Oh yeah baby!

Challenged by the fact that PhysioProf could mobile blog and I couldn't, I perservered in my quest for remote blogging. My efforts have been rewarded. Yeah!


-- Post From My iPhone

Why mobile blogging with Blogger blows

This week I was away from my desk (yeah!) for an extended period of time (yeah!) in a scenario where I did not have computer access to the internet, but I did have phone access. I had some time on my hands, and missed my blogosphere peeps, so I thought I would figure out how to do some mobile blogging. Afterall, having advanced internet capabilities was one of the reasons I got that fancyass iPhone in the first place! (BTW, the iPhone is coolest technological gadget I have ever experienced. If you are like me and feel intense need for and satisfaction at instantly Google-ing for a piece of information you were wondering about, this thing is as good as it gets until they figure out how to implant direct connections to the internet into our brains).

So, first I tried it directly from my phone through the web browser, but apparently my phone did not recognize the giant-ass text box. Then I searched for an app...afterall WordPress apparently has a nifty app for blogging on your phone. Nope. So, then I scoured Blogger for info on how to mobile blog. By this time, I almost peed myself when I found the link "Learn how to start mobile blogging". Obviously, I was missing something important and could use a few lessons.

Here's how it "works". You email or MMS go@blogger.com from your phone and it sets up a separate blog for you.  It sends you an email with a code that allows you to activate and link that blog with your real blog. Then, whenever you send an email to go@blogger.com from your phone it posts that email to your blog. Simple, right? Well, actually I thought it sounded weirdly convoluted and slightly esoteric, but  was pretty desperate at this point.

So, in my few minutes of spare time I trudged through the various steps outlined above. I received weird messages that indicated something had gone wrong followed by the email with my code indicating everything was hunky dory. I linked my mobile blog with Professor Chaos successfully. Excited, I quickly spun off a test email, explaining to you all what I was doing so you wouldn't be confused by just some post saying "test" popping up and send in the cavalry assuming that it was an SOS message and PhysioProf had hijacked me because I had promised to vote for Isis every hour on the hour if she posted a recipe I could freeze...which she did! Anyway, I pressed 'send' and then started checking my blog. Nothing ever showed up. Later, when I had a few more minutes, I checked my email:

Your carrier is not supported by Blogger Mobile. Please try using Mail-to-Blogger or visit http://www.blogger.com/mobile-request for more information.

What? My carrier is AT&freakingT! You kidding me? It's not like I'm on some pay as you go network or something! The link takes you to a form with this information:

"Request a mobile carrier

Thanks for your interest in Blogger Mobile. Please complete this form in order to submit your carrier for review. We will not respond to to these submissions, but will take it into consideration as we work to expand Blogger Mobile to more carriers."

Well it would have been nice before I started that whole mess to know what carriers exactly they did support.

Stupid... freaking... Blogger.

On the current battle for godhood

I have remained silent as I have watched the culinary battle between PhysioProf and Isis unfold. It is all very entertaining and I will admit that I have been voting. But at the risk of some serious swearwords and smiting (I honestly prefer Drugmonkey to be the next person blown out of the sky by the goddess as opposed to my humble self), I must finally say my peace: this competition is crap.

There, I've done it. Let the chaos ensue.

Why is it crap? Isis is the domestic and laboratory goddess (it says so on her blog). I think the 'and' is a critical (and apparently neglected) word. If I had all day to work on my home, I too could be a domestic goddess. My house would be neat (maybe,...there is my inherent problem of being a chaos vortex....I might have to clean my home and then lock myself out of it) and my long-suffering husband would come home with a gourmet meal awaiting him (I will never be a chef, but I'm mighty fine at following complicated recipes...which is surprising in retrospect since my TA for organic chemistry lab passed me on the condition I never step foot in another chemistry lab). I could also be a domestic goddess if I was a full professor and could afford to hire a sous chef to make my duck confit for me. Anyway, my point is that what makes Isis a domestic goddess worth praying to is that her advice allows mere mortal women to immulate BOTH a domestic and work goddess. Those handy pieces of advice that help you balance those competing demands. I mean, the pesto recipe was fantastic, and it has saved my ass on more than one occasion when General Disarray and I came home too exhausted to cook.

Now, I understand that sometimes true gods have to fling lightning bolts at each other to establish pre-eminence. However, I would like to point out that when gods forget the little people, they tend to stop being worshipped.

Figure 1. Not familiar with the gods Tiamat and Assur? That's exactly my point.

