Want to know something not so scary? Vampires are a mathematical impossibility. Whew, I can hand out the candy without worrying that one of those little ghouls is for real.

Happy Halloween!

Check out this article from Special Events. It’s all about blogging, and yours truly drops her pearls of non-wisdom throughout, along with meetings industry bloggers Patti Shock, The Party Goddess, and Shackman Associates New York. It’s a fun read, if I do say so myself!

In the only non-spam comment out of dozens I faced this morning was one from Steven Hall, founder of a site that sounds kind of interesting: TravelerVideos. From what he says, it’s a new travel video directory and sharing site, where you can upload your travel vids, or check out other people’s takes on various destinations via photos, movies, and even travel blogs with Web links, ratings, and a section where visitors can leave comments.

While it appears to be geared mainly toward vacationers, I could see this becoming a great resource for meeting planners—if planners use it to share info about destinations as meetings destinations. If you want to get your feet wet on the site, they are trying to entice people to participate with a travel video contest. Click here for details on the contest.

An online group I’m involved with has been having some fun with regional phrases, or just colorful phrases they know and love. I know I’ve had projects that could best be described as being “like nailing Jell-O to the wall” (I have to remember that one!). Others being batted around are:

Like herding cats
That dog/puppy won’t hunt
He could mess up a one-car funeral
He/she doesn’t know come here from sic em!
Her face could curdle milk at ten feet!
It’s higher than a cat’s back
She’s no bigger than a minute
He is wearin’ me slick!
She is slower than honey in January
It’s rainin’ so hard the animals are linin’ up two by two!
He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer

I love this one, too, from a Southerner: You can say anything, as long as you add “bless his/her heart” to it.

My favorite from growing up was my mom’s reply whenever I couldn’t find something right under my nose—”If it was a snake, it would have bitten you”—and my dad’s advice to help me find something I lost: “Look in the last place you put it.”

According to this CNN story, U.S. customs can legitimately and legally confiscate the laptop of anyone entering the country. Without even having to justify why, they can download everything on your hard drive and keep it for basically as long as they want. From the article:

[The Association of Corporate Travel Executives’] informal survey of 2,500 international members found that 90 percent did not know that U.S. customs officials had the right to scrutinize, copy or even seize laptops without having to give a reason.

The broad powers enabling customs and border guards to do this dates back to 1985 and both U.S. and foreign nationals are equally subject to the law.

If you, like me, didn’t know about this, consider yourself warned. The implications for corporate meetings with attendees from non-U.S. branches is mind-boggling. And what about international physicians traveling to a national medical society meeting here? Think about the HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) violations that could occur if they had any patient data in there.

Good thing there are USB flash drives people now can use to transport sensitive information without having to worry about border guards or thieves grabbing their laptops.

Update: Here’s more on how to protect yourself, from Jim Louis, one of the MeCo listserv moderators (posted here with his permission, of course):

Make sure your hard drive is encryped by some software.  My personal recomendation is www.securstar.com DriveCrypt Plus Pack.  It encripts your whole laptop before the operating system loads.  It also can use a USB drive for authentication and you can actually hide a whole operating system inside another operating system.  So you have two passwords one for the “Public” Operating system and one for your actual files. They also have a more basic program called DriveCrypt.  It is the most widely used encription program in the world.  This program allows encription of up to 1344-bit.  This is military grade. The other reason I like this company is they are based out of Germany.  Germany promotes strong cryptography.
 
These programs are both Windows-based, but Macs have FileVault.
 
Another option is keeping your files on a secure server back in the U.S. and connecting securly to it from anywhere in the world.  Using a VPN Network or something like Iomega’s I-storage to keep your fields.
 
Also remember Customs can conficate USB Drives as well if they feel that they need to, so when traveling you should make sure that your USB drive has some level of password protection and encryption.  A more secure option is something with Biometric Security like the “1GB Cruzer profile with built-in biometric security”  Here you need to use your thumb print to prove who you are.

Patti Digh issued a challenge that I just make take on: focus on something for just 37days. Just pick something to do (or to stop doing), and make a commitment to do it (or stop doing it) for a little over a month. From her blog:

What one thing could you do that would start you on the road, that magical road to wholeness and hope and freedom? Can you do it for just 37days?

Perhaps cleaning out one drawer every day in your house for 37days. Perhaps writing one Haiku every day for 37days. Or eating 5 fruits and vegetables a day for 37days, or writing for 10 minutes each day for 37days, or purging your basement for 15 minutes a day for 37days, or walking for 10 minutes a day for 37days, or doing push-ups every day for 37days, or reading for 10 minutes a day for 37days. Whatever it is, do it. Just for 37days.

I have to think about what it is I’ll do (I can guarantee it won’t be pushups!), but as soon as I settle on something, I’m going to do it. For 37 days. Care to join me?

According to the results of the latest TripAdvisor annual travel trends survey of 4,000 travelers around the world, your attendees may be into some things you didn’t know about. While 47 percent said they intend to visit a spa this year, that’s down from the 55 percent who said the same last year. That may be because they’re getting germaphobic: almost a quarter of those surveyed said they wouldn’t leave home without disinfectant/cleaning supplies, shower shoes, their own pillow, their own sheets/pillowcase, or their own towels (OK, I’m guilty of bringing my own pillow, but not out of germ fears. I just love my own pillow). But the germophobes who bring their own are balanced out by the 20 percent who said they took towels, bathrobes, and other hotel paraphernalia. And I thought this bit was interesting:

Twenty-eight percent of travelers said their worst experience in a hotel room was a dirty bathroom, and 75 percent of travelers think that a clean restroom is what makes an airport great. Eight percent of travelers have actually showered in an airport restroom.

Showered in an airport potty? The mind boggles. Then there are the scary stats, like the 4 percent who’ve been bitten by bedbugs, the 26 percent who like to dress provocatively while away from home, and the 4 percent who said they did illegal things they wouldn’t do at home (like stealing hotel towels, perhaps?).

Culture shock is always something to think about when taking a meeting overseas, but this is pretty extreme: Paris Syndrome. According to the article, some Japanese tourists find the reality of Paris so far removed from their expectations that it actually can cause psychosis:

Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported on Sunday.

“A third of patients get better immediately, a third suffer relapses and the rest have psychoses,” Yousef Mahmoudia, a psychologist at the Hotel-Dieu hospital, next to Notre Dame cathedral, told the newspaper Journal du Dimanche.

If you have any fragile folks in your group, I guess you better be careful in how you market your destination, be it Paris or Pittsburgh.

(Thanks to the MeCo listserv for the pointer.)

If there are any continuing medical education providers reading this, check out Capsules, our Medical Meetings blog. I’ve been quiet over here, but typing my little fingers to the bone over on that one about the National Task Force on CME Provider/Industry Collaboration conference I went to last week. Lots of good stuff, but probably not of interest unless you swim in the CME ocean.

The plan is to get back to posting over here as soon as I finish up the Medical Meetings’ December cover story. In the meantime, my apologies for the silence. I know, it’s so unlike me!

I had forgotten about Hyatt’s celebrity wake-up call service until Kare Anderson reminded of it in an e-mail. She had what I thought was an interesting idea:

What if a major exhibitor and/or meeting planner involved in a conference at Hyatt arranged for the hotel chain to have a relevant celebrity do the pertinent conference wake-up call message for attendees?

I like it!

Update: I just looked at the press release again, and the weird thing is that the service “is not supported by the hotel phone system,” so it’s only good for cellphones and home phones. So maybe Kare’s idea wouldn’t work after all, unless the meeting organizer had attendees’ cellphone numbers.