I don’t drink coffee so a store like Starbucks has much less appeal to me than to many others. I am also not fooled by most of their pastries. They tend to look good, but usually do not measure up in taste. (I have fallen for the looks enough times now to know better.)

There is one exception, however: the Starbucks Espresso Brownie Bar. Unfortunately, in the past few months I have noticed that they have added fudge on top. It is a really bad innovation (if you can even call it that). They have pretty much ruined an extremely good pastry. Yes, I can get dramatic when it comes to chocolate. I don’t like people messing with a good chocolate product.

It turns out that you can still get the fudgeless type in other markets. During my recent travels I have noticed them at various airports. But the store on my block only has the fudge type.

Maybe introducing the new version in some markets is their way of experimenting to see if the change holds up. If you’d like to join me in saving a perfectly good pastry then please send the company a note by filling out this form on their Web site.

I am happy to report that the Lansing, Michigan airport has free wireless.

I just finished a visit at the Quello Center at Michigan State. It was a great visit, the Center seems to be thriving. Also of note is that its Director Steven Wildman and Executive Director Johannes Bauer have assumed the editorship of the Journal of Media Economics with Stephen Lacy also of Michigan State.

It’s that time of year again when the Passover page on my Web site starts attracting lots of visitors. A few years ago I compiled a feminist humanist modern version Haggadah for Passover as the traditional ones I could find did not meet my needs. I would have preferred to just grab one from a Web site, but none provided the type I was seeking. Once compiled, I figured others may find it helpful as well so I decided to post it. Feel free to grab a copy if it is of interest. It contains no references to a higher power, it includes an orange on the Seder plate, it is inclusive in language to both Jews and non-Jews and it refers to contemporary plagues such as hunger, war and racism. It is certainly not meant to offend. It is meant to offer people an alternative that better aligns with their beliefs and concerns about the world. (The Web page does not contain a Creative Commons license because I myself grabbed most of the material from elsewhere so it’s not really up to me to make a decision on that. I credit the sources on the document and include links to their Web sites. )

A fellow user of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) has created a wonderful hack for Google Maps using Greasemonkey. By installing the script in Firefox, it is now possible to get addresses to overlay on the CTA system map. This was a feature seriously lacking on the Transit Authority’s own site and has caused many frustrations for me in the past. This is an awesome feature. [thanks]

Here are some step-by-step instructions on how to get this to work.

Using the Firefox browser go to http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/.

There’s a link called “Click Here to Install Greasemonkey” – click on that. Be sure you’re letting Firefox accept downloads. (If you are not then a warning message will come up right below the location bar of the browser letting you know and instructing you to click on a button to allow downloads from that site.)

Next, go to http://www.holovaty.com/code/firefox/greasemonkey/cta_google_maps.user.js
Once you’re on that page (it’ll just be script) then under the Tools menu of Firefox choose Install User Script.

That’s it. Next time when you go to http://maps.google.com/maps you’ll see a new link on the page: CTA map. You can click on it whenever you want to view your address on the CTA map.

Before I link to yet another advertisement for your amusement, I thought it was worth noting the interesting twist in some of us actually seeking out and making conscious decisions to view ads. Aren’t consumers supposed to hate advertisements? Isn’t the great fear about TiVo and similar devices that audiences skip over all the ads? That may be the case if the commercials are horrible, which many of them are. But the fact that people voluntarily visit sites that feature ads suggests that there is room for advertisements in our world. They just need to be good enough to capture our attention. Remember the Honda commercial called Cog? Talk about creative. I personally liked the Get Perpendicular Hitachi flash movie to which I posted a link yesterday (although that may be a bit too geeky for some). The Ad Forum hosts thousands of ads from across the world (although only a small fraction seem to be freely accessible). Again, some of them are creative enough that people will voluntarily go to the site to check them out. Here are some recent popular ones: Frogger and The Banana. So dear advertisers, instead of getting upset about new technologies how about getting creative?

UPDATE: I had also meant to post a link to the video depicting the shot made by Tiger Woods the other day. If you haven’t seen it yet, you’ll understand the connection to this post once you view it.

