Crochet Danger

 Crafts, General, Travel  5 Responses »
Dec 052005
 

I had to laugh at Eve’s link to the story of the weenie who was scared of knit­ting needles (while admit­ting I first saw the link at whump dot com from fol­low­ing XML 2005 Aggreg­at­or links). I have a bet­ter story than mere knit­ting needles or even nee­dle­work needles, since all of those have really blunt ends.

When the TSA dir­ect­ives first came out after Septem­ber 11, ban­ning knit­ting needles, I, along with a lot of oth­er people, was struck by the arbit­rar­i­ness of the bans. No knives, but forks were still allowed, and so were glasses made of glass. Per­son­ally I’d rather have someone come at me with a blunt knife that’s not cap­able of cut­ting any­thing than a broken glass. So I read the list of banned items and noticed that crochet hooks wer­en’t on the list. Giv­en that in terms of crafts I bounce between knit­ting, nee­dle­work, crochet, and lots of oth­ers, I have a good sup­ply of crochet hooks. I picked one out to take on my next set of flights. Not just any crochet hook though, one of my fine 1.25 mm crochet hooks that at the time I was using for filet crochet. So this is a hook, with what can only be described as a barb on one end, with a total dia­met­er of 1.25 mm (I have smal­ler, but had two of the 1.25 mm hooks so could eas­ily risk los­ing one).

The first secur­ity per­son checked the hook, looked wor­ried, asked her super­visor, the super­visor said “crochet hooks are allowed”. And that was it. On board I went, with my filet crochet and my crochet hook. These days knit­ting needles are expressly allowed, as are crochet hooks (although the TSA calls them “crochet needles”) so I will still be able to carry around my filet crochet hooks and scare unsus­pect­ing knit­ting needle phobics (yes, there is such a thing as a needle pho­bia; most people who suf­fer from it have pho­bi­as about vac­cin­a­tion and blood test-type needles, not knit­ting needles, although the pho­bia is appar­ently bad enough in some people to be set off by any needle-type object). 

So if you see someone with what looks like a viciously thin, barbed object and thin yarn, just remem­ber the TSA per­mits it. Mind you, read­ing that list does raise oth­er ques­tions, such as “if you can­’t smoke on board, why do you need a cigar cut­ter?” and “why are toy trans­former robots expressly per­mit­ted but not oth­er toys?” but that’s just me being picky.

Singapore Impressions

 Travel  5 Responses »
Dec 042005
 

I was recently in Singa­pore for a Liberty Alli­ance meet­ing. I had­n’t been in Singa­pore for 10 years, so it was inter­est­ing to see what was the same and what was different. 

Orch­ard Road was the same, but more so — more West­ern shops, more malls, more hotels. The air con­di­tion­ing in hotels and res­taur­ants, which I had remembered as being some­what over the top, was even more so, to the extent that we moved meet­ing rooms with­in the meet­ing hotel to find a room that was some­what warm­er and went out­side as much as pos­sible to thaw out! Out­side was the warm trop­ic­al air and thun­der­storms I remembered, the mix of people on the streets, and the trop­ic­al plant exuber­ance on the streets that helps make Singa­pore so memorable. 

Street in Singapore

Things have changed since 1995. People seem more relaxed, the streets aren’t by any means dirty but they’re not quite as “is this really a city”-spotless as they used to be. The tax­is no longer have the annoy­ing bell that says when they’re going too fast (just the stand­ard annoy­ing bell when someone isn’t using their seat­belt). The Long Bar in the Raffles Hotel is new, built to look much like the old one, but some­how without the same feel. It feels like a movie set, com­plete with over-eager air­con­di­tion­ing. The old Long Bar, the authen­t­ic one, had much more of that trop­ic­al sun­down­er feel. It’s prob­ably still worth see­ing as a tour­ist, but I would­n’t both­er going back, where­as the old Long Bar was some­where you could spend hours in, lazily watch­ing the fans and listen­ing to the crunch of pea­nut shells on the floor.

The old and the new — one block from Orch­ard Road construction in Singapore

On the way back to the air­port, I asked the taxi driver about the high­way with the large plants in pots, planned as an emer­gency run­way. It was quite a sight and I could­n’t fig­ure out how I had missed them. It turned out that Singa­pore had added a new dir­ect high­way into the city; the pots are still there on the older high­way. The taxi-driver was sure that emer­gency run­way would nev­er have to be used and I found his explan­a­tion touch­ing. Singa­pore is in the Com­mon­wealth and the Queen is very proud of what Singa­pore has accom­plished, and there­fore all the nations of the Com­mon­wealth would help if Singa­pore were ever to be attacked, he said. I hope he’s right, and I hope his belief is nev­er tested.

