This is pretty much a dead giveaway seen as though Santa Barbara is right along the coast, but if you want a cheap and fun afternoon, you should definitely bring out the beach towel, sunscreen and a good book and lay out in the sun. Luckily with the the exception of two to three bad weather weeks in the middle of winter, almost everyday in SB is a beach day. Check out East Beach and Leadbetter Beach. Both are centrally located in downtown Santa Barbara and have lots going on. You can  hire a kayak, take a surfing lesson, play some beach volleyball, or go grab a bite at one of the many restaurants surrounding both beaches. There are several other beaches for you to visit as well. John Dickson’s Santa Barbara website offers you all the information you need to know about all of them.

2. Hire a beach cruiser and bike along the ocean in downtown SB

Hiring a beach cruiser for the afternoon and riding along the running/bike path that runs along the Santa Barbara coastline is probably one of the most fun activities I’ve done in SB. There are a couple places right near the ocean where you can rent bikes including Wheel Fun Rentals and Open Air Bicycles. You can hire a bike for $20 to $30 per day or less for just an hour or two. You definitely need to get a beach cruiser too – mountain or road bikes do not do the beach scene justice.

3. Go shopping on State Street
State Street is the main street in downtown Santa Barbara. It offers everything from high retailers like Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue, but also a bunch of unique boutiques. You can stroll up and down the street, window shop and grab a bite to eat. You will not be disappointed.

4. Take a hike up in the mountains
Santa Barbara has some of the best hiking in Southern California. My favorite hike is 7 Falls, a two to three mile hike which involves some rock climbing and ends up at three pools where you can take a dip in the water. Unfortunately, the trail has been closed down due to the Jesusita fire, but hopefully it will be reopened soon. There are many other hikes for you to check out at Santa Barbara Hikes. Just make sure to pack some water and some gorp, also known as trail mix.

5. Grab an ice cream at McConnell’s Ice Cream and Yogurt
If there is one place you should grab a bite to eat while in Santa Barbara, it is McConnell’s Ice Cream and Yogurt shop. It has hands-down the best ice cream and yogurt in the area. My favorite is their yogurt variety called Wow Cow. The owner makes up the yogurt ingredients himself and there are new Wow Cow flavors every week. The yogurt is delicious and the shop has the setting of a 50s ice cream store. You can ride your beach cruiser there if you like!

If you are in Santa Barbara for a night or two, you should definitely do your best to do one or all of these five activities. You will leave feeling super relaxed and happy about life.

1. Big Day Out – Tuesday 26 January 2009
Dance around to the sounds of Lily Allen, Girl Talk and Groove Armada at the Big Day Out festival this year. What makes Big Day Out really cool is the funky art installations. If you don’t come for the bands, come for the Hand of Man by Christian Ristow shown below. This is just one of the number of artsy installations that Big Day Out features at their festival. The Hand of Man is this huge steel mechanical hand that people at the festival can actually control through a glove controller; a person can just put their hand in the glove and then any action they produce from their elbow forward will be performed by the big hand. Music and some high tech machinery produces a one of a kind festival experience.

2. Falls Festival 29 December 2009-1 January 2010

Grizzly Bear, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Hilltop Hoods are a few of the 70+ the bands you should expect to see playing at Falls this year. Held at the same time every year, this four day musical delight is located above Lorne, alongside Victoria’s gorgeous Great Ocean Road, so not only are you listening to great bands, but you’re also surrounded by natural beauty. The venue is a on a slant making it easier to catch a glimpse of bands, not to mention there is a big screen that ensures you really don’t miss a beat. Check out the video below to see what you may encounter at Falls.

3. St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival 30 January 2010
This festival isn’t necessarily set up to pleasure those who want the mainstream artists, but it was set in the lanes and alleys of downtown Melbourne, which may be one of the most unique settings of any of these festivals. Due to crowd control, the festival will not be held in such a vital area of the city, but it is still guaranteed to be music culture experience. Above is a picture of Feist performing at Laneway 2008, when I attended.

4. Good Vibrations 21 February 2010
This day festival, held at the Flemington Racecourse, allows you to enjoy the sun and some great music for an afternoon/evening. The headliners, The Killers, will be joined by other various talent such as Busta Rhymes, Salt-N-Pepa, and Gym Class Heroes. This festival is sure to be a crowd pleaser. Let’s just say I already have my tickets.