The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) is facing some major budget crises and has been contemplating various ways to deal with it. This week, the CTA decided to propose a plan that would cut dozens of bus routes AND the Evanston Purple Line express that runs during rush hours on weekdays. This would be extremely unfortunate for those of us in Evanston who use the Purple express.. and pretty much anyone between us and our destinations. I suspect those of us who have the alternative of getting into our cars will opt to do so. This will cause increases in traffic.. obviously not just in Evanston but to and from our destinations as well. It will be especially unfortunate for parking at Northwestern, which is already in a bad state. I foresee more and more people deciding to drive to work instead of taking the El. Overall, the environment won’t thank us for these changes either.

One of the most shocking parts of all this is that the one area in which the CTA decided to recommend no changes is charges to tourists! That is one of the most likely populations to go along with whatever changes are implemented so why leave them out of the plans?

Now that Meetup has decided to start charging for its services, I wonder if Upcoming.org is going to take off. It seems like a promising service and many new features are being added these days. It’s not clear why it’s been so slow to spread. It seems it’s still lacking the necessary critical mass. It’ll be interesting to see how the recent additions of features to it and the changes at Meetup may influence its future.

Reading up on hometown blogs I came across the unfortunate news that rat poopie was found in a warehouse holding airplane snacks at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport (and you don’t have to live in Chicagoland to use that airport during your U.S. airtravel given how many transfers occur there). The article states that “inspectors discovered more than 1,000 rat droppings where pretzels, beer and other airline snacks and beverages are stored”. To this a Chicagoist reader responded with the following astute question: “who got stuck with that counting job?”.

Yahoo! recently announced that they will increase the size of their free email accounts to 1 GB likely as a response to Google’s GMail, which gives users that much space. But GMail seems to be ahead of the game even as Yahoo! is still just preparing for the increase. Today, on the first anniversary of the launch of GMail, Google announced that they will continue to grow the size of GMail accounts beyond 2GBs. They have a nifty little counter on the GMail homepage that shows the increase of the mailbox size. (If you’re a GMail user and are always logged in, you’ll have to log out to see the number.) There’s also a cute little infinite-plus-one figure. As you watch the number grow, you can quench your thirst with some Google Gulp (in beta, of course).

UPDATE (3/17/05): In light of the recent troubles CT is experiencing due to Dreamhost, I should add that the following recommendation only holds for sites with modest traffic (i.e. less than thousands of visitors/day).

Recently several people have asked me whether I have recommendations for a hosting service. I have blogged about this before, but am happy to post another note. (No, I don’t expect all of my friends to be reading this blog religiously, really.) I use Dreamhost and have been quite happy with it. (Truth in advertising, if you sign up through that link I get rewarded. So if you do sign up with them after doing your bit of research, please consider using that link.)

Dreamhost offers three hosting plans. Their basic plan should meet most people’s needs. (People whose needs would not be met by their basic plan would not be asking me for hosting recommendations, that’s all I’m saying.) The basic plan comes with a free domain registration, which is nice. I speak from experience when I say that Dreamhost is quite good about domain registration and domain transfers. This is relevant in case one day you decide to change registrars.

Regarding their hosting services, they offer more goodies than most people – again people who would be asking me for hosting recommendations – will ever need. But it’s nice to have the options, and they still charge less than many other companies that provide fewer services. Their responses to customer support questions are quite good and usually within 24 hours. They offer one-click installation of WordPress (the blogging software this site uses) and phpBBForum plus some others.

With the basic plan, you can get up to 600 (!) POP/IMAP email accounts. You can also create an unlimited number of email aliases. (The latter is great for controlling spam.) You can also create an unlimited number of mailing lists and announcement lists. (The former is for discussions, the latter is for one-way communication with a list of people.)

They have a St.Patrick’s Day sale right now, which triples the amount of disk space and bandwidth you get. (The former has to do with how much space you have to store material, the latter involves the amount of traffic on your account.) This comes down to 2400MB of storage space and 120GB of bandwidth. Although it’s true that we can never have enough space, 2400MB is a LOT of space.

For the geeks in the audience, I am also happy to say that Dreamhost is one of the few hosting services that gives you shell access and supports Pine. Yes! It’s awesome (I know, I’m such a geek).

I suspect many of you reading this are thinking: “That’s all very nice, but I don’t need such a fancy plan.” I understand. However, as I said above, simpler plans are rarely cheaper, in fact, they are often more expensive. I did a lot of research last Spring to figure out where to host my sites and Dreamhost came out on top.

