Changing File Encoding on a CSV with OpenOffice Calc

I had a CSV that I created with Open Office Calc, and it was saved in a Western Europe encoding. I needed to change it to Unicode UTF-8, but there was no option to save the CSV with a different encoding. If I opened the CSV and selected to view it with UTF-8 encoding, the special characters (letters with accents) did not display correctly.

The solution is to open the CSV with the encoding that displays your characters correctly, and save that file as an OpenOffice Spreadsheet (with an .ods extension). Save that .ods file as CSV, and you are prompted for an encoding. Select Unicode UTF-8, and the characters display correctly.

Diving in Cozumel

How refreshing it is to jump in the ocean and get wet for a change!

This post is primarily for divers, with my reflections on the differences between cold-water and warm-water diving, and tips for going to Cozumel. I dive in California, and have used a dry suit for the past several years, meaning only my head and hands get wet when I jump in the water. In Cozumel, the water temperature was 75-78F for the entire trip, and no drysuit (and only a 3mm wetsuit) was needed.

We stayed at Scuba Club Cozumel, which I highly recommend. It is not the cheapest option on the island, but you will get your money’s worth as a diver. The resort is built specifically for divers, which means it has:

• A rack outside of every room where you can hang your wetsuit and other dive gear to dry.
• Several rinse tanks of fresh water for your gear.
• Lockers next to the rinse tanks, so you can leave your weights and other gear behind (bring your own lock).
• No carpet in most of the resort. The rooms are all tiled, which means that you can come to your room still wet from a dive and head straight for the shower without having to get dry first.
• Diving-centered operations. The hours for meals are set by the diving schedule. If your boat is late, lunch of dinner is held, as the crew has called in and notified the restaurant. Maids come by in the afternoon, after your morning boat dives, to see if you need any more fresh towels.
• Two boat dives a day (in the morning), optional wreck and evening dives, and unlimited shore diving.
• An on-site dive shop with equipment rental and instruction.

The diving is different from California, and required some adjustment. In Cozumel there is a strong current, and the diving style is drift diving — a go-with-the-flow style. The boat finds you at the end of your dive (it’s handy to have an inflatable dive sausage in case you need to signal the boat, but I never had to use mine). The boat dives are done in a group of four to six people, led by a dive master.

The diving I do in California tends to be diving with a buddy, returning to the same location (boat is anchored, or returning to the shore entrance), and diving at a much slower pace. I like to hang out at a rocky point for a little while, and look for the smaller life, poke my light into nooks and crannies, see if I can find an octopus or eel or something else interesting that is hiding. Next time, I think I will do the “Taxi Dive” — take the Taxi down the road (a mile or so? not sure) with your dive gear, enter the ocean at Papa Hog’s, and drift down the current back to Scuba Club. No dive master, you can go at your own pace and see what you want to see and take your time.

Some lessons learned:

• Pretty, feathery sea plants can sting, even if they look similar to the California plants that cause no problem..and you often don’t feel it when you brush up against one of them, it’s only later that you feel the pain. I bought a dive skin to wear under my (rental) shorty wetsuit and that helped a great deal.
• If you can, go into town on a Sunday, or when there are not many cruise ships in port. Go off the main road where the cruise ship passengers tend to stay, you’ll find more interesting shops with a greater variety of items.
• Bring water/reef shoes for wearing around the resort and on the boat between dives. More comfortable than wet booties, and not as hot as shoes with socks.
• Walk to the grocery store for drinks, cash, and any forgotten items. It’s about a five minute walk, and they do take credit cards. Scuba Club is all-inclusive, save for drinks (including soft drinks) at meals. You’re not allowed to bring your own drinks into the restaurant, but you’re welcome to have them on your patio and in other areas (and there are small refrigerators in each room).
• Computer access is everywhere! In 2000, when we last visited, we had to hunt for an internet cafe. There are internet access shops all over the island, and for a reasonable rate (a dollar an hour in one case). Scuba Club Cozumel has wifi access in the main courtyard area, and you often see divers either checking their email or downloading pictures from their cameras. The airport also has wifi access.
• If you bring a lot of camera gear, pay attention to the weight of your bags as well as the size. You can easily reach the 50 pound weight limit before your bag gets full.
• Cozumel My Cozumel is a great website in English, written by locals, about how to get around the island — where to shop, eat, stay, what to avoid, common myths, etc.

As a side note, I hadn’t realized how much diving with a drysuit had become automatic, until I went for a dive off the beach to check my weights. I was a little buoyant, so I raised my left arm to get rid of some of the air — and realized I was in a wetsuit, that there was no extra air in my suit to vent. When I reached bottom on another dive, my hand went to my chest to find the inflater valve that wasn’t there. Yes, I still wear a BC while diving dry, and I use it for most of my buoyancy, but I use the drysuit to make minor changes to my buoyancy. The inflater valve is always in the same place, you never have to search for a hose. Dumping air is just as easy: roll over a little to your right, lift up your left arm, and air goes out. Again, no hoses or valves to find.

