It may not be as fancy as Experience Columbia's campaign site, but a CCSC 2009 class council member has tipped us off to the Council's new-ish beta site (they haven't advertised it widely, at least), which replaces the never-used, never-updated baby blue version of yore. This one, in patriotic red and cobalt, currently houses a few shreds of useful information--including an archive of resolutions presented in the last several years--and promises more. The 2009 section is a good place to go for your senior agenda, because a) who reads Mark Johnson's e-mails, and b) graduation is too freaking close for comfort. Happy surfing!

The Freshman elections for Columbia College Student Council approach (Bwog is sitting on its hands for October 6th and 7th) and in order to keep you the voter informed, here is a recap of the six parties running and why they think you should vote for them.

Candor Party

Facebook group size: 76

Website: Features a predominantly beige, grey and blue color-scheme and details on social events and some class-wide and school-wide changes that they want made.

Naive idea: "Pull the Plug Night" hopefully isn't going to involved Columbia cutting out its power-grid.

Analysis: Definitely one of the front-runners in this election, at least in the highly inaccurate world Facebook polling, but elections are won by votes, not slick websites with cute pictures.

Bwog operative and newly-minted alum Zach van Schouwen noticed something a bit uncanny when visiting the College's homepage. The following photo, aside from giving the false impression that the 9 train is still running, which it is not, pictures the subway entrance as a grandiose marble affair, which it is not. (See below for visual confirmation and here for a larger shot.) ZvS also found insurmountable evidence something that might lead us to believe in the subway's Photoshoppage in the form of what appears to be a 1 and 9 symbol that float in midair behind the entrance, as well as JPG jaggies around the white-on-black text. We just hope the class of 2012 isn't too heartbroken when they find out what the subway entrance really looks like. The blood is on your hands, Columbia College.

(Reality is pictured at right.)

UPDATE: Some things we've learned:

• The movie poster on the background on the College's subway is for Bait, which came out on September 15th, 2000.
  
• Also, noticed how the One sign in the background hangs off into oblivion. (There is no black background surrounding the left edge of the red circular "one.")
  

Stay tuned, as we unearth this mystery.

Bwogger Lydia DePillis noticed that attempting to reach the Spec's website now brings one to the following message:

Ruh-roh. Has Spec not been footing the bill's for its web presence? Or perhaps it simply went the way of the Barnard Bulletin, whose foray into the world of the Internet was all too brief.

Tipster Stephen Wang informs Bwog that Alma Mater is going to be offering permanent email addresses for its illustrious, tech-savvy alums and seniors. Users will get to choose their own display name (!) and the emails will be able to "enjoy all the features of Google's Gmail
service while maintaining a Columbia address." So a lot like what every current student has been doing for four years.

However, our emailing tipster already sends word of a technological slip-up: "You couldn't sign up on the first day it was available... because it was broken, already."

UPDATE: Seniors: nab your first name as your display name before someone else gets it first! Ready, set, go.

UPDATE 10:13 PM: Commenter reports that lee.bollinger@caa.columbia.edu. is taken. No word yet on the.butler.marxist, princeton.sucks, et al. Hurry, hurry!

In light of CCSC's recent crusade against juicycampus.com, Bwog wanted to know if it were really possible to ban a website from the campus server. Apparently, it's not. Resident computer expert and Bwog Web Master Zach van Schouwen explains why in the following bullet-pointed list:

• It's expensive. They don't have an existing filter in place, so they'd have to buy expensive, unreliable software
• We're all forgetting the masterminds of SEAS. It would be approximately 30 seconds before any SEAS hack had a mirror of the site up that was accessible at a different address
• Proxy server. Let's say you're visiting Juicycampus. Normally your PC sends them a request, and they send back a website. A site blocker would prevent this request from going through. A proxy server is just a third-party server that you make the same request to; it then makes the request to Juicycampus and sends you the results. This can all be encrypted, too, in which case there's no way for even a smart CU programmer to know what you're doing.
• Google cache. You can get to any blocked site by looking at Google's saved copy. Nobody ever thinks of this. (There are other sites like this too.)
• Tunneling out. If you have login access to any off-campus server, anywhere, you can easily log into it remotely and view the site. (Like, say, the Bwog server.)
• Mirroring. Juicycampus can just change their address, put up a mirror site, identify themselves numerically...
• Copying. Some intrepid kid could just create a site that copies all their content every five minutes.
• CUIT's never made a practice of it, so it'd be pretty shocking if they shelled out the $1000s for a commercial-grade filter, slowed down everyone's internet, and blocked a single site. Liberty University probably wouldn't even do this, let alone... any real university.
  

"The Internet has created new forms of storytelling. In some cases, the threat may prove fatal." What, pray tell, does he speak of?

Toy Story: the defining allegory of our generation.

We won and we lost! Hooray for a balanced perspective!

"Vocalist Shirley Simms remained largely silent." Good show!

Columbia's housing selection process is SUITE. Or not suite enough.

Bwog was stumbling around in the nether-regions of Craig's List, a confusing place brimming with possibilities of love, sex, and felony. We've filtered out the best (and worst) of Columbia-related posts.

Dear Professor Amazing

The way you tear into a argument-- you pounce on the main points, you toy with the subtleties-- makes me weak. When you take off on one of your brilliant analyses of 19th c. literature, I absolutely swoon. I love the animation of your face, the delicacy of your hands, the precision of your language, the suddenness of your laughter.

