Building Code

Anyone who has ever stayed in a hotel in London probably has experienced the seemingly endless series of small doors you have to pass through to get from the lobby to your room. If you bring an American sized suitcase and you’re lugging it down these Lilliputian corridors, it’s annoying to pass through tiny doors every 20 feet or so.

This same thing happens in houses. Not only do you have doors to bedrooms, as you expect, but you often have doors at the ends of hallways and doors in between inner rooms that, in modern American houses, you wouldn’t have. I thought this would annoy me. It doesn’t. In fact, I find them jolly convenient as I can use them to isolate kids, dogs, or noise. With different doors closed (and sometimes they actually have locks on them), I can really make a small house feel not-so-cramped because I can get some separation from the other inhabitants. Even if they happen to be quite loud.

Packaging

People complain that things are more expensive here. And they are. I have a handful of reasons that I think that’s true. For one thing, I find the most trivial of foods and small items come in stronger, more durable packaging than they would in the States. There are these fabulous Gü puddings that come in nice glass dishes. I mean really: for two puddings that you’re going to eat, do you really need nice glass dishes in the cardboard box? And the plastic that they use to pack things like power transformers and cables and detritus that comes with electronics: it’s all a few microns thicker than what we get in the States. I wonder if this doesn’t contribute to the higher prices of things.

“Unlimited” Marketing

The fact of life here in the UK is that nothing is truly unlimited. You pay for everything by the minute, by the megabyte, whatever. They try hard to hide this fact. Any time they can advertise something as “unlimited” or “lifetime” or something else that implies boundlessness, they will.

In the US, we’ve grown accustomed to words like “Natural” being abused in marketing. I mean, what are you differentiating between when you say “natural” cereal, or “natural” wood? Over here, they will say things like “Unlimited downloads (1GB fair use limit).” At first glance you might think it fair. I mean, after all, we do have fair use limits in the US. But over here, you can find a mobile internet provider offering 3 different plans for the same device that all say “Unlimited,” but they have different prices. The difference in the plans is the fair use limit. So “Unlimited” with 3GB fair use is more expensive than “Unlimited” with 1GB fair use. Vauxhall recently started advertising a car with a “lifetime” warranty that is actually just 100,000 miles and is limited to the first owner. Only in the event that the first owner dies before driving 100,000 miles is it a “lifetime” warranty.

Litter

London is dirty. One of the side-effects of the IRA’s bombings and such (they had terrorism long before the US did) is that most public trash cans have been removed. At a really busy train station like Clapham Junction (the busiest in Britain), you’ll find maybe one per platform. In my section of Canary Wharf, they have a few public rubbish bins that are almost always overflowing. There’s simply no place to put that drink bottle, sandwich wrapper, or plastic bag when you’re done with it. I’ve witnessed people walking down the street and  they just chuck a bottle or something behind a bush or leave it behind a lamppost. Like the litter fairy is going to come and clean it up. On the one hand: holy crap—pick up the litter, people! On the other hand: where should they put it?

Housing Density

There are plenty of towns and villages that have American-sized suburbs where you have to drive to get anywhere. But there’s a lot more little towns, like the one we live in, that have much more dense buildings. In the Virginia suburbs, school districts are huge because you have to go quite far from the school itself to get enough households with children that will fill a school. To get to school we’re compelled to drive big fleets of buses and cars because nobody can reasonably walk to school.

In the UK, though, you can have a school where over half the kids come from within a 1-mile radius. My boys go to two schools that are next door to each other, and the start times are staggered by 5 minutes. You take the youngest in, then the oldest, and it works perfectly. It is a short walk. You can do this in a major city in the US, but not the suburbs.

Bathrooms

In very modern (i.e., renovated this year) bathrooms, you might find sinks with separate hot and cold water taps. They’re for sale in your local hardware store, and people still choose them for some reason. I can’t imagine why someone would choose this.

You’ll never find a light switch on the wall or an electric outlet on the wall in a bathroom. The light switch is outside the bathroom, or it’s a pull-chain from the ceiling. You can find shaver outlets from time to time in bathrooms, but never a full-blown electrical socket.

