not to yell out “I can see the sea!” like an excited six year old.

It’s a pity, then, that I live in one of the points of Britain that’s furthest from the sea. I have to get my fix in short, intense bursts of exposure.

One of the first plugins I installed when I moved to WordPress was Amazon Media Manager. It’s a handy way of getting the details of various Amazon products on to your site easily, so that you can link to books, CDs or DVDs you’re interested in. It also includes your Amazon Associate ID in the links if you have one, which removes a number of otherwise very tedious steps.

I used it to power the media links in my sidebar for a long time, but somewhere in the upgrade to WordPress 1.5 it stopped working. However, now Amazon Media Manager (AMM) 1.5 is out, and it’s fantastic. The new version allows you to search for media within the WordPress admin interface, and select from the results—-this is a huge improvement. Many more fields are stored now, so that data like the director of a film is stored separately, and can therefore be displayed separately. There’s also a star rating, which is very handy. It also allows you to define any number of different templates for displaying the results on your page, which gives you huge scope to format things in exactly the way you want.

At the moment I’m more or less replicating what I had before (with the addition of ratings stars), but I plan to spiff things up a bit when I get a chance. It’s a really nice plugin if you like to write about what you’ve read, watched or listened to. And who doesn’t?

We’ve just eaten our entire season’s crop of lettuce in two very small side salads. I think that we need to rethink our horticultural practices. Lots of stones and soil that looks like dust does not make for happy, abundant lettuces.

Furthermore, we’re suffering from lettuce-envy, because friends of ours produced a bed full of hedge-sized lettuces in a couple of weeks. Our scrawny little saplings have struggled for months to reach a size that makes it worthwhile washing them and putting them on a plate.

I’m a recent but devoted convert to Sufjan Stevens, so I was really looking forward to listening to this album. It’s the second album counting towards Sufjan’s quirky and ambitious aim of recording an album in each State of the US. One of the things that I love about him is his blatant disregard for short and snappy song titles. Track 2 is a perfect example: ‘THE BLACK HAWK WAR, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologise for the Inconvenience but You’re Going to Have to Leave Now, or, “I have fought the Big Knives and will continue to fight them until they are off our lands!”’. iTunes is going to be continuously scrolling on that one. Even without the title, the track is startling, with martial trumpets, drums and wordless vocals creating an amazing atmosphere.

‘Jacksonville’ is a jaunty, summery little number, though it still has Sufjan’s persistent air of sadness. I think my favourite track on the album (though it’s very hard to choose just one) is ‘Casimir Pulaski Day’, which is an intimate and tender portrait of the terrors and breathless anticipation of a teenage romance. It happens to also have a very sad ending:

Tuesday night at the Bible study We lift our hands and pray over your body But nothing ever happens I remember at Michael’s house In the living room, when you kissed my neck And I almost touched your blouse

Many of the tracks, particularly ‘Out of Egypt, into the Great Laugh of mankind, and I shake the dirt from my sandals as I run’ (phew) have the feel of some of the modern minimalist classical composers like John Adams; there are pulsing tones and woven together musical lines, which create a mesmerising texture. It’s an interesting development of his style, and makes me wonder if he is an admirer of Adams’ music.

Another interesting feature of the album is that many of the tracks don’t end abruptly, but have classical-sounding instrumental pieces at the end, such as a brass fanfare, or an intricate banjo line. It’s certainly an unusual album: both musically and lyrically. Sufjan seems to be particularly interested in the stories of everyday people—-the little, disregarded but shiningly important moments in all of our lives. I like that about him a lot.

Peter Cooper alerted me to the fact that he’d made some huge changes to RSS Digest (the service I used to display my del.icio.us link on this page) and it had emerged—-like a butterfly from a chrysalis—-to become FeedDigest.

I found some time to sign up for the new service today, and I’m really blown away by it. For a start, it’s much quicker than it used to be (not that the speed ever bothered me much), and there are loads of new features like combining feeds, slick templating features, and a host of different output formats.

The free account gives you up to 5 digests from up to 3 sources, so you can try it out and see if you like it. I think you’ll be hooked. Apart from anything else, it’s worth signing up just to see Peter’s wonderful way with Ajax alert boxes. Needless to say, I’m jealous.

I’m finally back home again after a very intense week at the conference. It was a fantastic and academically inspiring time in many ways, but now I’m completely exhausted. I’ve just finished sorting through a load of emails that needed responses and a few other outstanding work matters, and I think that’s probably about it for me this weekend as far as intelligent activity goes.

It’s pretty interesting going to a conference that’s outside your area of expertise, as much for the fun of experiencing a different scientific culture as anything else. The differences are very subtle, but interesting, and two things in particular surprised me a little.

First, there were more people using Apple hardware than I had expected—-I’d estimate that a little over 25% of the laptops at the conference were Powerbooks or iBooks. Given my unofficial position as Apple Fangirl, I obviously think that’s an encouraging thing. I suppose that I shouldn’t have been so surprised given the increasing credibility of Macs as a serious development platform since the move to a BSD foundation with Mac OS X, but it was still nice to see.

Second, I was agog at the number of people using laptops during talks, and particularly people surfing or checking email. Now, it’s entirely possible that I’m just a bit out of touch (not having gone to a really big Biology conference in a couple of years), but at most conferences I’ve attended, very few people have even used laptops to take notes. A wireless connection in the lecture room does allow people to do cool things like downloading a paper mentioned in the talk, or surfing the speaker’s home page. However, some people were either parallel processing with great efficiency, or just using the time to catch up on email or other tasks.

The terrible temptation for me was to look over their shoulder and see just what they were finding so fascinating. If they were Mac users, I felt even more compelled to see what they had in their Dock. I didn’t quite feel that I had the chutzpah to open up my Powerbook, so I sat there like Dr. Luddite with my Moleskine and fountain pen. I’m planning to sort and transcribe my notes on to my computer next week, and hoping that the transcription process might prompt a bit more processing and synthesis of the ideas I was exposed to.

I took pathetically few photographs in Edinburgh—-my excuse is that I had very little free time—-but I’ve put a few up on flickr.