5. Pyramid Rock 30 January 2009-1 January 2010
This New Years Eve festival, located on Phillip Island, combines music with the beach scene. You can’t help but admire the beautiful ocean view while watching and listening to the bands. The festival also offers super sweet market stalls selling band memorabilia and other goodies. You will definitely enjoy the setting Pyramid Rock has to offer.

So what’s a girl to do when she moves to Australia and misses her TV shows? She signs up for Sidereel of course.

The website Sidereel is a website that allows you to watch movies and television shows online for FREE! You don’t have to register a profile, but if you do, you can select your favorite shows and Sidereel will send you an email telling you when your show is on the day it airs.

I’m sure you’ve found a site that suits for all your TV show needs but I just thought I’d fill you in on simple pleasure in my life.

Well the sheriff of Cook County, Illinois begged to differ. Earlier this year Sheriff Thomas Dart sued Craigslist, the online advertising website in the United States, accusing it of allowing posts that market prostitution on their websites. A Chicago judge has thrown out the case.

After the lawsuit was filed, Craigslist reviewed all their listings and did a bit of clean-up regarding indecent posts. Even before the suit, Craigslist warned its users that it prohibited the solicitation of prostitution. In fact the website even warns you before you view any ads that may contain disturbing content. The page you see when you click on the ‘casual encounters’ link is shown below:

As stated in A Win for Internet Speech, one of the articles that publicized the Cook County case, The Communications Decency Act of 1996 “protects ‘interactive computer services’ — ranging from small bloggers to giant Internet service providers — from liability, in most cases, for speech they did not help create.” Congress ruled that it was unfair to expect an internet service provider or website to keep track of all the information put on their website.

This case even shockingly presented that these ads for prostitution actually turned out to be beneficial to Cook County. Sheriff Dart told the court that they made numerous arrests for prostitution by using the Craigslist ads. Go figure! The sheriff was suing a company that actually provided the means for him and his colleagues to protect the community. If that is the capability of every police department in every county in the U.S., then arguably, the prostitutes are putting themselves at risk by offering their services on a website like Craigslist.

Craigslist does still have the ‘personals section’, which obviously encourages a little foul play, but all in all, we are all active users. If you do not want to see the posts in the Craigslist ‘personal section’ then it is your right not to click that link when you are on the website. And if parents are worried about their kids finding this type of content, they need to be the censors for their kids, not websites or ISPs.

With warnings like this there is no way that people can sue websites or ISPs for indecent information. If the site is not meant to contain inappropriate content, but it is possible for that type of material to makes its way on it, the site will warn you. It would be like a warning sign being on an electric fence and then walking straight into it and blaming the makers of the fence. Just like you couldn’t sue the fence makers because they warned you, you can’t sue a website for the same reason. Clearly Congress has recognized us as active users and we have to start seeing ourselves the same way.

I got especially excited a few days ago when I read her article The Internet Has Created a Great Generation of Writers. She said and I quote,

The best writers in the history of the world are graduating from college, right now.

And guess what? I just happened to graduate from my undergraduate university, UC Santa Barbara, in June. So when Trunk is referring to the best writers in the history as the ones graduating right now, she is referring to me. Well clearly not just me, but she is referring to a group of people that I am very much a part of. This gets me excited.

I’ve read countless articles on how all the texting and instant messaging these days is destroying the English language, as if adolescents today don’t know the difference between the abbreviated version of a word and the actual word. Penelope begs to differ. With all the avenues of social media communication – facebook, flickr, twitter – people write messages all the time. The new generation of internet saavy people have the ability to take in all the information online and communicate about it through the internet.

I don’t want to steal Penelope’s post here and I totally recommend reading her article on this subject. Essentially though she introduces research done by Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric and Stanford University. Her findings were published in Wired magazine.

Here are the basics of Lunsford’s findings:
1. Only 38 percent of the writing young people do takes place in the classroom – before the internet, the majority of writing that students did was for school.
2. The type of writing done on mediums like instant messenger, Twitter, and Facebook is actually developing our communication skills.
3. Outside the classroom, students are writing to debate, persuade, make their voice heard. They are learning to write to convey a point and communicate clearly – definitely a plus for a good writer.
4.Young people today are quite adept at reaching their target audience.