Heated towel racks are quite common in bathrooms. Since most people have radiator heating, they often run a special radiator into the bathroom. You hang your towels on it and they get piping hot. Ahhhhh. It’s wonderful.

Opening times

Shops are pretty universal in opening from 10:00am to 5:00pm. Some will open earlier, others may stay open a bit later. A handful of things are open on Sundays. What I find so mindboggling about this system is the question “who is doing the shopping other than OAPs?” (OAP = Old Age Pensioner, not a derogatory term here in the UK). I mean really: if I have to work 9-6, and the shops are open 9-6, when will I shop? The short answer is Saturday. People shop at lunchtimes and on Saturdays.

A side-effect of this paradox is that, at least in the major London area, virtually anything can be delivered cheaply and quickly. You can order office supplies, groceries, furniture, tools, you name it and it will all be delivered often on the same day. Now to be sure, we have delivery in the US. But it’s usually FedEx or the postal service or something similar. Here, they just have fleets of independent couriers and delivery vans and such. Probably a lot like what a major city like New York, Boston, or Chicago might have. Since none of us own American-sized SUVs or minivans or the like, delivery is a way of life in certain kinds of shopping.

Telephones

Wow do telephones work. Now, they’re complicated and annoying, but the market has been deregulated for some time, and pricing and competition are alive and well. If any American thinks he has seen free market economics at work, he should take a look at the British mobile phone market (and, to a lesser degree, the landline market). You can walk into a store, pay a few quid, and walk out with a phone. Pay as you go (PAYG) is plentiful, cheap, and easy to get. I can go into the fanciest shopping mall and get a 3G dongle for my laptop for £10 (about $16 at the time of this writing) and then pay £15 for a month’s “unlimited” service (about $23). That’s pay as you go, no contract, no nothing. Try that in the States, just try. Can’t be done. Not only that, but I did full motion video conferencing with it back to the US and the quality was good. The telephone infrastructure and payment structure are awesome.

Plumbing

No two sinks, toilets, tubs, showers, dishwashers or washing machines are the same. The hot is not always on the left. To flush a toilet you might push a button, step on a button, pull a chain, turn a knob, or step on a pedal.

Appliances

Most appliances are labeled in hieroglyphics. I guess they figure that they can’t be accused of discriminating against some group of people if everyone finds the instructions impossible to decipher. I’ve seen symbols on microwave ovens that resemble those on a VCR. Goodness knows what it means to press “fast forward” on my microwave. My oven has a symbol that looks like “next track” on a CD player.

Air conditioning

Surely you jest. No, there is no air conditioning (or “air con” as they call it) here. Every house and flat is equipped, however, with windows that open. Only the big, very modern skyscraper office buildings have windows that don’t open. However, they never have screens in the windows or doors. Now, true Brits would tell you that’s because there are no infestations of mosquitoes and such here. That might be true, but they still have bugs, and enough of them that you’d like screens.

What the windows do have are lots of interesting ways to open. Many can be opened in the rain and they cantilever one way or another to prevent rain from pouring in. Pretty necessary in a place like this.

Conclusion

So that’s a few things that are different. I like it over here, generally. But there are definitely a few bits that make me scratch my head and say “huh?”

My little boys must think it queer,
to shovel without a snow plow near.
Between the curb and sidewalk gray,
the coldest evening of the year.

They give their kid snow shovels a shake,
to ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the scrape,
of vigilante plows and rakes.

The deficit’s scary, dark and deep,
but I have tax payments to keep.
And tons to shovel before I sleep.
And tons to shovel before i sleep.

Credit to one of my favorite poets for inspiring this.

Security ignores usability

Let’s see what’s wrong:

1. The page is titled “Member Login”
2. The main text in the middle of the page says “Sign in”
3. The button I click under “Sign In” is labeled “Login”
4. The help is labeled “Login Help”
5. After you log in, the page says “Sign In: You are currently logged in as…”
6. The entire form for signing in or logging in appears twice on this page, once at the top right, once in the middle. As a user I have to ask myself: do they do the same thing? Do they take the same Username and Password?
7. On the top right, the button is labeled “Sign In.” On the middle of the page (under where it says “Sign In”) the button is labeled “Login.”
8. Should the search options (”I am interested in”) appear on this page? I mean, if this is the login page, just give them the login option. The navigation bar at the top gives them some other places to go if this isn’t where they really meant to go.  I find “I am interested in” looks too much like it’s related to signing in.

