Tuesday’s links

‘back at Woodside 5 after a nice weekend in Cambridge.  LastMinute.com produced a deep discount at the University Arms on Parker’s Piece, a lovely old hotel with wood accents and Tiffany lighting, soft bed tucked at the top of a few steps up into the room, 20 year-old scotch in the evening and expansive breakfasts overlooking the green at sunrise.

I needed the break.  We’re still waiting for key lab results to arrive that will define the future of the business.  Preparations for the move are ongoing, but I’m finding that making reasonable decisions and good choices incrementally are perversely leading to bad outcomes.  Unexpected events involving people at work and in the US added to the worry. 

It all got to me more than I realized, making for worried days and sleepless nights all week. With the arrival of a sunny, cold weekend, it was nice to just relax in elegant surroundings and distract a little with others.  It gave me the chance to separate from work and Poole, to browse bookstores and colleges, to try a new Turkish restaurant, and to dream plans for my upcoming birthday celebration.

…and caught up with a few worthwhile expat links and readings:

• Holland Expat Center South has a new guide to Maastricht and South Limburg that is worth checking out if you live in, or plan to visit, the area.
• And a shout–out for Invader Stu, a fellow blogger who has been recognized as a finalist for this year’s Bloggie Weblog Award as Best European Blog.  He’s always fun and insightful to read, and worth your vote.
• If you’re thinking about going expat later in life, the Times had some good thoughts on health insurance.  You should think carefully both about the quality of care available and the cost of your insurance policy: remember that a home policy that covers travel abroad may not cover care while living abroad (I was surprised to find that both my life and disability insurance plans had qualifiers that limited benefits if I was living overseas.
• Heffers, a major academic bookstore in Cambridge, has completely reorganized their interior.  It’s much simpler, many fewer books. much less interesting to browse.  Most tellingly, shelves of weighty books have been replaced by kiosks of ‘simple guides’ to academic subjects, problems, life, and Great Ideas that feel like an affront to deep thought and genuine insight.  ‘especially in a place like Cambridge.

• If you’re expat, you travel; if you travel, you pile up the frequent flier points.  The programs are getting tougher though: Delta has instituted spending requirements alongside mileage thresholds for top-tier qualification.  Lounge acc3ess costs over $600 per year, double what it cost a couple of years ago.  It may be time to reconsider costs and benefits, advises the Times.
• The Artique Gallery in central Cambridge is opening their spring show with seascape painter Rebecca Lardner.  Interesting individually, her seaside villages and round-eyed animals become repetitive and kitsch when multiplied into a wallpaper of near-identical images.  This holds for almost every artist exhibited in the gallery, unfortunately.

  

• Alec Baldwin recorded a really good interview with Billy Joel, including a discussion of whether marriages are more likely to fail when one partner is immersed in creative work.  Is there enough, indeed anything, left to give to the relationship?  It’s a recurring question (see Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George”) that I think poses real issues for even the most committed couples.  That’s why it was also nice to read Katy Guest’s thoughts in the Independent about the value of simply being kind to one another.
• Finally, in the ‘too true’'; category, this is, indeed, what the world seems to be coming to.   Java programming may be the new ‘Language of Life’, just like ‘Her’ might be the vision of future relationships.

Clippings

Wake up in quiet time, advised Lifehacker, describing seven simple things that can improve a bad day.  It's good advice (except item 5 for dealing with fools and negativity) and, while I used to publish my clippings to twitter, I’ve switched to publishing some curated links here in the blog, instead.

‘Some worthwhile early-morning reading for half-term, then:

Dutch speedskaters are thrilled; Americans baffled:  I haven’t had time to follow the Olympics closely, a bit of curling and biathlon while working out at the Leisure Centre.  But the discussions among friends have centered on the stellar performances of the skaters.  It was especially gratifying to see Sven Kramer get medals after he was disqualified in 2010 due to a coaching error.

Loneliness twice as unhealthy as obesity:  A new study reports that living alone increases six-year risk of dying by 14%; poverty by 19%.  Earlier studies have suggested that almost half of older people (depressingly defined as “over 50”) suffer persistent loneliness, and suggest maintaining contact with colleagues and engaging with “befriending services” is a remedy when family is far away. 

Isolation is certainly an issue in expat life, often attended by loneliness: my worry is always that I’d suffer an accident or emergency without anyone knowing where I was.  A laminated wallet card would seem to be prudent; living in a house-share likely helps too.

