Louise's thoughts

Break

I am taking a break blogging. I could give you all kinds of reasons but those reasons are closely tied to what I cannot blog, so let me just say that my life is taking an interesting turn and that I find myself in a situation where I want to be personal about certain things that I don't want all people who read this blog to know. When I have straighened things out I promise I will be back. And of course you, my reader, will be the first to know exactly when the studyboard has 7 copies of my dissertation on their desk...

Conference evaluation

Okay, I should be working on my thesis, but I am still all wound up after the past two weeks of conferences. I really didn't get the chance to blog much, because I was busy practicing my talk and afterwards, too excited by all the people I met and got to hang out with. Real people are more interesting than my laptop. My favorite paper at the UbiComp conference was in fact one that was not in the proceedings but a paper I had sent by one of the coolest guys in the field, a paper to appear in the Journal of CSCW, which relates to my thesis.

Glasgow was nice in a Glasgow way, the roughness of the city kept me spellbound for a whole Sunday of shopping, sightseeing and just hanging out in coffee shops. The highlights of the Mobile HCI conference was the game Wednesday afternoon where I won the first round together with my team mate. I was running around in my heels, not thinking of anything but wining (my competitive gene). I also met some really nice people, and got better in understand Scottish (which is such sexy accent). I had way too much fun in Glasgow (and have three blue bruises on my arm to prove it...) and by the end of the week I was drained for energy. Friday I just spend in Starbucks reading through my dissertation. Now a night of just staying in, eating sushi, watching mindless telly (I am trying to pick up the British...) seems like the perfect activity.

Luggage

As I returned from Glasgow to Copenhagen last night, one of the worst luggage incidents happened to me. When I picked up my suitcase, also called the beautybox, from the conveyer belt, it was open but as far as I could tell from the top of my head, all the lose things were still inside. It has happened to me before, which is why I bought another bigger, more soft suitcase, that I rarely use but instead still use this little handy Paris bought suitcase, which does not hold more than one set of proceedings... (I know I am going to get certain sarcastic comments from certain friends now). It was not before I got home, had unpacked and was sitting comfortably checking all my unchecked-for-two-weeks-email that I realized what was missing: my Vaio laptop charger! In my case it is THE worst thing to miss for several reasons: 1. I need to work and had planned to do this at the coffee shop all weekend, now I would have to go into the boring empty office. 2. Since Vaios are not sold in Denmark the process of getting a new charger is rather difficult. I would have to buy one online (which will be a problem, because for some reason my American credit/debit card is not working despite having plenty of money on it, and online stores generally do not take foreign credit cards) and have it sent to Copenhagen or have some merciful soul somewhere in a Vaio country buy one for me and send it here. Both processes something that could take over a week. After hours of frustration and calling the airport with no result ('but we will fill in a form for insurance purposes'... I don't care, I just want my charger, it is not like it is a million dollars worth, just my sanity), I realized that a friend of mine who happens to come to Copenhagen on Monday also has a Vaio and he has been so kind as to bring his charger. How lucky am I?

Mobile women

I was very pleased today to see that there are so many female presenters at my conference. Last year, there was about 2 or 3 out of about 30 but so far, 4 of the 10 presentations have been carried out by women. I am often surprised to see that despite a good portion of the authors on conference papers are women, it is most often (in my subjective impression) men who present them. I have to say that (unfortunately ;-), the fact that a woman presents a paper does not necessarily make it a better presentation. My own little qualitative, participatory-observation study shows that the quality of a presentation is correlated to how much the presenter have practiced, how interesting and relevant the study is and how relaxed and confident the presenter is. There is absolutely no correlation between quality and gender or quality and age. But bear in mind that these results are purely my own little subjective observations, recorded in my head, not on paper and analyzed by way of thinking, not some kind of conversational analysis or categorization. In other words, it is not very scientific, (fortunately) unlike most of the research presented here at Mobile HCI.

Hotels

Although I should be blogging about the two interesting conferences I am attending, this nomadic life makes me want to write about my experience with British hotels instead.