Maybe I’m overdoing it, but we only need one term for logging in or signing in. It’s pretty clear that these folks consider “login” and “sign in” to be the same thing. But does the average user? And why do we have a login form appearing twice, with the button labeled differently in each.

Sigh. We can’t even get our own terms straight in the security industry. No wonder nobody else gets it straight.

My microwave oven is digital, so I enter a set of numbers to indicate the cooking time. I’m not sure if all microwaves are like mine, but mine will accept integer values that are not logical clock values. I can enter, for example, 75, and it will run for 75 seconds. If you forget, for an instant, that you’re dealing with clock values, the inputs and outputs (what you type and how long it runs) can seem pretty weird.Consider the following inputs and outputs:

I decided to try to mock this up in Excel. It turns out that you can paste this into a cell, and it will give the output (number of seconds) given the input (integers typed on the keypad).

=IF(A1<100,A1,(TRUNC(A1/100)*60)+(A1-(TRUNC(A1/100)*100)))

I like this as an example of user interface design because it has some really unintuitive effects. I have some ideas how I might use this one day in training testers and security folks.

Time Warp

Facebook is savvy about time zones and the fact that its users span the globe. But notice this conversation I had with a friend. He sent it at 12:39am on October 21st. I replied 3 hours earlier. Now, if you look at our profiles, Roy and I live in the same time zone. Normally this would never happen. But, I happen to be in the UK when this happened. I think I replied a couple hours after his message, but at you’ll see, it’s essentially impossible to know, given what I see.

I think it has decided that I’m on the west coast. I’ll have to go figure out if that’s right. Without putting the time zones in there, though, it is impossible to sort out who sent what and when. You can’t tell if there’s an actual error in the time stamping, an error in my user profile or Roy’s user profile (e.g., one of us has told facebook that we’re in some weird location), or if there’s an error in the localization. That is, facebook could have figured out that I’m in the UK and tried to display local times, but then goofed up the conversion to my local time zone.

I wonder what kind of software testing you would have to do, if you couldn’t change the display to add in the time zone. Could this be tested in its current form? Could mistakes be distinguished from correct behavior?

It may be possible to make a copy of the /usr/lib/libcurl.4.dylib library, do their software install, and then copy it back. It’s dangerous. I ended up finding a friend with a Mac and booting into Target Disk mode, and then I could replace the file. People who don’t know what that means will have to find a Mac service center, Apple store, or a tech-savvy friend. But that’s not what this blog post is about.

Suckiest App Evar

The crappy app that you get with the USB stick is clearly slapped together using a template, demo app that came with XCode or something.

MyApp

• The menu has a “Preferences” item that is greyed out (but there is a settings button in the window. Why isn’t that hooked up to the Preferences menu?).
• The File menu has a bunch of options: New, Open, Open Recent, Save As, Print. etc. None of these make sense. Perhaps they didn’t realize they had a menu? Perhaps they didn’t realize they could eliminate the entire menu?
• The Edit menu does what you’d expect. Lucky them.
• The Window menu has a Hide/Show toolbar (also grayed out) and a Customize Toolbar (also grayed out).
• And my favorite: The “Help” menu has one item: “MyApp Help.” They forgot to do a search and replace on “MyApp” throughout their project. Though it does bring up the right PDF file for documentation.

SMS

And then there’s the SMS feature. I’m not sure I understand why I want my mobile broadband adapter to send and receive SMS. but it’s there.

CPU Usage

There’s the fact that I have this dumb program running the whole time that I am using teh interwebs. It uses a visible amount of CPU, ranging from 0.6% to 1% when just sitting idle. Since it is adding zero value to my Internet experience, this just takes up space in my dock, desktop, and RAM. And it’s burning a little CPU as well.