I should add that if you just want to reserve some names and redirect a URL, Active Domains is a somewhat cheaper option at $10/name. However, since a basic plan at Dreamhost comes with a free registration and most people who are not quite at my geek level are fine with that, this may not be very helpful. Also, I once experienced a significant outage with Active Domains so I’ve shifted all of my important domains over to Dreamhost. There are probably options even cheaper than this, but that’s really only for reserving a name without much else.

The Hungarian Pastry Shop in New York is my favorite pastry shop in the U.S. While in the city last week taking in The Gates I stopped by with a friend to try some of their goodies. We had some poppy seed strudel, a chocolate pyramid, a lemon petit-four (they have that in three other flavors as well) and a rum ball. They were all very good, but the rum ball was especially amazing.

This is a very pleasant coffee shop. You order at the counter, go find a seat and a few minutes later the drinks and pastries are brought to your table. They have free refills on coffee and hot water, which is all self-served close to the counter. The space is a bit dark, but this does not seem to deter many many people from reading and studying there for hours.

I wish we had a pastry shop like this in my area.

It is nice to be reminded of great online resources. Via Discourse.net comes a link to the Australian Project Gutenberg outfit. Project Gutenberg (U.S. link) is a collection of eBooks available online for free. These are books that are now in the public domain and volunteers have prepared them for online availability. Over ten thousand works are on these sites, they’re worth a look!

The new service Wists brings us the option of creating a public list of bookmarks with tags. The tagging feature resembles tags in Flickr. I guess it all sounds a lot like del.icio.us although I have never used that service so I can’t really say. Wists certainly looks better though.

I’ve started putting up a few links. I’ll be curious to see if it’s a service I end up using much. (There are so many things I have sort of tried over the years only to abandon them usually sooner rather than later.) Browsing others’ links is one way of finding potentially interesting sites. The service allows creating private bookmarks as well (handy for all those private baby blogs I started following lately). Unfortunately, it looks like the site is already attracting a type of spam. After all, what are the chances that someone would post bookmarks to so many individual items at one particular online store?

UPDATE: I’m told the many links to individual store items are on purpose.

[via Nick Denton]

Last week Gawker Media launched Lifehacker, a site I have gotten addicted to quite quickly. It’s a great resource for any geek or geek-wannabe. One of today’s finds is the most recent service launched by Google: Google Maps. They offer very nice clean maps that allow searches for more than just addresses. For example, see chocolate in evanston. Click on the red pointers and get the exact addresses. With another quick click you can add an address for directions. By clicking on “Link to this page” you get a static link you can share with others. (Note that the arrows for navigating are in the upper left hand corner not on the sides of the map as with some other services.)

The results to searches are far from exhaustive though. I’m afraid the above search misses my favorite chocolate store in town. In fact, curiously, it misses relevant stores that a regular Google search will bring up and Google Local doesn’t seem to be using Google Maps yet either. Since they’re still in beta, hopefully we’ll see some improvements. Regardless, it looks like a very nice new service worth checking out.

My father and brother team up to bring us the fifth in the Candid Science series published by Imperial College Press. They present conversations with famous scientists, many of them Nobel laureates.

Earlier volumes in the series:
* Magdolna Hargittai & István Hargittai: Candid Science IV, Conversations with Famous Physicists
* István Hargittai & Magdolna Hargittai: Candid Science III, Conversations with Famous Chemists
* István Hargittai & Magdolna Hargittai: Candid Science II, Conversations with Famous Biomedical Scientists
* István Hargittai & Magdolna Hargittai: Candid Science, More Conversations with Famous Chemists

The new tech blog Lifehacker points to Google SMS. Send a text message to 46645 (in the US) with queries about addresses (e.g. of hospitals, restaurants), definitions, names/phone numbers, products and more, and receive a response text message (or two or three) with information. Standard text message costs apply (or so I’m assuming).

This on CT.

