Four Random Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. You might find the title off-putting, but "Meet the Hobbyists Who Collect Barf Bags" at CNN Travel is a surprisingly fun and benevolent read:

Image by Politikaner, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

Eli Cox, a collector from Austin, Texas, can also blame academia for abetting his hobby. The business professor told CNN he got a portion of his 370-bag collection from students he knew during his teaching days.

"It's been a surprise to me, over the years, to get bags that were mailed from students who had graduated 10 or 20 years earlier, but somehow remembered what I was doing," he said. "It has been a way of connecting people and generating some laughter. So that's really been fun."

Fun, Cox says, is the whole point.

"It's a dopamine producer. When I tell people about it, they first ask if they understood me properly, and then they laugh. And I think there's a dopamine shortage and a laughter shortage in the world right now."

I love that fact that some of these collectors worked with Dramamine on an exhibit in New York called "The Last Barf Bag," and that one of them got the last two words of that phrase inscribed on vanity plates.

2. Staying with air travel for a moment, I got a kick out of learning about "PySkyWiFi," which software developer Robert Heaton describes as a "completely free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights:"

As I searched I noticed that the login page was encouraging me to sign in to my airmiles account, free of charge, even though I hadn't paid for anything yet. A hole in the firewall, I thought. It's a long way from London to San Francisco so I decided to peer through it.

I logged in to my JetStreamers Diamond Altitude account and started clicking. I went to my profile page, where I saw an edit button. It looked like a normal button: drop shadow, rounded corners, nothing special. I was supposed to use it to update my name, address, and so on.

But suddenly I realised that this was no ordinary button. This clickable rascal would allow me to access the entire internet through my airmiles account. This would be slow. It would be unbelievably stupid. But it would work.

...

Before I could access the entire internet through my airmiles account I'd need to write a few prototypes. At first I thought that I'd write them using Go, but then I realised that if I used Python then I could call the final tool PySkyWiFi. Obviously I did that instead.

Heaton starts out instant messaging through the name field of his air miles account, and eventually comes up with a way to get internet access through it.

I agree with his disclaimer (you obviously shouldn't actually do any of this), but love the ingenuity.

3. If you're about to start a summer internship or know someone who is, Ask a Manager has some funny cautionary tales.

I loved Item 11. That's one way to get nicknamed "Spider Man."

4. File Under "I'll Take Your Word For It:" Ten Things No One Tells You Before an Antarctic Expedition.

Alternate take: Yes, there may well be such a thing as too much butter.

-- CAV