Lunsford isn’t the only person who argues that texting and instant messaging can produce good writers. Al Filreis, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, believes that texting (and instant messaging/emailing) has actually caused students’ writing to improve rather than deteriorate. She basically argues that quantity of writing, no matter what type of writing, leads to quality.

Granted I hadn’t thought that my texting habit would lead me to be a better writer, these arguments do make it seem possible. Through these mediums, I have not only practiced writing, but learned how to convey emotion, learned how to concisely make a point; these are the most important factors in writing. It doesn’t matter if you can use a bunch of big words, if you don’t send a message, your writing means nothing.

I’m quite glad that I’m not the only one who doesn’t think our younger generation is ruining the English language. I don’t know if I would have said we are the best writers in history, but I have no problem accepting it.

According to the article Welcome to the University of iTunes, hundreds of universities are making recordings of lectures and conferences on web sites such as iTunes and YouTube. Even top-rate business schools such as University of Cambridge Judge Business School and Yale School of Management are utilizing these resources. The article mentions a French business school HEC Paris that has engaged in a partnership with Apple, so that all new MBAs are provided with an iPod Touch. Half of their lectures are filmed using an automatic camera system and then footage is made for students to download.

This the iTunes U page for Yale University.

The author of this article even suggests that those who don’t have the money to pay for an MBA program can still acquire some of the knowledge through iTunes U. Granted that is a great intention of iTunes, I don’t quite see how listening to a business school lecture would really benefit someone who is not actually going to get a degree. If someone is keen for some self-education, however, that is a great benefit to point out.

My only concern when it comes to web sites like iTunes U is that students may stop going to class all together. I mean really, if lectures are online, if students can just email their professors with questions, is there really any need to go to class (at the university level that is)? What are those lovely, massive brick institutions for if not to attend?

I decided to try to find some statistics on university student attendance especially with the proliferation of so much internet technology making it so students don’t really have to attend class. To be honest, not much research was to be found, unless you count 1993 as an acceptable year for internet research.

I did however land on a University of Dublin blog, asking the same question as I. According to the University of Leeds, the Royal Veterinary College and Carnegie Mellon University, “the provision of podcasts or lecture recordings seemed to have little effect on lecture attendance.” In fact, a survey taken by Politics students in Leeds found that only 7% of the students would choose to listen to a podcast instead of going to class.

This percentage seems a bit low to me for I suspect a few more students would choose to listen to podcasts, but that’s just my suspicion. It does seem though that if everything from a lecture can be captured in a podcast, then perhaps professors need to think about incentives for their students to want to come to class or else eventually the number of students who don’t go to class will be increase drastically.

I’ve been in a long-distance relationship and luckily for me it has continued to work out beyond the distance factor. Now in the same place, we don’t have to deal with it anymore, but we did for one whole year and survived.

In honor of positivity and a firm belief that long-distance relationships can work, here’s my advice to keep the chemistry going.

1. Download Skype.
Skype is the long-distance couple’s savior – you can video chat (buy a webcam if you don’t have one!) and send instant messages for FREE! Skype also offers great rates to call mobiles and phones. You would like to think that hearing your partner’s voice would be enough, but trust me it’s not. Being able to see them makes you feel like they’re in the same room.

2. Figure out time difference and set times to video chat.
Make sure to consider all your time obstacles – work, school, friends, homework – all of these should factor into figuring out when to chat. Once you have figured out times that work for both of you, you can look forward to talking to each other and will feel a lot less stress. I suggest chatting at least three times a week. You will likely start out chatting all the time, but don’t freak out if your individual lives get in the way. It’s bound to happen!

3. Figure out what constitutes cheating.
Set standards, people. I’m assuming you two know each other’s values but if you don’t lay them on the table, one of you may get hurt. People have very different ideas of what constitutes cheating so it’s good to set the boundaries.

4. Buy phone cards.
Usually phone cards are available at supermarkets or stores like Target and Big W. They are your emergency ticket if something happens – if you can’t make a video chat session, use that phone card! You should also check with your phone company to see how much extra it would cost to add international calling.