The Apartment:  (Business success is) becoming a millionaire and getting a speedboat.  Eventually, he got it, but his wife wouldn't let him take the kids out on it, and the neighborhood association wouldn't let him park it in his driveway, so he kept it in a storage facility thirty minutes away, visited it like a spouse in prison, and rarely spoke of it. 

The moral: Cultivate relationships and collect experiences, not money and things.  And if tempted, read the Times on the emptiness of Going to the Gala

How free are we?:  It’s a sign of maturity that I find reading The Shrink and The Sage more interesting than Tyler Bruhe’s Fast Lane on the weekends.  This week they debate whether free will is an illusion, as viewed from choice therapies.  Fascinating stuff.

I’ve struggled to calibrate and accept the extent of my choices: what (natural) events are beyond my understanding and control, what (people) things have reasons but are forever beyond my knowledge or control, and what (plans and futures) I can actually influence. 

The Shrink holds that therapy helps with identification and acceptance of that sliver of life we can actually control; the Sage affirms that people do things for reasons and are able to modify their behaviour on the basis of argument and evidence. But is that the same as “free will”?

15 Reasons to date a scientist: Predictable fun (You’ll likely win at trivia night), but still fun.  Contrast this with the incomprehensible writings of Relationship Coach Rori Raye.  Creator of Circular Dating strategies (Take each offer as it comes, without manipulating who calls or where you want to go), her blog is, well, like this:

“And what was your issue with that…?”

And so I said, “It would feel good to hear what you thought I said…”

And he did. And he got it right, too. Perfect.

AND – I didn’t feel any better!

I STILL felt angry, combative, not comprehending the “conflict” in our two views…still all of that.

BUT!!! – And here’s the really, really important part: HE FELT HEARD!!

…and there are distressed people in her office paying for advice.

Wednesday links

I came back up to Cambridge this morning for a Board meeting and to pick up the last of the moving stashed in the office.  Autumn has started to arrive at the fringes, red and yellow leaves flashing in the morning sun and a first dusting of color on the grass.

‘A few links to share today, between prep sessions for the meetings:

The Faces of Facebook  What d over a billion faces look like on a page?  You get something that looks like colored snow on the television.   But it contains all of the profile pictures on Facebook, in chronologic order.  Click anywhere to see an expansion (privacy preserved)  or put in your login to find out what your what your ‘number is (I am 3,367,707, a relatively early arrival)

The Average Man  in America looks, well, different than the average man in the Netherlands, France, or Japan.  This  page compares the various physical characteristics of men from the four countries.  No surprise that Dutch men are tall of the American has the largest waist.  No corresponding page for average women (there may be no such person….)

Unseen Amsterdam  The annual photo fair shows little-known works by lesser-known artists. Unfortunately, it ended last weekend but the photographers still have their bio and photo pages on the site.  It’s fun browsing: I especially liked works by

 

               Kelly Richarrdson                                 Lina Scheynius     

 

        Noemie Goudal                                      Katrien Vermeire       

and…Ranking the Star Trek Movies  It’s a generational thing, but they mostly got it right..

Sharing updates and links

I’ve had a bunch of things accumulating to do and share, so I’ll slip through it in one go, then back to something more thoughtful.

The photos are from a brief pitch-trip to Guernsey this week, unfortunately foggy and wet, although we did get some good investment interest.

If you are expatriate, the annual HSBC Expat Survey is worth a reading, if only to tally how your experiences align with those of other expats.  They’ve redone the data access so that it’s easier to assess and compare expat life in different locations.

I follow a variety of blogs written by fellow expats, collected into a single public feed summary on NetVibes. The list is not prioritized or ranked, Expats are down the right and center, more general business and news blogs are down the left and center.  If I missed you, I don’t know about you: please let me know?

Similarly, I listen to a lot of podcasts (some more faithfully than others), and have collected them onto another NetVibe.  If you want to load your .mp3 player with some ideas and essays, something here is good to start with.

And I will get my personal feeds organized into a third NetVibe, but it’s a work in progress (why can’t anything be simple with Facebook?).

Several weeks ago, I commented that I never wanted to end up as the old expat sitting alone at the end of the bar, the one who has been around for ages but nobody seems to know who he is or why he’s here.  This archetype showed up in The 6 Characters You’ll Meet at Every Expat Bar: enjoyable, and I know I’ve run into most of them.