Engrish

Lastly, there’s Engrish. If you don’t know what Engrish is, go take a look at Engrish.com. They have error messages in the software (from reading /Applications/T-Mobile Mobile Broadband Manager.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/LanguageTokenList_TMO.txt) that look like this:

• The request has been time out!\nTry to terminate the communication!
• If disable, you will not be able to install the SW of T-Mobile Internet Manager to other computer until enable it again.
• SIM card capacity is not enough!

In fact, of the 232 strings in that file (which correspond to messages you might see in a dialog box or error), 75 (about one third) have an exclamation point in them. One error message even has 3 exclamation points in it.

Conclusion

It turns out that the device works. But what a pain. I lost half a day to trying to recover without a second mac. When I got the second Mac to fix my own Mac, all was well in about 5 minutes. After that, it works flawlessly.

My solution? I use random passwords as the answers to my questions. The name of my first dog? Well, one site thinks it’s 6pnESltf9ygissZ and another site thinks it’s DnlOCacy732r3Ol8hb. Oh, and the best man at my wedding? He’s RitYHNwuhTkyF0c, but we just called him “Rit” for short.

I use a PasswordWallet program because it has both iPhone and Mac versions. It generates random passwords, stores them securely, types them into my browser for me, and makes it possible for me to use really strong passwords without ever remembering them. And since I always have either my phone and or my computer with me, I always have them. If I lost both, I have backups of all my passwords in various encrypted files, both on backup drives and other laptops. And if the absolute worst thing happens and all 10 copies of my password file are lost, well, it should be hard to recover.

Often the poem is part of the author’s catharsis and a waypoint on their journey to regain their emotional balance. These are the authors I am addressing. I am writing these tips, however, not in an effort to help them overcome whatever emotions they’re dealing with. Rather, I’m hoping they will write better poems. I’m not opposed to cathartic poems that express betrayal and decry lost love. I just want it to be better poetry. Later on, I will describe why I think we can have ‘good’ poems and ‘bad’ poems. It’s not all relative. There’s good and there’s bad and not everyone gets a trophy.

Tips

1. Don’t give me conclusions.

If you want me to feel what you felt, I probably need to experience what you experienced. If your poem is written entirely in the present tense, “I am angry,” and “I hate” and “I loathe” and so on, that’s the result. I don’t understand the result. Imagine that I told you that I had a really hard math problem to do, and I worked and worked and worked, and finally I discovered the answer was 204. You have no idea what the math problem was like, why I found it hard, or what it meant for me to “work and work and work.” The number 204 sure doesn’t seem frightening. How hard was the math, really? If your poem only discusses where you are now in your thinking (e.g., how angry you are now, how betrayed you feel now, etc.), it’s like telling me 204.

Let me explain it from a totally different direction. Forget love for a second. Imagine trying to tell a scary story. If the person said “I went into this house, and it was spooky. I got scared and ran home.” Would you be scared? No way. If they went into vivid detail about eerie sights and sounds and smells, and unexpected things happening, they might spook you a little. Then you’d be feeling something similar to what they felt at the time. Same thing for love, hate, and other emotions. You have to build up the scene and explain where those emotions come from.

Given that:

2. Relive it.

If you loved someone once, there was a reason. Even if you totally despise that person now, you loved them once and it made sense then. Get in your time machine and go back there. Relive that emotion. It was pleasant at the time. Set me up. Get me, the reader, feeling what you felt when you fell in love. I want to fall in love with the object of your contempt. Bring me up to that high level where you were.

3. Include the betrayal.

Whatever the event was that caused this emotional hurt, put it in. For me as a reader to feel the same level of anger, betrayal, rejection, or whatever negative emotion you feel now, I have to start at the same high place and fall with you. I have to hit the same rocky bottom you did to see these emotional injuries and hate the person who pushed you off that cliff.

If it is too painful to relive literally, don’t worry—this is poetry. Make something up that is good enough. Can’t bear to talk about the lies your ex used to cover up philandering? Make up lies your ex used to cover up stealing from you. All you have to do is get me, the reader, to feel your pain. It doesn’t have to be exact. The mistake many writers make is to start off by saying “I used to love you” and end by saying “now I hate you” and they leave out the whole bit in the middle where love turned to hate.