In short, I had a great vacation. I would go to Cozumel and Scuba Club Cozumel again, but maybe not as my next warm-water trip. I’d love to explore Indonesia, the Philippines,  and other places. I will make every attempt to book the trip with the Finstad’s Worldwide Diving Adventures however. Nothing compares to having a couple of enthusiastic tour leaders with marine biology degrees on your dive trip.

Moving to morgretdesigns.com

I’ve moved the majority of the blog entires over to my own server at http://www.morgretdesigns.com — if you followed a link from another page and got a 404, please go over to the new site. I’ll be keeping this site up for off-topic posts and as a way to redirect links to old posts. I should be posting more regularly on the new site now that I finally have everything configured (at least until I run away to Cozumel for the winter holiday, and I don’t think anyone is interested in my reports on water temperature and visibility as I dive my heart out for a week).

MySpace Groups: Real Answers to Your Help Questions

My article on how I would change MySpace groups is the second-most viewed post on this blog. Even weeks after the post, people find that post because of searches for MySpace Groups and MySpace Groups Help. Their FAQ for groups includes three entries that relate to groups, and four entries that do not. I just received an automated response to a question I had, and wanted to post the answers here (plus a couple not included) as they do not appear to be posted elsewhere, at least according to Google. If anyone in the future sees MySpace listing this information in this format, let me know and I’ll send them a bill for my technical writing — their email was disjointed and had answers for for a particular question strewn in two or three parts of the message.

Create a group
Click Groups on the top navigation bar. On the left of the groups page click Create Group. Be sure to select a category so that others might be able to find your group. You might want to first search the groups (a painful process, I know) as there are thousands of groups and there may be one that already meets your needs.

Add html to a group
Html can only be added to the Description, not the Short Description.

Add a moderator — not possible, as groups may only have one moderator
If you are currently in a group with no moderator and you would like to be the moderator please send us the group URL as well as your personal URL and we can update that for you. Please note: if the group currently has a moderator ONLY that moderator can request the moderator change.

Display an indicator for new messages when you click Groups
Go to account settings > group settings and check “Check here to display indicators on “Groups Home” when you receive new posts or bulletins.” If this is enabled, you can go to each individual group, select Privacy from the right navigation and choose whether to have notification for that group enabled.

Display Groups I belong to on your profile for others to view
Go to account settings> profile settings and check “Display Groups I belong to”
Note: you can also disable HTML in your profile comments, pic comments, and blog comments. Handy if you don’t want your comments cluttered up with glittering dancing babies.

Un-ban a user
Simply email [km: there is no “simply email” with MySpace!] us your URL, the group UR, and the URL of the person you have banned and we will unband them for you.

Waiting period for posting
New MySpace members must wait seven days before they can post in any group.

Invite others to your grup
You can invite others to join your group. When you visit their profile, click “Add to Group” in the contact section. You will not be notified if this person already belongs to your group, or if you have invited this person to your group previously, so you may want to keep a list of those you have invited. You do not need to be a moderator to invite others to join a group. Not all users will accept group invitations, depending on their privacy settings.

Leave a group
Go to the group, and click Resign on the right navigation pane.

Delete your own group
The email states that you visit the group page and click the cancel group button. I cannot find this button anywhere for the group that I moderate.

Bonus MySpace tips for Firefox Users
Download the Web Developer Toolbar extension. This extension has many useful features, but has an added benefit for MySpace users. Under the CSS menu, select Disable Styles > All Styles. This disables the CSS people have added to their profile, and enables you to see their profile without the background, blinking text, etc.

Download the Adblock Plus extension and the Adblock Filterset.G Updater. The filterset pre-populates the Adblock extension with many of the most common advertisements, making MySpace (and other sites) much easier to view. Custom div tag filtering can be enabled, so that your own view of your profile is much less cluttered.

Hacking A More Tasteful MySpace
Mike Davidson has an excellent post with hundreds of comments regarding hacking a more tasteful MySpace.

Things to Fix Before Letting a Search Engineer Review Your Website at a Webmaster Conference

This post has moved to my new blog address at http://www.morgretdesigns.com/index.php/2006/11/22/things-to-fix-before-letting-a-search-engineer-review-your-website/

Pubcon Ecommerce Site Optimization Session Part II

This post has moved here: http://www.morgretdesigns.com/index.php/2006/11/18/pubcon-ecommerce-site-optimization-session-part-ii/

Pubcon Ecommerce Site Optimization Session Part I

This post has moved here: http://www.morgretdesigns.com/index.php/2006/11/16/pubcon-ecommerce-site-optimization-session-part-i/

N1VG’s Balloon Launch a Great Success: See Pictures

For a detailed report on the launch, see http://n1vg.net/balloon/.

