Seatguru

by Jane Rigby on February 5, 2010

Does everyone already know this tip, or am I about to improve your lives?

Seat Guru shows airplane seating charts, specific to your airline and plane, color-coded for good and bad seats.  It’s prevented me from selecting ‘exit row’ seats that don’t recline or business class by the lavatory, and it’s found me the comfiest seat home after a long observing run.

For example, here’s the seating chart of American 767-300, my plane from Santiago Chile to Dallas.  My travel agent had given me seat 12H, which is flagged as red.  I swapped to a green seat.  When you’re trying to catch up on sleep on an observing run, every bit helps.  (Yawn.)

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3D Plotting in Python with matplotlib mplot3d

by Jessica February 1, 2010

I recently needed to do some simple 3D plotting in python. The strongest choice as discussed on the web is Mayavi, which is part of the Enthought Python distribution. However, I have a previous python distribution already installed (via scisoft) with all of my favorite packages updated to the latest and greatest versions (e.g. matplotlib, [...]

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Links: iPad, Effective Delegation, Job Interviews, and More

by Kelle January 29, 2010

iPad Impressions from People Who’ve Actually Used It | The iPhone Blog Looks like I’m coming down pro-iPad. Not right away, of course, but I could see myself getting a 2nd generation one…with multi-tasking and a camera.
Apple iPad: Everything You Need to Know | Gizmodo
5 Tips for Effective Delegation | www.ismckenzie.com 1) Define the task [...]

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Introducing the AstroBetter Wiki

by Jessica January 27, 2010

As part of our efforts to “astro better” we have started a new wiki. This wiki was originally hosted at MacSingularity but has now been migrated over and substantially expanded.  You can get to the wiki from the menu bar above. Unlike the blog, anyone can register and edit the wiki content. We will frequently update the [...]

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Are Non-Academic Jobs Worthy of the Rumor Mill?

by Kelle January 25, 2010

There’s been lots of shenanigans on the Astrophysics Job Rumor Mill recently. The comments on the revisions are beginning to sound like an existentialist debate. The curfuffle of the moment is whether or not there should be a section for non-academic jobs; the section has been appearing, disappearing, and modified [...]

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Evernote: Organize notes, emails, photos, and more all in one place.

by Kelle January 25, 2010

This is a guest post by Sarah Kendrew (blog, Twitter) a postdoc in infrared astronomy at Leiden Observatory working on instrumentation for the European Extremely Large Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope.

The tag line of note-taking application Evernote reads “Remember Everything”. The great thing is, with Evernote, you don’t need to remember. If you [...]

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Links: Negotiating Tenure Track Jobs, Unclutter Your Office, Collaboration Tools Compared, and more.

by Kelle January 22, 2010

AAS Twitter Stream Graph by Nathan Bergey.

Stuff new/prospective TT faculty need to know. Part 1: Money | Professor in Training Discussion of startup funds and salary issues for those about to start negotiating academic tenure track positions.
Stuff new/prospective TT faculty need to know. Part 2: Negotiating | Professor in Training Putting together a startup request [...]

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Links: AAS Tweets Rundown, Screen Sharing, Wave FAQ, and more.

by Kelle January 15, 2010

MacBook Generations, alternate view, by Robert S. Donovan. via TUAW.

Tweets from the 215th meeting of the AAS | Douglas Burke Word clouds from the tweets. Fine, just #aas next time.
MIT Pledges to Improve Conditions for Minority Faculty Members | ScienceInsider
Mac OS X’s application switcher does not go both ways | Finer Things in Mac [...]

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MarcoPolo – Context-aware computing for Mac

by Tom January 11, 2010

MarcoPolo is a very cool (free) application for MacOS X that uses information about the current state of your computer, or evidence, to automatically perform actions.
For example, one can use MarcoPolo to automatically change the Network Location if an ethernet cable is plugged in or a specific Wi-Fi network is present (useful if you need [...]

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