4. Touch the senses.

Tell me how warm his hands were. Tell me what her perfume smelled like and how it made her real and alive in the room hours after she left. Tell me how the sound of his voice vibrated in your body and put your jangled nerves at ease. Tell me about the floppy straw sun hat she wore strawberry picking that she had to keep pushing up so she could see what she was doing. Something, anything that I can see, hear, smell, taste, or touch.

5. Remember: this is poetry.

Make !@#%!@ up. It does not have to be perfectly faithful to exactly what you went through. Get the right emotion into the poem. Leave out unnecessary details. Simplify what really happened so you get to the essence of what is important.

Remember also that the person in the poem doesn’t have to be you. It can be someone else. It can be a fictitious character who goes through something similar to what you went through. Don’t feel compelled to bare your soul directly in your poem. Use the poem as a vehicle for the emotions. Create a persona that goes through the situation in the way that you want, so that the right emotions come out.

6. Don’t use trite expressions

There’s too much vague crap out there. “I am empty and alone,” or “I trusted you with my life, but you turned your back on me,” “you were my everything.” All these phrases are fine when they sum up something that has been made clear. These phrases are no good by themselves. They’re conclusions. They’re the summation of the emotions you’ve been through. I won’t feel like you did just because I read one of these stock phrases. They’re also a bit like perfume. Even fine perfume will stink if you spray enough of it. Pick trite phrases carefully and use them sparingly.

Good and Bad Poetry

Am I some literary scholar whose opinion on this matter carries weight? No. In the words of a friend of mine “I bring nothing to the table.” I have a blog and I post my opinions, use or discard them at will. Having said that, yes, I do believe there is good and bad poetry.

I am a liberal believer that capitalization, punctuation, line structure, rime, meter and all these things are up for grabs in poetry. Everything’s fair game in making your poem into a literary work of art. Having said that, it is not a poem just because you break the lines in odd places. If I fix the line breaks and it reads like a really boring paragraph, it’s probably not much of a poem, either.

Good poetry has a point. It uses some of its structure to draw you in, but the words ultimately do the heavy lifting. You know something when you’re done reading a good poem. You know what someone thinks, what they saw, what they did, what they felt. Something.

Bad poetry might have a point, but it is undermined by too many weaknesses. It is trite and belabors old tropes in well-worn ways. It’s structure is either nonsensical, random, or out-of-touch with the poem. The vocabulary is weak, using commonplace words in common ways with no novel effect. Note that you don’t have to use ten dollar words to make a good poem, but you can’t pull a bunch of lines from a bunch of 1980s hair band lyrics and get great art from them.

For those who may wonder what my favorite poems might be, two that come to mind are by Robert Frost. Now, most people think of Robert Frost as a grandfatherly figure who gave us such lyrical and memorable poems as Stopping By Woods on a Snowing Evening and The Road Not Taken. My two favorites, however, are powerful and dark. Out Out, and Home Burial.

I travel a lot and I care about the environment. I am very conscious of the ways that travel creates waste. Lots of things are packaged in single-use containers. Services are provided to either meet code or to attract customers. Many of these practices produce a lot of waste one way or another. There are some actions I take from time to time to minimize the amount of waste my travel produces. Let’s be clear, I don’t do everything on this list on every trip. But I keep these practices in mind every time I have a decision to make.

If you only travel occasionally, some of these tips probably won’t be practical. But if you travel a lot, the way I do, you might keep them in mind on your next few trips and see how it turns out. Another thing you may notice is that these tips are often cheaper in one way or another. If you pay your own travel expenses, they’ll save you money. If your company pays your travel expenses, you save it money (which may—or may not—come back to you later). If you have a customer paying your travel expenses, you save them money and you’re sure they’ll appreciate it. If it saves hotels and other companies money, then they have less pressure to raise rates. I believe that saving money is good all around, even if the money you’re saving is not your own.

Principles

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

I know it’s trite, but you remember it. What people may not remember is that they’re ordered. Try to reduce your use of stuff if possible. If you can’t reduce it, try to reuse the things that you have to use. If you can’t reuse things, recycle them.

Minimize waste

I try to think about the products and services I’m going to receive and try not to order stuff that generates more waste than useful product or service. It’s surprising how much can be avoided.