So, Isis and PhysioProf, in your competition to one-up each other, please remember that many of us are struggling young scientists without much time to cook extravagant gourmet meals (or the money to hire someone else to do it). Please attempt to demonstrate to your humble worshipers not only your might, but also your benevolence and usefulness.

Hugs and Kisses,

River

Role Models

A few days ago Isis mentioned that like many young, female academics, she worshiped at the alter of FemaleScienceProfessor. Something about her statement brought to mind a phenomenon I often experience when at scientific meetings, which General Disarray swears happens at every time. One minute he will see me walking across a room towards him and the next I'll have disappeared behind a wall of women who have taken the opportunity of finding me alone to come ask a bewildering array of questions regarding being a woman in science. General Disarray says this is a sign that I am doing something right as they wouldn't be coming to ask a complete loser for advice, but I have always felt a little sadness about it because surely these women can find a better source of information - someone further in their career who has actually figured somethings out and isn't blundering around in the dark just like them.

Until Isis's comment, that is as far as my thought process had gone on this topic. Something about her statement made me realize that with respect to FemaleScienceProfessor, I was like the women at those meetings...except instead of rushing towards her at a meeting, I rush to my google reader every morning. And then I realized that she was filling a role model void that I have had for a long time - the happy, female, scientist, tenured professor, with children. This realization made me think a little more about the importance of role models.

I do not have a role model, I have lots of role models....kinda like the Catholics have patron saints for all sorts of different things, I have role models for different occasions. For example, I have Saint Professor Mentor who is my role model for being a scientist. I have Saint Female-Scientist-with-Kids-but-no-permanent-position, who I go to when I want to know more on balancing kids and science career demands like frequent traveling. However, in my pantheon of saints, I have been missing a Saint Happy-Full-Professor-Female Scientist...someone who walked the path I am walking, dealt with the issues I am dealing with, and still loves what they do. Too many of the senior female professors in my field seem to have lost that joy somewhere along the way...or they have become tough in a way that is simply not me. I feel like FemaleScienceProfessor fills that niche for me and my guess is I'm not alone in that.

While some may prefer to take a more monotheistic approach to their role models, I have always felt like what are odds that one person will incapsulate everything I want to be? (And even if they did, would that be a little creepy?) And this, to me, is an important reason why we need diversity in science. Afterall, we all need role models, people we look up to that help us calibrate our internal compasses when times get hard and confusing. Finding the right role models for you becomes a lot easier if there's a diversity of people to choose from. Which is what's so great about the blogosphere. I've been exposed to a diversity of people that I have not found in my own world...who knew some of my role models would end up being a female scientist in the physical sciences (St. FSP), an NIH-funded biomedical research scientist (St. DrugMonkey), and a slightly profane basic science faculty member at a private medical school (uh...St PhysioProf?) ? How cool.

My First Blog

I just finished a semester of editing more Ph.D. dissertations than I ever care to do again in a two week period. In thinking about this experience, I found that there was a common theme to my comments to these students: the context in which they put their results was incredibly important. The context can completely change how a reader thinks about what they are reading. Since one of my biggest worries is that I will become one of those people who does not realize that they are what they complain about (we all know these people), I thought my first posting should give context for my blog.

I am an assistant professor at a second-tier research institution. I was trained in a fantastic lab by a world-class scientist to be a top-tier researcher and the mismatch between my training and my reality often results in me wondering if I am insane.

I am also part of an academic couple. My husband is in the same field as I am and we currently have tenure-track jobs in the same department at the same institution. We are not only husband- and-wife but also each other's primary collaborator. We only notice balancing these roles when other people make a big deal out of it (e.g., the Voting Block issue, the "who's research is it anyway" issue, etc).

Finally, I am an active scientist. I have published a fair number of papers in the top journals in my field and - when I am not being neurotic - I am (generally) happy with the trajectory my career is on. Because my science is a big part of my life and how I view myself, I will go ahead and fess up that I am an ecologist. It will undoubtedly slip out anyway.

I never thought of writing a blog until I became addicted to FemaleScienceProfessor's blog and realized that reading her balanced and often funny take on things that I was also dealing with made me feel less like I was Alice in Wonderland. My hope is that my blog will do the same for someone else. I choose to write my blog anonymously (anyone who saw the movie Serenity will know that River Tam is not my name) because I wanted to be candid about events and issues without causing problems for my friends, students or (frankly) myself; I see no point in doing this if I can't be candid.

So, here we go....