Yes, I admit it: I have tuned out seminar discussions to wonder what kind of underwear you might have on. And yes, I have allowed myself a couple ridiculous fantasies in which, through some truly transparent plot device (costume party, your late-night lamp-lit office), I have found an opportunity to kiss you.

But this is reality. So, I shall quietly show up to class tomorrow, make a small remark about James, and be on my way.

Respectfully yours,
The Smitten Graduate Student

More PG-13 Columbia-centric findings after the jump!

Big news in the case for transparency in academia: Starting in the spring, CC students may be able to view the results of their course evaluations online—specifically colorful bar graphs illustrating the section in which students rank the class and the professor from 1-5. CCSC has been working on the project since last year, but ESC has already been doing this for quite some time with a program called Oracle. "Knowledge is power," proclaims Oracle. Indeed!

Daily reminder e-mails make it pretty hard to forget that it's course evaluation season, but CCSC Policy dude Alidad Damooei says that the spiffy new system will only become reality if you actually fill them out: "I am pretty confident that the project will come to fruition but the ONLY [his emphasis] possible threat is a low response rate," Damooei explained in an email.

TAs, meanwhile, have been sweetly suggesting that their students do their academic duty and fill out the evaluations, especially if they've had a good time in the class. According to one source, the instructions they were given pronounce that "personal encouragement" is the best way to ensure a high participation rate.

Bwog has recently been made privy to Grand Central, a Google-owned program that allows users to sign up for one number that will make all your phones ring when called (both landlines and cellphones). Grand Central also has numerous creepy/cool features like requiring people to state the reason for their call before getting to speak with you and allowing you to record calls at a moment's notice (without the other person's knowledge, natch.) But like any cool toy, this one comes with a warning:

"Note: If you choose to record, be sure to check your local laws regarding call recordings. Most states only require one party's consent (yours), but others require both parties to consent. There are significant penalties for recording a call without the other party's consent in these states so to be safe you should let your callers know you are recording the call. It's the nice thing to do regardless. "

Orwellian! We like!

Bwog Arts Editor Justin Goncalves explains that you can actually switch the number from your cell to your room's ROLM phone (the thing you unplugged and stored under your bed on move-in day), and use the phone to make outgoing calls. Says Justin: "I realize I'm way too excited about this, but I feel like others should know. Save your cell phone bills!"

...meanwhile, Google nerds across the world sit and wait...their imminent reign quietly yet unmistakably approaching.

Or so fear the Columbians behind StudentsPrepAmerica, a new website aimed at preparing you for a plague of Seventh Seal-like proportions. Yet death won't be privy to long, philosophical chess games on the beach this time around: according to the folks over at StudentsPrep (CC seniors Justin Kamen, Alex Diacou and Chris Baratta, for the curious), she'll come at you hard and fast: their meticulously footnoted homepage notes that "flu spreads incredibly quickly," and predicts, among other things, labor shortages, widespread chaos, and a disproportionate number of dead college-age kids.

Who's to save us from the oncoming carnage? Why you, dear student--or as the STA folks put it, "..we, the young, educated students of the nation, who will inherit the future and have the most to lose, who must inform and prepare the nation."

Of course it's very hard to conceive of events so catastrophic, and, at the present time, so hypothetical (yes, I just linked to my own article. Pandemic flu happens to be an interest of mine. Get over it). But Bwog is weirdly gratified to know that a few of our peers aren't taking any chances. And med students, epidemiologists and flu enthusiasts (enflusiasts?): feel free to give this the Bwog peer review.

-ARR

Bwog played around with Google at work yesterday. Here's what Google suggests we're trying to find when the bolded word is typed into the search bar:

Butler Library
Butler Library columbia
Butler Library hours
Butler Library columbia university

Tao Tan
Tao tanning lotion
Tao tantra
Tao tang
Tao Tan lehman

Columbia Spectator
Columbia Spectator online
Columbia Spectator noose
Columbia Spectator madison
Columbia Spectator newspaper
Columbia Spectator blog

Barnard
Barnardos
Barnard marcus
Barnard college
Barnard castle
Barnard castle school

In which Ashish Kundra, a veteran of one internet enterprise himself, leads us through a forest of free services on the web that may just save you some money on your way to tech geek nirvana (if they don't end up on the startup junkheap first).

Google on-demand

Google on your phone...no crackberry required. Text "Google" (466453) with any search query and Google will text back results. For example, a text with "Mexican restaurant 10025" will give you the closest Mexican restaurants. Be careful though, there isn't a friendly suggestion when you misspell something ("Did you mean blog?"). So spell correctly or make sure you have a lot of texts in your plan.

Cross-gadget communication (www.Teleflip.com)

Send a text to any phone by emailing the [phone number]@teleflip.com. For example, if I text 1231231234@teleflip.com, the email will be broken up and sent as a text to that person's phone. For student groups, you could make a list serv of phone numbers (entered as email addresses) to send out messages ASAP. The service is easy to use, but it can't completely replace an email/data plan. The email texts are confusing, too-- sometimes filled with a lot of white space.

For the chronic oversleeper (Snoozester.com)

Snoozester lets you set up an alarm clock calendar. At your preset wake up times, Snoozester will call your phone and ask you to confirm that you are awake by pressing a digit. It's free for the first 10 wake up calls, then 4 bucks a month after that. Works nicely, but when they start charging you might as well stick with your alarm.