Pretend you pay for everything

At home, I fall into a bit of the classic dad model: “who left this light on?” or “why is the thermostat set at this temperature?” I’m always watching out for electricity, water, and other things that might be wasted around the house. I still think about these concerns when I travel, even though I don’t pay directly for my electricity or water usage. Just about everything that causes pollution also costs money. So, if you think about minimizing what it costs (anyone, not just you) to travel, you’ll probably reduce environmental impact, too. Not polluting is generally much cheaper than polluting.

Techniques

A baker’s dozen ideas you can consider. Some are easier than others.

1. Bring your own soap / shampoo

Chances are, you already pack some toiletries. Pack a small bar of soap. Where can you get it? Just take it with you the next time you go to a hotel. They can’t reuse that tiny bar of soap you showered with once. They’re going to throw it away. Put it in your bag and take it along. The next hotel won’t have to give you a bar of soap. Frankly I find that I can get quite a few uses from a single hotel-sized bar, meaning that each one of them I reuse probably saves 5 or 6.

Shampoo is the same thing. Bring along your own small bottle of it. Bring one that a hotel gives you and use it until it runs out. If you can, refill it at home with your own favorite shampoo. No need to keep throwing the little bottles in the trash.

2. Drink tap water

When you can, drink tap water. The water coming out of the tap in the majority of places is fine. Obviously if you’re an American going to India, this advice is not good. But if you’re a Virginian going to California, there’s no reason not to drink the tap water. Bottled water creates a ton of waste. Bring a nalgene or other reusable water bottle with you and fill it at water fountains or sinks. This is a great, free way to get water after you’ve passed the security checkpoint at the airport. Empty water bottles pass with no trouble. Reusable water bottles will save you a ton of money, given that bottled water is many times more expensive than gasoline.

Drink that tap water in your water bottle if you get a quick, to-go meal at the airport. Not only do you save money, but it’s also healthier and you prevent one more disposable cup from going to the landfill.

3. Use a shuttle van

If you have a choice of using a shuttle van or taxi, and the shuttle service makes sense, use it. They’re usually a fraction of the cost of a taxi, at the expense of making you wait until enough people are going in the same direction as you. Shuttles are spotty. Sometimes you wait 5 minutes, sometimes it’s 40 minutes. Any time you can share a ride on a trip, you’re clearly saving money as well as pollutants in the environment. One van dropping nine people is far better than nine cars dropping nine people.

This one is hard for me, since I often rent a car to get to my customers’ offices. At home, a taxi costs about $17, the shuttle costs $20, and parking my own car costs $16 a day. Getting from my house to the airport is essentially the same cost, and the convenience of my own car is a real temptation. The main time I use shuttles is when I’m going somewhere like a conference and I’m pretty much going from the airport to the hotel, and then going back to the airport a few days later.

4. Reuse towels and sheets

Many hotels offer to allow you to reuse towels if you hang them up. Some will only change sheets every few days unless you ask them to. This is theoretically a great way to save the environment. It radically reduces the energy, detergents, and waste water that hotels use laundering linens. Less laundering also gives those linens a longer duty cycle, requiring fewer replacements over time. Many hotels tout their commitment to the environment and their love of mother earth, blah, blah, blah.

I always do this. I find that the housekeeping staff, however, replaces the towels regardless most of the time. You may as well try. If you hang the towels up just like they looked when you got into the room, maybe then they won’t be changed. Maybe. Anyways, we should all get in the habit of doing this, so that the towels will be reused someday when the housekeepers are finally instructed to leave used towels hanging.

5. Turn off the air conditioner

This is a big way to save the environment. Air conditioners at hotels are notoriously inefficient. They’re ill-maintained, energy wasting, and many have either no thermostat or a very crude one. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stayed at hotels where the dial on the thermostat could have been labeled “freeze your nuts off” on one side and “sauna” on the other. And then there’s the “high” and “low” speed settings that determine how soon you will either freeze your nuts off or roast. Most of these units run more or less constantly, wasting a ton of energy.