A quick summary: winds prevented the launch on Saturday morning, so the launch was set for Sunday morning. Winds and not enough camping gear prevented my husband and I from spending a second night in the tent in the desert, so we spent the night at a motel in Barstow and spent some of Sunday morning tracking the balloon.

Tracking was interesting, as we had no internet coverage and intermittent cell phone coverage. We ended up talking to my mother, living in Virginia, who was watching the progress on the web at home. The balloon landed in a perfect spot (less than a mile off a road in a dry lake bed), but alas it wasn’t really on the road to Vegas, so my husband and I said goodbye and headed up highway 15 to get in a day and a half of playing tourist before my conference starts this morning.

Stats: the balloon reached an altitude of at least 106,000 feet, and took more than 1000 pictures. Again, see the website for complete details and all of the pictures. The pictures are just in a directory now, but should be in some type of photo album for easier browsing soon. Thanks to WA8LMF for providing another way to track the balloon, including a plot on the map that showed the path and elevation of the balloon. Not quite as nice as Tufte’s favorite map of Napoleon’s march, but much more useful when one is wanting to see the path of the balloon. The path is no longer active on the website, but I’ll be contacting the webmaster to see if any screenshots were taken and post them here if I can obtain them.

Checking my email Sunday morning was an interesting experience. None of us had had any way to update the web page showing the launch information, so people thought that they had missed it or that the tracking wasn’t working correctly. I didn’t realize how many people were interested in the launch until there were messages on three or four different mailing lists (including that of a competitor to the product my brother manufactures for tracking) asking about the launch, stating their own site had had several hundred hits looking for the balloon, etc.

And to tie all of this in to something related to search engine marketing, web publication, and the like..I look forward to attending the PubCon sessions regarding website analytics and the time later this week that I’ll spend looking over the Google Analytics and server-based statistics. The page for the balloon was only put up about three days before the launch of the balloon, and when I left town Friday as the second most visited site on the page. For PubCon, I feel like I did when I first started applying to graduate school. I’ve been doing things on my own, learning as I go, and now it’s time to use what I’ve learned by trial and error and see how my understanding compares to the experts and see how I can improve things. Hope to meet some of you this week in Vegas!

High altitude balloon experiment using APRS this weekend.

For some time (two or three years at least), my brother (N1VG) has been actively involved with developing, manufacturing, and selling APRS trackers. Some of these trackers and GPS units have been deployed in high altitude / near space / edge of space balloon projects. He decided it was time to do a project himself, and combine it with a camping trip to our favorite spot in the Mojave desert, Red Rock Canyon State Park. The details of the high altitude balloon experiment are included on his website. To track the balloon, check out Map at Findu.com and Google Earth: http://argentdata.com:8080 (add as a network link)

How I Would Change MySpace Groups

I’ve been using online groups since the late 90s, and have been online (via dial-up BBSs) since the mid 80s. I’m no stranger to finding my way around new websites and systems, but MySpace seems to be in a separate category. I’ve come to expect a certain set of functions, or at least a certain consistency to the group-based offerings. I’ve been quite frustrated with MySpace in several respects, but in here I’ll just outline the difficulties I have encountered with their groups, and how I would change that particular part of MySpace.

I would add more categories, or make subcategories in the Groups area. The Cities and Neighborhoods subcategory is a great example of this. Logical subgroups would be by country then state. Yes, you can search by zipcode, but if you’re in Humboldt you’re not going to find the West Coast group, which is listed as being from Santa Monica.

The search function seems to take some time to be updated. I started a new group, and it was well over a week before it was included in the index. Even craigslist manages to update their index every 15 minutes, it shouldn’t take a week for a listing to appear.

Follow Jakob Nielsen’s advice and put a search box when you’re browsing the category pages, not just a link to a search. In his UseIt Article he states that putting a textbox search function on his homepage, rather than just a link, increased search usage by 91%.

Use correct breadcrumb navigation. I clicked on Automotive groups, and the navigation states MySpace Groups > Most Popular Groups. No indication that I’m in the automotive groups.

Inconsistent use of search. On the groups main page, the search box is the simple search. If you click the search link on a sub-page, you’re taken to an advanced search.

Even advanced search is not very advanced. Say you want to find a group dedicated to VWs automobiles, so you search on VW. Here are the first ten results, the most popular groups with VW somewhere.
– VW Owners and Lovers
– vwvortex.com (vw/audi enthusiasts)
– The Transformers (the 1980s toy)
– VW – Volkswagen Enthusiasts Unite
– Stuck in Frederick Maryland
– 951/909 DirtSports
– Lovers of Orlando Bloom
– German Autos
– GTI Owners for Life
– Nanaimo BC

Search on Volkswagen, and also only six of the top ten groups are related to VWs (others include a description as a voice that won’t be co-opted by Volkswagen and a group on the psychedelic era).

At least all of the sponsored links are about cars. Maybe MySpace should use their ad-targeting algorithms for search and ditch their own search?