I have already experienced a wide range of hotels on this trip (so far, lasting exactly a week) some better than others. In Nottingham I stayed at the Horrible Express, which was reminiscent to future visions from the 60s; fake wood surfaces all over, clean and carpeted, sterile and sleek, and a breakfast consisting of dry toast, canned fruit and machine cappuccino. We paid 70 pounds for this per night, but got to borrow a converter plug on top of this (I had actually brought two, however, they turned out to be Australian instead of British). As we continued our venture into the nature of North West England (yes, I have no idea how my friends got me convinced to go, even my advisor laughed in disturbed surprise when they said they were bringing me to the country side), we thought we would have to make do with an idyllic 30 pound bed'n breakfast in the middle of nowhere. However, these were hard to come by and we ended up at the 'Inn at the Lake', which was a 'tiny rooms but big bar with lots of different types of whiskey' hotel. It had three stars which came to show through a full English breakfast (they actually give you a set of 6 pieces of toast... each!) and flowery tapestries, flowery interior, flowery furniture and flowery carpets. The view was pretty nice too.

Optimistic as we were, we drow all the way up to Glasgow for some Saturday night clubbing in a real city, despite not having hotel reservations. After walking around asking we ended up having to take a 89 pound/night room at a shiny new white-washed and scarringly clean hotel. The rooms were big and my friend and I had a whole double bed each. Unfortunately we were too hungover the next morning to enjoy the fitness and swimming pool facilities. The main feature here was the bathroom which had room for literally all of our toiletries on the counter, a feature we had not experienced before. The downside was the terrible service at breakfast, getting us coffee/tea not before we were done with our breakfast. The fact that the receptionist girl could not split the bill in two, did not impress me either.

Finally, last night I landed in the most honest hotel I have seen so far. Located in the middle of everything in Glasgow, on the pedestrian street, one block from the movie theater, three blocks from the conference center and a short 30 meters from the shopping gallery (it would actually be degrading to call it a mall, this is Britain after all). The hotel itself owns three stars and it must be the location and its originality that have supplied those. The rooms are small but fits the necessary things such as a bed, a desk and a closet. There is not enough light and no pictures on the wall, making it much more authentic as a cozy place where electricity was installed a couple of decades after it was built, the carpet was not bought with the lamps in mind and the bathroom being rustiquely supplied with whatever sink and tub were in style in the 30s. This will be my home for five nights and I like it already. It reminds me very much of a small hotel I stayed at in San Francisco last year, with the same old city traits. In the end it is the location that matters as long as you have a bed to sleep in and room to unfold your suitcase. But I have to admit that I look forward to seeing my Copenhagen apartment again on Friday.

I survived

I just survived the biggest talk of my life so far, presenting the research that I did in Irvine at the UbiComp conference. I am so relieved that it is over with and I think it went quite well. So now I am off to partying...

3 questions

I am exhausted, so you are only allowed to ask me three questions. If they are interesting enough I might elaborate on them.

So did you finish your dissertation?
Well, yes I did. Thursday night I made final corrections and thanks to my brother, I got some nice pictures rather than the default bar graphs from excel (not that I don't know how to do that, but it was time consuming beyond my patience at that point)

So did you hand it in?
No I did not.

Why not?
Well... let me just say the printer didn't work. The printer setup means that PDF documents over a specific size come out in a wrong (monospaced, san-serif) font. System administration is not open at 11 pm. You get a bonus question because I can't say more about this.

Did you have fun at the big party on Friday?
No, I did not. In fact I had a horrible time arguing with the guy next to me about the PhD education in Denmark, a guy who happened to be in charge of a large blue corporation in Denmark. I turned to the other side and talked to a nicer guy (dean of a large university). Somehow the administration/event planner had placed us after our expected conversation skills, completely forgetting that I had spend the past three weeks conversing with my computer in academic English. That inhibits your ability to small talk quite a bit. Later I found out that the 'crush of my life' had gotten a new girlfriend and found myself crying in the ladies room while my girlfriend tried to comfort me and another guy I had flirted with earlier knocked on the door, trying to explain why he thought I was nice but not anything for him. I danced the rest of the night away but couldn't shake the feeling of defeat. Even the bartenders thought I was the 'saddest girl with a Martini' ever.

That's all you get for tonight. You might find that I am being a bit too personal, but I really can't help it. I have been stuck in my office for three weeks and I have missed being in touch with reality and virtual entrusting.