If you’re like me, you leave your hotel room in the morning, do stuff away from the hotel all day long, and then come back to sleep. I often don’t even go into my room until after dinner and drinks. From 8:00am until 9:30 or 10:00pm, that air conditioner/heater is running constantly for nothing. I turn the thing completely off when I leave in the morning, and turn it on when I get back in the evening. It may run a little harder for the first 30 or 40 minutes when I get back, but that’s nothing compared to the savings of not running at all for 14 hours.

Many hotels have installed motion sensors that are attached to the thermostat. If you’re in the room, the thermostat does what you say. A short while after it detects that you have gone, it allows the temperature to rise or fall quite a bit, still keeping it reasonable, but allowing it to get much hotter or colder than you had originally set. I overheard a property manager at a Marriott talk about having such a system installed. He was telling a colleague that it was expensive to install, but it paid for itself in just a few months because of all the electricity it saved.

Until your hotel has motion sensors, turn off the A/C when you leave the room for the day.

6. Watch the electricity

We all know that wasting electricity creates pollution. There are a lot of ways you can save electricity when you travel. The air conditioner is an obvious and big one. But it’s important to do simple things, too. Housekeepers, in my experience, have a “leave it as you found it” approach to making up your room. Even though you’re gone all day, if they find a light on in the morning when they come in, they’ll leave it on when they’re done. Thus, the light you leave on in the morning will burn all day until you get back. Turn off the lights, TV, and so on. If you don’t, they’ll run all day, wasting electricity and contributing to pollution.

7. Decline the newspaper

Many hotels now provide a newspaper to your room every morning. If you look at the fine print, you will often discover that you can decline the daily newspaper and save yourself anywhere from $1 to $2 per day. Not only that, but you save one more newspaper from being recycled.

Obviously, it doesn’t work quite like that. Theoretically, though, they order one fewer newspaper, which means one fewer is printed, which gets back to our primary goal of reducing. In practice, it may not really work out that way. They may order a fixed number and the paper you decline just ends up in a pile in the lobby. But if everyone did this, they’d definitely order fewer papers, and that would be good for the environment. Start small, do your part, and everyone doing their little parts will add up to something larger.

8. Decline housekeeping service

One of the ways you can be sure that your linens don’t get washed too much and your towels don’t get laundered more than you want is to control your housekeeping service. If you put your “Do Not Disturb” sign on your door all day, they will leave it alone. Obviously you’ll have a messier room, and you won’t get things refreshed (like coffee, shampoo, soap, etc.). If you’re trying to reduce waste by reducing the number of disposable toiletries and sundries they provide, this complements that plan. I’m not suggesting that you decline service always. You could, however, decline it once or twice during a week. That will also reduce electricity spent on vacuuming, cleansers used in cleaning, and waste associated with wipes, gloves, or other things that the housekeepers will use cleaning the room.

9. Use digital receipts when possible

As a business traveler, I have to submit receipts for most of my travel expenses. I can’t avoid the paper receipt that I get for hotels, rental cars, restaurants, etc. But, when I turn them in, I can scan them or take a digital photo of them. Some folks will lay receipts on a photocopier to get them all just a few pages and to make them all uniform size (US letter). That wastes a few sheets of paper for negligible benefit. You can avoid this small waste by just scanning or photographing the receipts and emailing them to be reimbursed.

10. Share rental cars

When possible, share rental cars with colleagues. It saves pollutants, gas usage, and money. Real simple. Real obvious.

11. Look at the carbon impact of air travel

It is possible, if you want to, to look at the amount of CO2 your air travel will produce. Sometimes you have equally reasonable options, but one pollutes less. I don’t find this handy myself, but it is out there. If you’re doing something else to offset your carbon usage, this helps you estimate the impact of your air travel.

12. Don’t take unnecessary stuff

Airlines, car rental agencies, taxis, hotels all give you stuff that you don’t need. Refuse it. Just nicely tell them you don’t need it. Some examples:

• Folders for holding your boarding passes. Most airlines will stick your luggage claim tags in these multi-fold holders and stick your boarding passes in them. Just collect the stickers. Leave the folder behind.
• Maps at rental car agencies. If you don’t really need it, don’t accept it. The fewer they give away, the slower they’ll have new copies printed. It slows down the consumption and waste.
• Promotional materials. Hotels, rental car companies, and others will try to give you fliers, coupon books, and other promotional nonsense. Get in the habit of refusing it. You can always get a copy of it later if you change your mind.
• Don’t open or use items sealed in plastic, unless you’re going to use them. It sorta goes without saying, but there are a lot of things on airplanes you can keep intact. For example headsets, blankets, comfort items (like blindfolds and the like), are all sealed. Keep them sealed unless you use them, so they can be offered to other passengers, instead.

