Roland Allen: Weblog

It seems that I’m regularly summoned for possible jury service. Yet, I’ve never been on a trail. I’m not complaining. But, the possibility of jury service can be disruptive.

The most recent summons required that I call the jury commission for “up to five days” to see if I’d be needed. My first call was last Friday evening. After that I was instructed to call in the next day at noon for possible service the same afternoon. That went on every day this week until yesterday afternoon when I was released. The problem with that type of “service” is that I could have been called in on the final day for possible service, which would have meant that I had committed a week to being available for possible service before actually serving. I think that I would have preferred to have been called in at a certain time and either used or released.

Now that I’ve completed my civic duty, I’m free to resume my life. I can make plans, which I’ve done. I’m leaving town tonight to visit friends in the Seattle area.

Now I’m on summer break.

I added cash at the gas station terminal, and after loading in two $20 bills and one $10 bill I got a message: “Cash Limit Reached”. So I pumped 10.64 gallons of gas and left.

I think that was enough gas to fill my tank.

Last week I received a packet in the mail from a former employer, Stanford University.

The letter was straightforward:

We are writing to inform you of a recent incident that could affect you. As some of you know form an email notification, we have discovered that information about you was in a data file on a stolen laptop. This data file contained sensitive personnel information about current and former Stanford employees.

Personal information contained in the data file may include some or all of the following: name, Social Security number, birth date, gender, home address and phone number in Stanford’s records, business title and salary while at Stanford, Stanford email address, Stanford ID card number and Stanford employee number.

The letter went on to say:

We understand the sensitive nature of the personal information entrusted to us by our employees, and it is our responsibility to keep it confidential. Stanford has well-established policies and guidelines in place that should have prevented this type of incident from occurring. This incident was a clear violation of our information security policy and procedures, and the result of human error.

I mention this because The Chronicle of Higher Education posted an article this morning about the increase in incidents like this at universities. The article cited incidents and several universities, including this at the University of Virginia,

Patrick A. Grant was stolen in April. A thief walked away with a laptop containing the University of Virginia biochemist’s name and Social Security number, as well as those of more than 7,000 other professors, staff members, and students. The machine belonged to a university employee who had taken it off campus — and then it was simply taken.

The next month, Mr. Grant discovered that criminals had amassed at least $22,000 in debt under his name.

Information on 62,000 current and former employees was on the laptop stolen in the Stanford incident.

Closing faculty meetings and end-of-year professional development days ended yesterday morning. I left town on an early afternoon flight to San Francisco.

My first stop was at You Tube, which is in San Bruno, just minutes from San Francisco International Airport. I stopped in to visit a friend from MIT who has been with Google for the past two years. I always enjoy Google offices because they seem like fun places to work. Tom used to work at the Googleplex in Mountain View. Now he’s at You Tube.

You Tube has the advantage of being close to San Francisco. It occupies the building that was Gap’s previous executive headquarters before Gap built new digs in San Francisco. The building is pretty cool. It’s a “green building” with plants growing inside - to help purify the air and create a nicer environment, and grass on the roof - which aids in energy efficiency.

I’m driving up to Vallejo and Napa this morning. My first stop is at California Maritime University. Their ship, The Golden Bear, is out of port, so I won’t tour the ship. (It happens that I’ll be able to tour The Golden Bear on August 15 when it will be at the Port of San Diego.) My second stop will be in St. Helena at the Culinary Institute of America. (This is the California campus, which is called Greystone.) After the admissions office meeting and tour, I have a dinner reservation in the dining hall at Greystone.

This article on the environmental impact of plastic water bottles should get everyone’s attention; even more so as gas prices continue to rise.

The problem isn’t the water — it’s the use of resources. It takes a lot of oil to make all those little bottles and ship them, sometimes halfway around the world. But Tom Lauria, vice president of communications for the International Bottled Water Association, said bottled water isn’t the environmental bad guy.

I have four trips on the books for the next couple of months. However, I’ll talk about one. I have plans to spend a couple of weeks visiting universities in England and Scotland. I’ll fly to London, spend one night before traveling by train to visit universities in Durham, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews and Cambridge. If time allows, I’ll make side trips to other unis as I travel.

