It's likely that somebody's already told you about the wonders of Google's browser, Chrome. That someone may even have been Julie, in her post Using Google Chrome and Chrome Extensions for Speed and Productivity. Chrome's got an awful lot going for it: it's fast, it's lightweight, and it's super-stable—and as web applications become more complex, that last is increasingly important. If you've ever had Firefox crash when you've got multiple tabs open, you'll know what I mean. In Chrome, each tab and window runs as a separate process, and so the worst that a bad Flash application can do is cause the tab it's in to fail.

But beyond simple stability and speed, Chrome's got a lot of options available. Here are a few nifty tricks that might help make your browsing experience that much better.

1. Extensions

As Julie discussed in her earlier post, Chrome has hundreds of available

The inbox pictured at left is not mine. I feel compelled to tell you this right at the outset, because the idea of an inbox with that many messages in it, much less that many unread messages, is enough to make me break out in hives.

But there are times when my inbox does get a bit more full than I'd like, which usually happens when I find myself using it as a substitute for my to-do list. I'll read a message from a student asking for a letter of recommendation, or a request for information from my dean's office, or a reminder of an impending due date for a conference paper proposal, and I'll let that message linger in my inbox, effectively saying that I don't have time to do that thing right now, but leaving the message to serve as a reminder that I need to do it, and soon.

The problem, of course, is that such requests and reminders stack up, and so does the inbox, such that the thing...

Lots of studies indicate the thing that we all already know: airline delays are getting worse. While flight delays and cancellations are an unavoidable part of travel today, this edition of "Traveler's Aid" offers a few suggestions for ways to minimize the possibility that you'll be held up en route, and ways to minimize the pain of such a delay.

First, some quick tips for delay avoidance:

1. Travel early. Delays compound as a travel day wears on, and then tend to get straightened out overnight, such that in most cases things will start out on time in the morning. (I emphasize "in most cases" because the effects of a winter storm in a city unprepared for it are often worst first thing in the morning.) But the key points here are, first, an early morning flight is far more likely to be on time than one in the afternoon, because the plane is generally there waiting for you as the airport...

Last week, in discussing my new (academic) year's resolutions, I mentioned that one of my goals for the year is to run three times a week. It's relatively easy for me to promise myself something like that right now, as I'm on leave, and aside from some travel and some project meetings, my only real time commitments are to myself.

Personally, I've found that maintaining a regular exercise program is way more difficult than that during a regular semester. I always start out with all kinds of good intentions, and feel great as long as I'm still working out regularly. But school-oriented commitments inevitably start creeping in: that one meeting that has to be scheduled during my usual gym time; that article that I'm not finding enough time to work on; that class that isn't quite as prepared as I'd like. And almost invariably, when I start feeling pressed for time, the first thing that...

I've never been a big believer in New Year's resolutions, but up until a few years ago, I still made them every January, and still felt awful by about the beginning of February when it became clear that they'd all fallen by the wayside.

Part of the problem, of course, was that January 1 falls at a terrible point for me, as a scholar with one foot in literary studies: inevitably, I'd just gotten through the insane rush of the end of the fall semester, the Christmas holidays with my family, and the MLA convention, and found myself feeling bloated and exhausted and looking at a mere two weeks until the next semester began, in which I had not only to get done all the research I'd been unable to finish in the fall but also get the spring semester's classes on track and ready to go.

And so I'd find myself making the same resolutions year after year, overly general and yet impossible to...

There you are, minding your own business, when your hard drive starts to make that suspicious grinding sound. Or you discover that your laptop is not where you left it. Or your web hosting provider suffers a catastrophic data loss.

No sweat, you say. I'm a ProfHacker reader, and so I'm all about the backups. (If you're not yet all about the backups, you might take a moment to check out some of our posts on backing up your stuff, including Annual Reminders--Backup, Back Up Your Essential Files Using Dropbox, How to Back Up Your Cloud, Backing Up a Campus Email Account, A Few Ways to Back Up Your Website, and Backing Up Your Social Network, among others.)

Suffice it to say that this is not the moment at which you want to discover that your carefully laid backup plan isn't working.

A while back, I wrote about the importance of backing up your WordPress blog, an issue I'd mostly been...

In the last fifteen years, the number of computer-based devices that I use regularly has grown precipitously. Things were once pretty simple: I started grad school with a laptop (a PowerBook 160, if that doesn't date me too much) and ended it with a desktop computer, and most data transfers were handled via floppy disk.

But when I got my first post-grad school job, and got my first college-provided computer to go with it, things began to get a little more complex: I had to decide what data I wanted on the home machine and what on the office machine. Things that resided in both places were (mostly) kept synchronized via Zip disk or the occasional email message.

And then the PDA joined the scene, and suddenly there was this other category of data that I found myself keeping in sync: contacts and calendars. The process was pretty simple—put the Palm in its cradle and press the sync but...

I travel a lot. Between a mostly long-distance partner, a major collaboration housed on the opposite coast, and a (perhaps too) active circuit of talks and conferences, I feel like I'm on the road more often than not.

Generally speaking, I have pretty good travel skills: I pack light and leave early; I know how to avoid the lines that can be avoided, and how to avoid sweating the ones that can't be; I'm productive in airports and on planes; I've built up enough miles and other travel benefits to make the whole experience less painful than it might be otherwise.

But sometimes, the travel gods just rise up against you. Connections get missed; flights get cancelled; luggage gets lost. Such are the insults and indignities of contemporary travel. And as any number of self-help gurus would be happy to tell us, we can't control what happens to us —but we can control how we respond to it.

...

Yesterday, the Library of Congress issued its triennial statement of exemptions to the portions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that forbid the circumvention of digital rights management (DRM) and other technological measures intended to prevent access to or copying of digital materials. Three years ago, the announced exemptions allowed film and media studies professors to crack the content scrambling system (a.k.a. CSS) on DVDs in order to rip short clips to make compilations for classroom use. This seemed at the time like an awfully restricted exemption — literally only film and media studies profs (no profs in other fields, and no students), literally only in order to create compilations of clips for use in the classroom (not for use in critical writing) — but it appeared then that the statement might be the thin end of the wedge.

And so it turns out to have been. The...

Several years back, I more or less stopped making photocopies. In part, my ability to stop adding to the pile of dead tree flakes in my office came about when I moved my class communications online; instead of handing out syllabi or other handouts, I put electronic versions of those documents on our class website.

But the most important factor in my all-but-copy-free workstyle was my department's lease of a new copier with a powerful high-speed scanner and a network connection. Now, instead of photocopying that chapter I need to read, I scan it and have the machine automatically send it to my email address.

Which is fantastic, of course; now I have those pages that I need to annotate in a highly portable digital format. The only problem is that the PDFs that our copier makes are actually pictures of the pages, rather than text-containing documents. As a result, not only are the result...