5. Be considerate.
Just because your person is hundreds or thousands of miles away doesn’t mean you don’t have to give them the consideration you would give if they were there. If your friends are egging you on to go drinking, but you scheduled a video chat, don’t ditch the video chat. Would you ditch a date with your boyfriend or girlfriend if they were physically there? I don’t think so. Plus, you can always meet your friends afterward.

Lastly, here’s a tip for you before the long-distance adventure begins – make sure your relationship is something that could last and make sure you won’t always be a long-distance couple. If you just started dating and already see potential problems, the long-distance may not be the issue.

1. Don’t wear clothing that makes you look like a frat boy or sorority girl.
Be proud of your Greek letters at home, but OZ doesn’t have either fraternities or sororities. What they do know of sororities and fraternities is what they have seen in Legally Blonde or Old School, and, let’s face it, neither of those films portray Americans as the smartest bunch. Basically, wear your Greek fraternity or sorority letters and it’s a dead give away you’re American.

2. Pick up some Aussie slang.
The Aussies certainly have their own way of saying things and sometimes it just gets plain confusing what they’re talking about. The one that used to get me was ‘tea’, meaning dinner. When I first moved to Melbourne and my roommate kept on saying I’m going to have some tea, I honestly thought she was referring to the British tea and crumpets. ‘Ta’, which means thanks, to this day still confuses me – I always think they are saying ‘bye’ as in ‘Ta ta’. For a guide on more Aussie slang, check out this manageable list of Australian Slang Expressions and Words.

3. Start slathering that brown, gooey substance Vegemite on your toast.
It’s brown, smells kind of weird, and has the same mysteriousness of the meat served in the cafeteria, but the Aussies love it. And after being shown how to properly eat it (with butter and cheese on toast), I love it too. If you’re spotted eating some vegemite, no one will be the wiser that you’re American.

4. Don’t wear Uggs.
They’re made in Australia, but the Aussies don’t really wear them. Perhaps they bust them out in the privacy of their own homes, but you won’t see many wearing them outside. If you wear Uggs, you’re most likely American.

5. Boys, don’t wear baseball caps.
Just don’t. You won’t see an Australia boy wearing a baseball cap, ever.

6. Say goodbye to baseball and football, and say hello to cricket and footy.
Americans play baseball, Australians play cricket. Americans play American football and Australians play Aussie rules football, or as they’ll refer to it, just Aussie rules or footy. Also don’t say you root for a team, say you barrack for them. To see why, look up ‘root’ on the Australian Slang Dictionary.

As I was finishing reading her blog post about blogs, I saw the title of her last blog: My Miscarriage – on CNN, ABC, and AOL. The blogging article was helpful but this was juicy. Penelope posted a ‘tweet’ on Twitter that announced

I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a fucked-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.

Not only did she have a miscarriage but she was happy about it, and she felt it appropriate to tell all her followers on Twitter. This has turned into a hot topic in the media. In her blog she offers links to articles on ABC online, the Washington Post, and has posted the video from an interview on CNN (the correspondent interviewing her is Catholic which makes it interesting. I tried to post it here but CNN wouldn’t let me).

Many are shocked that Penelope felt open enough to reveal what is normally such a terrible and harsh situation. Clearly she didn’t want the baby in the first place because she was going to have an abortion, but does her being okay with a miscarriage give her the right to ‘tweet’ it so publicly?

I do believe that the internet is a place where people are allowed to be open, honest, and reveal private information, but how far does it go? Penelope had the right to post about her miscarriage, but she didn’t need to. Imagine if a woman who had been excitingly awaiting the birth of her baby had a miscarriage. Chances are a nonchalant ‘tweet’ like Penelope’s would devastate her.

People should be able to express themselves online, but there is a certain decency that should be maintained. It does not bother me that Penelope posted about her miscarriage but the fact that she is treating the death of her unborn child like a unwanted DVD she was able to sell on eBay is troubling. I’m sure other women have been relieved just like Penelope when she had a miscarriage, but I highly doubt those woman would have been offended if Penelope had shown a slight remorse for her loss.

The freedom of posting information on the internet is testing people’s decency. Unfortunately what some think is perfectly appropriate, others believe is completely inappropriate. It would be nice to figure out some way where indecent comments like Penelope’s could be censored, but she and assuredly others see nothing wrong with them. Can a line ever be drawn? Doubtful – with the millions of internet users, coming to an agreement seems very doubtful.