The devalued dollar left me shell-shocked when I visited London and Dublin this past Easter break. So, I thought long and hard in deciding to return to the UK. This is how I’ll make the trip more reasonable: 1) I’ll travel on Virgin Atlantic from Los Angeles to London. The ticket on Virgin Atlantic was much more reasonable than purchasing a seat on a U.S. carrier. And, the Virgin ticket can be changed. 2) I used tripadvisor.com to research lodging, and in most cases I opted for privately run smaller hotels and B&Bs that include breakfast and taxes in the rate. That cuts down on hidden costs, and is much more affordable, in most cases, than hotel chains. Although, I did get an amazing rate in Glasgow Marriott Hotel using my AAA card. in fact, it’s the cheapest room of any for the entire trip. 3) I will purchase a BritRail pass, which allows for 9 days unlimited travel throughout England, Scotland and Wales. The usual term for the pass is 8 days, but currently there’s a special that throws in an extra day. I’ve planed my trip so that I can use the first day of the rail pass to take the Heathrow Express pass to central London, when I arrive. And I booked a hotel that is walking distance from Paddington Station, which is where the express train arrives. I’ve scheduled the rest of the travel so that the nine days ends when I’m in Cambridge. I’ll purchase a ticket from Cambridge to London and take the Tube to Heathrow for my departure. 4) Since not all of the hotels and B&Bs have free Internet, I’ll map out free Internet resources prior to my departure.

The cheapest way to travel in the UK is to purchase train tickets in advance and to pre-pay for hotel rooms. However, those tickets and reservations can’t be changed, which is why I avoided going that route. However, planning in advance has gotten me to research hotels and B&Bs and sketch out a workable itinerary for the trip, and helped me to get good deals, which should be able to cut unexpected expenses.

The National Enquiries Official Schedule website is a very helpful resource for getting the lay of the land of train travel and fare information throughout the UK.

Another helpful site is World66 which is a user written and edited wiki site.

Read about Weezer’s new song and video here.

Watch it here:

This is another case of micro-blogging providing valuable real world information during an emergency. The article is from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The point is that micro-blogging has benefits beyond social networking.

LINKED IN WITH…
Jim Groom, who used instant blogging to get information while a gunman prowled the campus.
Twittering Through a Campus Lockdown

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

Mr. Groom, an instructional-technology specialist at the University of Mary Washington, was attending a University of Richmond conference on May 6 when he was told of a gunman on the campus. He used Twitter, an instant-blogging service, for support and information. (A suspect, who police said was probably carrying a pellet gun, was later arrested.)

Q. How did you find out there was a gunman on the campus?

A. Someone actually came into the room and told us to turn off the lights, remain quiet, lock the door, and wait for further instruction. They didn’t say when they warned us what the issue was. It was through Twitter and e-mail that that information got through to the group.

Q. Why did you use Twitter, and not phone calls or text messages?

A. My cellphone didn’t work, because we were in the basement and didn’t get reception. E-mails went just to University of Richmond staff and faculty, etc., and so I didn’t get any of those. Twitter turned out to be a reliable resource for me.

Q. So others on campus were also “tweeting”?

A. Another session was going on in the room across the hall. I knew some people there who might be on Twitter, since I’d already been following many of [their Twitter posts]. At least four people in my room were on Twitter, too. One librarian had gone to get an image of the suspicious person on campus, and he used Twitter to publish the image. Many in the room who saw that signed up immediately for an account.

Q. Was the information reliable?

A. I think the logic of Twitter was to kind of make sense of what was going on as people came in and gave us information and digest what others were hearing. Others weren’t locked down. We were told limited information, and this helped us learn what was happening outside of the room. We could bounce off each other what we had known and what we had been told and find out what was going on at the campus at large.

Q. Was that comforting?

A. Definitely. People were sending advice with what to do in a crisis situation, with links. Some friends wrote that they were doing a “safety dance” for me. That stuff helped break up the tension.

Q. Should universities use Twitter for security alerts?

A. Twitter is notoriously unreliable, but it provides a possibility for communication, even if it’s not a panacea. Maybe if a university has a text message sent out, they could also send it to the university’s Twitter. It is a great mechanism because it allows people to actually talk synchronously.

I learned of MyClimate when I bought a ticket from Los Angeles to London on Virgin Atlantic Airline. Virgin offers a brief primer on carbon-setting and the opportunity to make a donation to a Swiss non-profit that manages making one’s air travel “carbon-neutral.”

SmugMug has flash video.

See it here: