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I was walking through Harvard Yard at about 10:50 PM last night when a girl standing at a window on the fourth floor of Thayer called out to me. "Hey," she said. "When does Hannukah start this year?" Obviously, I was not able to answer her question.
When I was a Harvard freshman, I generally [...]

The environment of Harvard Summer School is quite different from the regular school year. Instead of the 18-21 year olds that made up the majority of undergraduate students in Harvard College, I am experiencing "people of all ages, from around the United States and more than 90 countries, live and learn together as they satisfy [...]

This entry has been sitting in my drafts for the better part of the year. I feel that it is about time to publish it.
Last fall, the Harvard Crimson, the most popular daily on campus, redesigned their website. From a web designer's perspective, the new website was not that much better than the old one [...]

Update: Matt Gline noted that UC stands for "Undergraduate Council," not "University Council." I feel suitably chastened.
The Undergraduate Council's website is not only ugly and outdated, it is horribly broken. In the latest in a long history of technical glitches, the online application for nominations for the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize (awarded for [...]

On a desk in Lamont Library:
[in pink] You're ugly
[in black] Why is Lamont beautiful and Cabot ugly?
[in different handwriting] One word - modernism. It's an idea where form + function just didn't meld too well.
My personal opinion (which, unfortunately, is not expressed on the walls of Lamont itself) is that Lamont Library was built in [...]

I was excited to see that the Harvard International Review, the magazine where I used to hold the position of Web Editor, now has its own blog, entitled The Big Picture.
I first noticed the magazine when I received a complimentary copy in the freshman mailing. I can recall being impressed by both its professional writing [...]

Despite having a Boston setting, the first chapter of Patricia Cornwell's book At Risk, the latest New York Times Sunday Serial, is one of the worst pieces of writing ever written.

Apparently, the short letter I wrote in response to Wired's article "The Digital Audiophile's Toolbox" (part of a series on audiophiles and high-quality digital music) was worthy enough to be included in an article displaying some of the feedback that Wired Magazine had received. It is not as cool as actually being published in the [...]

Way back last December, I noted that there was no Harvard chapter of Free Culture, a national student organization working to affect change in copyright legislation, to expand fair use, and to help restore the common cultural pool that artists, writers, and other content creators can draw from.[1] A little less than a year later [...]

Team Zebra's website describes their goals succintly:
TEAM ZEBRA seeks to bring two zebra to Harvard Square to raise money for hurricane / earthquake survivors and triumph in a challenge that will raise even more money for the cause.
My first thought was "This is the most ridiculous idea that I have ever heard." But it [...]

I was a bit annoyed back in August when I read Travis Kavulla's description of his time at Panafest, a biannual festival in Ghana which celebrates pan-Africanism. While I have liked the incisiveness of some of his past writing, this piece took too many cheap shots. For example, his second paragraph:
PANAFEST—not an acronym, but unfailingly [...]

Malaise. Dissatisfaction. Apathy.

In response to a query about whether RSS feeds would be coming to The Crimson's website sometime before the Second Coming of Christ, I was informed that the Crimson already has two RSS feeds of its News and Sports sections, located at http://www.thecrimson.com/rss/news.xml and http://www.thecrimson.com/rss/sports.xml. Their feeds do not have more metadata than the scraped [...]

I chose not to comment about the HBS-ApplyYourself story because I was busy, and I forgot about it when I finally got some free time. I am more busy now than I was in the middle of March, but Matt Gline's column in today's Crimson annoyed me:
It's not just copyright, either: many have had a [...]

Jason Lurie writes in yesterday's Crimson about an increase in the number of cases of student plagiarism coming before the Ad Board. While he rightly suggests that faculty members found guilty of having plagiarized should be punished, he attempts to blame them for the increase:
In each case, Harvard took no public (or as best as [...]

Josh Aas writes that Macalester College has switched to Firefox in its computer labs. I can only imagine what it would mean for Firefox usage at Harvard if it became the official browser in our computer labs. As DrunkenBatman notes on his post about Microsoft Office (see the section on "Interface"), users get attached to [...]

From the Boston Globe comes an entertaining article about those whose houses are bisected by the municipal border between Cambridge and Somerville. While taxes seem to be determined by what percentage of their land and homes reside in each municipality, voting and public school eligibility seem to be determined by the town in which one [...]

