I run Android phones & tablets. I have wordpress on them, and was using them because they connected easily into the hotel wifi, while the laptop, which runs Debian, did not. I have managed to rejig the phone settings and buy data, so I can now use a proper (that is, a laptop) tool to blog and read.
This has allowed me to clean up today’s egregious typos: I have large hands and typing on a 10 inch tablet (or even, worse, a phone) makes for unhappiness. This is not the fault of Android or WordPress. It was a series of assumptions that do not work in Victoria.
In most of the world, the internet is part of what you pay for if you hire a hotel room. You ask for a password, and that is that. Not in Victoria. You pay. about $10 per 100MB — it has been cheaper to put data on my cellphone than use the hotel’s.
Lesson one Pack a USB wifi system. You can always buy a SIM from the local phone people. Far cheaper
Secondly, you have to hold a tablet. This is OK for checking maps (done often) or checking email, but is useless when it comes to typing. I use all ten fingers and I want to see what I am typing, not a virtual keyboard. I have enough trouble with spelling
Lesson two Use the laptop to take notes and blog. Retyping things ten times is tedious, and putting vodka into a post this week has been embarrassing.
Which brings me to the third error. I bought the wrong bags. I used a MLB of 40 L with a 10 L day bag inside and a computer bag. I should not have bought the computer bag: it is too geeky, and the 10L bag was too short for the laptop. Moreover, the weather has been awful. The day bag did not have room for a windbreaker: I got soaked five or six times
Lesson three, Leave NZ with your bags only half full.
The conference itself has been good… lots learned, particularly in a review of genetics today. I went there because I needed to understand Genome Wide Association Studies, which look like this from PLOS One
Improved Detection of Common Variants Associated with Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder Using Pleiotropy-Informed Conditional False Discovery Rate
Ole A. Andreassen, Wesley K. Thompson, Andrew J. Schork, Stephan Ripke, Morten Mattingsdal, John R. Kelsoe, Kenneth S. Kendler, Michael C. O’Donovan, Dan Rujescu, Thomas Werge, Pamela Sklar, The Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC), Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia Working Groups, J. Cooper Roddey, Chi-Hua Chen, Linda McEvoy, Rahul S. Desikan, Srdjan Djurovic, Anders M. Dale
PLoS Genet. 2013 April; 9(4): e1003455. Published online 2013 April 25. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1003455
However, tomorrow I have to be at the airport early and will be travelling all day. I will either post a brief lectionary note very early tomorrow, or wait until I am back home. I won’t try to use a tablet on airport Wifi… for that would the final lesson: doing anything like that is not a good idea.