13. Stay in extended stay rooms

Many times I find that hotels like StayBridge Suites or Residence Inn by Marriott will be comparable in price to a more traditional hotel (e.g., a Hilton, Hyatt, or Holiday Inn). The difference is that the extended stay hotels come equiped with kitchens, dishes, cooking utensils, etc. To minimize cost, waste, and the impact on my waistline, I stay at these properties and eat in. Eating in my room is much cheaper, pretty convenient, healthier, and less wasteful on the environment. Sure, there’s nothing wrong with going out sometimes, but when I’m traveling I’m eating out nearly every meal.

Conclusion

You can’t save the world alone. My belief, though, is that many of us taking small steps can make a difference. I also believe that if many people began to do this, it would affect how travel businesses provide their services. Perhaps fewer papers would be ordered, fewer disposable items would be produced, and more reusable options would become available. Plus, with all the talk these days about fuel efficiency in cars and other major life changes, let’s not overlook the actions that take no technological revolution to make an impact.

Here’s four examples, starting with the trivial and working up to the biggies. I do it this way because the biggies are well-trodden at this point. Warning: I’m cranky this morning.

Reusable Grocery Bags

Good idea, right? Of course. While some of us paid for them, though, there are literally millions of them being given away. These are people who wouldn’t otherwise do their share. They need both the carrot and the stick. They keep using the environmentally-polluting bags until someone gives them a bag, and even then we have to threaten with taxes or fees just to make them use it. So your reward for not spending the $6 or $7 to get 6 or 7 reusable grocery bags is that you will have them given to you. Your reward for buying them 18 months ago: priceless—as in zero.

Maryland’s Tax Amnesty

At the end of a booming stock market, as we’ve slid deep into a recession, the state of Maryland is trying to boost its tax revenues. Its plan is a tax amnesty, the second one this decade. So what does this tell you? If you live or pay taxes in Maryland, don’t pay your taxes on time or in full. Use that money to invest in a booming stock market, make a bunch of profits and then pay the taxes during an amnesty. Done well, your market winnings should easily exceed the reduced interest and waived fees during the amnesty. If you don’t make a big bundle on the stock market, that’s OK. It wasn’t your money you were gambling anyways. And all the people who paid their taxes on time? They see no relief or reward.

Cash for Clunkers

I know of few other laws that slap good people in the face like this one. If you’re making good money and you drive a responsible car: keep doing that because we’re gonna take that for granted. People who drive gas guzzlers (which should never have been manufactured in the first place) will get a check, practically made out to GM, that lets them get a car more easily. Most importantly, the teeming millions who drive reasonable cars that are neither gas guzzlers nor hybrids get nothing. If you drive a gas guzzling beater and pollute to high heaven for years on end,  you’ll get a nice government handout. Be responsible and pick a middle-of-the road car? We have nothing for you.

Gross Mismanagement? There, there, it’s not so bad, have a few billion…

As I said, I’m leaving this for last because it’s the biggest and it’s well trodden. The whole concept of capitalism, however, is that market forces pick the winners, thin the herd, etc. However, the new measure of corporate success is not being a blue-chip stock. That’s so 20th century. The new measure of corporate success is TBTF: too big to fail. Given the bailouts we’ve seen lately, why does it not make sense to build behemoth companies that acquire tons of strategic business units. Profit like mad as you grow, then when it falls, hand it to the government to clean up the mess. The list of companies where this is happening is staggering.

The problem with this one is that I’m way out of my league here. I have no solution. Economic armaggeddon might be a bit of a high price to pay to “teach those guys a lesson.” Fine. But surely there is something else we can do other than saddle our grandchildren’s grandchildren with the debts that our own grandparents created. I can’t believe that the best solution is to throw it in the landfill of public debt and let it become someone else’s problem.