A related article, Things I wish I Knew as a New Expat, also rings true.  I would only disagree with number 6: Dual Citizenship is filled with personal and professional hazards, and permenant residency may be much more practical.  And there is a serious move afoot in the Dutch government to restrict dual passport holders as well which bears watching.

Last month, Netherlands television aired 24 Hours: Between Life and Death, a reality show filmed in an A&E department.  It was justifiably criticized and cancelled.   An op-ed in the Volkskrant  suggested three reasons that this might have seemed acceptable:

1. A general decline in what constitutes acceptable public standards, driven downwards by the pulp press and tolerance for GeenStijl (broadly, public acts that lack style or manners).
2. The rapid trend towards commercialization of civil society, where public institutions become brands that can be promoted and monetized, and
3. The widening  gap between professionals and management, the doctors and the directors of the hospital, that  agreement on where the boundaries actually are or should be.

One of the really nice offshoots of learning Dutch is being able to read and understand these local debates.  They do add color to perceptions and conversations.

And, finally, a perceptive comment by Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller about America’s Darwin Problem.  I’ve been debating this with friends on Facebook, as science, health, and economics increasingly get dragged into the culture wars that were previously fought over news and art.  These are quantitative fields, driven by hypothesis, data collection, and peer review, the best was that we have to determine objective truth in a critical debate.  The more that we deny demonstrable facts, the greater the likelihood that we will make wrong choices and fall increasingly behind those that do heed the data.

Yet people increasingly see authority as conspiracy, where doctors, teachers, and scientists deliberately hide the truth.  I don’t know how you counter this in a framework of open debate and experimental demonstration; there’s neither the expertise or the willingness to engage in discussion that creates constructive progress.

Thursday’s links of interest

I have lots of little jots in my notebook – things that I want to write about but that don’t merit a whole essay.  So just scroll through and watch for something of interest.

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Learning:  Stanford University runs a very good set of online technical and management courses.  I took their Certificate of Management program, four courses that were all excellent: I don’t know how I would survive without their Accounting class in particular.  The school is now giving courses for free: lectures and classwork online, backed up with readings and faculty support.  The Lean Launchpad, for those starting a business, is here, and the links to other courses are at the bottom of the page.

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Thought 1:  Do we get suspicious of people in situations where we feel vulnerable, or just in situation where we’ve previously had bad experiences?

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Politics: Now the OWS has been evicted from parks (I love the images of city workers cleaning up in HazMat suits to reinforce the health risk that bearded protesters pose to the public), the discussions seem to be shifting to thoughtful debate rather than civic actions.  I liked Ursula Le Guin’s 99% parable and Sen Bernie Sanders plea for Democrats to stop caving:.

Here is something we all can agree on: Federal deficits are a serious problem.  Here is something no one seriously disputes: Today's big deficits were caused mainly by big tax cuts for the wealthy, two unpaid-for wars, and a horrible recession caused by Wall Street greed.

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Light Reading:  Book View Café.  Wonderfully written daily essays by outstanding writers.  Along with BBC’s From our own correspondent and NPR’s This American Life, it’s both an enjoyable and informative collection of content and a strong example of how to tell compelling short-form narrative stories.

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Thought 2:  Does the truism “Past returns are no guarantee of future performance?” increasingly apply to the value of a colelge education?

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Tech tools: Google Chrome.  IE has become unusable – it takes forever to load and fails too often.  Firefox is a trusty alternative, but speed is again an issue,  I gave Chrome a try and am pleasantly surprised: it’s lightweight, compliant, includes build-in spell checking and has a rich supply of plug-ins.  I recommend adding session Buddy – I’m always having to save sets of tabs after doing some research.

Resource Monitor.  This one is from TechRadar – my Windows Live Writer hung in the middle of a process.  I could see it dragging 50% on the CPU, accomplishing nothing, but didn’t want to kill the process and lose the work.  Resource monitor lets you see the process tree and kill the sub-process causing the problem, allowing me to recover the main window text.  Yes, we shouldn’t need it, but when we do, it’s a lifesaver.  The utility is built into Windows 7 but, like Snipping Tool for screen capture, you have to search to find it.

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Consumer tip:  I increasingly find that when I dead-end with a company’s support department, a quick tweet with the company hashtag produces results.  BT and Rosetta Stone certainly monitor their tag, and the public shout-out seems to get their attention.,  It may not resolve anything, but it’s another avenue to try.