Among other things, my research looks at how people find information online. When I conducted in-person observations of people’s information-seeking behavior on the Web, it was interesting to see how well Ask Jeeves had done in marketing itself as the search engine that answers people’s questions. Even respondents in my study who otherwise relied on Google for almost all of their queries would go to Ask Jeeves to find the answer to the question about what steps they would have to take if they lost their wallet. People would type in their query in the form of a question even though in most cases – and especially if not specified with quotes, which is something few users do – including “what” or “where” in a query does little to improve the results of a search. It was an interesting example of how a search service could position itself in the search engine market by a particular marketing approach. The results to users’ queries on that particular search engine were no better than the results offered by other services, but due to the type of question people turned to that service regardless. Now I have come across something that seems quite unique to Ask Jeeves among the most popular search engines in terms of actual services rendered, for the moment at least.

Reading the Search Engine Watch blog I found out that using Ask Jeeves can cut down on the number of clicks required to find the answers to simple factual questions. Ask Jeeves will now give you a little box with the answers to some of your questions without having to click through to one of the results for the information. For example, wondering about this year’s date for Passover, I typed in when is Passover in 2005 and was given the exact info right there by Jeeves. (Yes, of course it’s enough to type in passover 2005 to get the same result, I was just playing along.) The service seems to cater to more popular forms of information. It will give you information about some celebrity birthdays (e.g. walter matthau birthday) and the names of Academy Award winners (up until 2002 for now, e.g. academy award best actress 2002), but it won’t display the names of Nobel Prize winners directly (e.g. see results for chemistry nobel prize 2002). It will be interesting to see to what other topical domains they expand the service (some geographical information is also available this way already). For now, other search services such as Google and Yahoo require additional clicks to find answers to the above questions. Perhaps in time they will come out with their versions of instant responses.[1]

fn1. Yes, I realize that Google has been supplying answers to some questions directly for a while. That’s what Kieran relied on in this post.

Looking for a fun alternative to the default Firefox theme? I’ve been using Doodle and like it quite a bit.

This on CT.

I was interviewed for a Chicago Tribune piece about the new Web sites that have spurred up encouraging people to buy blue.¹ The idea is to get people to spend money in the stores of companies whose political action committees and employees support Democratic candidates and causes. It’s an interesting idea, but it’s completely unclear whether: 1. people’s purchasing behavior is that connected to their political ideology; 2. the blue side will use the compiled information more than the red side (after all, the information can also be used to boycott companies instead of supportint them). Regardless, it is certainly interesting to see where people are channeling their political frustrations.. and how quickly news has spread of these sites.

[Accessing the article requires registration. Bugmenot may be worth checking.]

¹ I’m glad to see that the reporter quoted me in the right context, which is not always a given. Unfortunately, she got my departmental affiliation wrong. My primary appointment is in the Department of Communication Studies.

This on CT.

I’ve been meaning to post about the blogging software WordPress and a recent announcement from my hosting service Dreamhost now gives me even more reason to do so. WordPress is a great free blogging software that I decided to use for my own blog back in the summer when I was upgrading various parts of my site. It is free both in the sense that you don’t have to pay for a copy and in the sense that you have the freedom to modify its code. It is filled with wonderful features such as no rebuilding when making changes to your template and efficient ways of dealing with comment spam. WordPress is committed to offering cool features of other programs such as MT’s Trackback. It also offers importers for Movable Type, Greymatter, Blogger, b2, and Textpattern with others forthcoming (Nucleus and pMachine). Moreover, it is quite easy to install, definitely much more straight forward than some other programs such as Movable Type. When they say it takes five minutes they aren’t kidding (granted, some more general prior technical knowledge can be very helpful).

But wait! If you don’t have five minutes to spare (and perhaps you’re lacking some of those technical basics) then Dreamhost is the way to go. A few days ago they announced automatic installation of WordPress on Dreamhost accounts. I use Dreamhost for the hosting of my sites and highly recommend them. Their prices are extremely reasonable and the services just keep getting better.[1]

Once you are done with the installation, all sorts of styles are available to alter the default one. For those just a tiny bit more ambitious but without the necessary prior knowledge, it’s possible to pick up the requisite PHP and CSS know-how within an afternoon (okay, based on prior HTML skills and a certain amount of geek determination) to make additional changes to the designs. All-in-all, I’ve been very happy with WordPress having used it for about three months now. And the Dreamhost install option is awesome.[2]

fn1. Full disclosure: if you sign up for their services through the above link, I will get a referral fee.

fn2. I will be setting up blogs for about thirty students in a month so I welcome any feature that assists the process.