From a post on Michel's blog, I "rediscovered" (I browsed it some time ago, but was busy) freeculture.org. There is still no Harvard chapter, which irks me; I assumed someone else would have started one.
I do not really have time to start a club, but I just might have to make some…

This is the fifth time that I have written about Wirehog on this blog. This is also the first time I have seen Wirehog in action (users of TheFacebook from Harvard and Stanford can download Build 650). Alas, I am not impressed.
To be blunt, the UI is horrible. The "little piggy" icons are wonderful (you [...]

This purported list of "America's Most Connected Campuses," (via Slashdot) created by Forbes and the Princeton Review, should be viewed with a grain of salt, as not all of the results are valid. For example, according to the list, Harvard College does not provide students with space for web hosting, does not provide streaming course [...]

This Crimson article about professors who do not use e-mail seemed like normal fare until I read this paragraph:
Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape John R. Stilgoe doesn?t use his Harvard address either, but for security reasons. Because e-mails travel through Harvard?s local area network (LAN), messages could end up in the hands of [...]

When I read The Crimson on Wednesday, I noticed that the rate of petty theft had increased on campus (although you would not know from the headline, "Violent Crime Eases"). Two laptops were stolen from Margaret's room this week. This is the first time that one of my friends has had something stolen. Sure, it [...]

One of the reasons that I use Linux is because I am addicted to updates (another is that I am a masochist, as previous events will show). Waiting several years for new features (much less bugfixes!) is ridiculous. Sometimes, one pays a price for being on the cutting edge.
About a week and a half, I [...]

As all of the tech media websites have been talking about, Amazon has changed its review system to include "Real Names." They explain their rationale thusly:
In general, we believe that a community in which people use their Real Names will ultimately have higher quality content, since an author willing to sign his or her real-world [...]

Matthew Yglesias points to this Weekly Standard article suggesting that Harvard's undergraduate population is ready to hear the siren call of conservatism.
Thanks in part to this enhanced conservative presence, the terms of campus debate have shifted rightward. Harvard history professor Stephan Thernstrom estimates that even in the 1970s, only 10-15 percent of the student body [...]

A post on the Harvard Democrats mailing list alerted me to the fact that Jack Valenti, CEO of the MPAA, would be replaced by none other than the director of the Harvard Institute of Politics, Dan Glickman. All indications seems to indicate that Glickman will continue in Valenti's footsteps. From the WaPo:
"Privacy and protecting the [...]

With Kofi Annan as the official Commencement Day speaker, it was inevitable that someone would bring up the United Nations's relative inaction in Sudan. The Crimson had two articles about it. While this news article seems to conflate slavery and the conflict in the south of the country with the atrocities in Darfur, this editorial [...]

As first reported here. Updated files are available at the project page. Just in time for the Commencement coverage, which starts tomorrow.

When I first read this article, it simply confirmed what I already knew about the Berkman Center; it was an important part of the Internet landscape. At the time, I was attempting to build a RSS aggregator in C#, inspired by this article. Although I never finished that project, when I became to read both [...]

?Work is aggravating me,? she wrote in an April 28 entry on the publicly accessible journal, the contents of which have since been taken offline. ?I am one shade lighter than homicidal today. I am two snotty e-mails from professors away from bombing the entire Harvard campus.?
It's probably not a good idea to make threats [...]

Earlier this morning, I was ruminating on the effectiveness of coffee as a stimulant. When I was falling asleep as I was studying for a midterm exam on J. S. Mill's On Liberty (I love the book, but I have read it three times, for three different government classes), a cup of joe perked [...]

When I saw this post on Boing Boing, I thought, "I wish they had the ability to check the status of your laundry online here at Harvard. Curse you, Mac-Gray!" Then I followed the link, and was pleasantly surprised to find that Mac-Gray is indeed the company behind this venture.
However nice the screenshots [...]

Trackback is not working properly:
Ping 'http://www.bamsplat.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/615' failed: HTTP error: 501 Can't load '/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.00503/alpha-dec_osf/auto/IO/IO.so' for module IO: dlopen: cannot load /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.00503/alpha-dec_osf/auto/IO/IO.so
I will probably need to change some configuration variable in one of the configuration files. I surmise that it has something to do with the change to an all-Linux server environment.