Five Years On

 Conference  2 Responses »
Dec 012005
 

“The time has come, the wal­rus said” — not to talk of cab­bages and kings, nor even of seal­ing wax, but to move on and let someone else with fresh ideas take over chair­ing the XML Con­fer­ence Series. XML 2001 was the first con­fer­ence I chaired, XML 2005 the last. It’s been an inter­est­ing jour­ney, full of inter­est­ing people and inter­est­ing top­ics. I’ll miss many aspects of chair­ing — the pos­it­ive side of inter­act­ing with attendees, review­ers, ses­sion chairs, and speak­ers, but I am relieved I no longer have to plan my entire year around one week in Novem­ber, clean dozens of XML papers (well, once this year’s final pro­ceed­ings are done), or worry about how many last-minute can­cel­la­tions or no-shows we’ll have (e.g., this year, for some reas­on we had a large num­ber of can­cel­la­tions so I was glad I had a form­al waitl­ist of speak­ers and talks).

When I took the job, I set out to make a con­fer­ence that I would want to attend and con­trib­ute to. To me, the key was com­munity involve­ment. A con­fer­ence is only as good as the speak­ers allow it to be; you need know­ledgable speak­ers talk­ing on inter­est­ing top­ics if you’re to give attendees a reas­on to both­er attend­ing. How do you get good speak­ers to attend? You make sure there are lots of oth­er good speak­ers attend­ing, so they can all talk and learn and net­work. The ideal con­fer­ence to my mind is quiet dur­ing ses­sions, noisy dur­ing cof­fee breaks, and every­one goes away exhausted but exhil­ar­ated from everything they’ve seen, heard, and thought about. Includ­ing the com­munity in this pro­cess was key, and I was for­tu­nate in that so many people in the XML com­munity were happy to help out, wheth­er as plan­ning com­mit­tee mem­bers, review­ers, speak­ers, or ses­sion chairs.

I set up a plan­ning com­mit­tee to help with final decisions, and designed a peer review sys­tem that was easy for the review­ers (give a grade from 1 to 4 and add com­ments) so people would­n’t mind review­ing. One review­er said it was just like read­ing a sched­ule and decid­ing which talks he’d both­er attend­ing, which I liked. The review­ers made the plan­ning com­mit­tee’s work in pick­ing the final set of talks for the sched­ule pos­sible. Many of the review­ers were happy to be ses­sion chairs for the con­fer­ence itself, help­ing out speak­ers (par­tic­u­larly new speak­ers), mod­er­at­ing ques­tions, and, to my mind, under­scor­ing the fact that this is a com­munity con­fer­ence. I don’t really like con­fer­ences that don’t have ses­sion mod­er­at­ors or chairs as it seems imper­son­al somehow.

And then there were the smal­ler touches I could bring in as chair. For example, many con­fer­ences hand out speak­er gifts, which are usu­ally small, semi-use­less tech toys that die after 3 uses. I decided that per­son­ally I’d rather have a speaker/reviewer recep­tion to attend, so that’s what we did. And I star­ted the XML Cup to recog­nise people whose con­tri­bu­tions seemed to cry out for more recog­ni­tion; again, this was inten­ded as some­thing for the community. 

My reward has been con­fer­ences where people are involved, where the hall­ways are quiet dur­ing ses­sions and the cof­fee breaks busy, where attendees come up and say “my man­age­ment told me to attend and it’s been really great!”, where ideas and tech­niques cross-pol­lin­ate from one field to anoth­er. This year it became par­tic­u­larly obvi­ous that we could­n’t pigeon-hole talks any more, they were all applic­able to mul­tiple tracks and had applic­a­tions far out­side the uses of XML even 3 years ago. XML is truly a basic part of today’s IT infra­struc­ture in ways that few would have been brave enough to pre­dict when I star­ted chair­ing these con­fer­ences. And I like to think that at least some of that is due to this con­fer­ence: ker­nels of ideas that are passed around, net­work­ing, and the incub­a­tion effect of hav­ing lots of experts in close prox­im­ity who can bounce ideas and crazy thoughts off each other.

Dav­id Meg­gin­son will be chair­ing XML 2006 (Nov 13–17, 2006, in Seattle). He’ll do a good job and will bring fresh ideas and energy to the con­fer­ence. It will be inter­est­ing for me to sit back and watch how it develops!

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