Stony Brook is amazing! Not only are we playing our rival school on Long Island, the Seawolves v.s Hofstra football game this Saturday but Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra is also performing at our Staller Center for the Arts. The problem is that I want to go to both events however both events conflict. The football game is an away game so I would have to hop on the bus at our stadium and take a ride to Hofstra at 5PM or I can wait and attend the Wynton Marsalis event at 8PM.

Now both are great events but I think clearly one is more worth it to attend. Wynton Marsalis by far the “once in a lifetime” event to see. For those of you who don’t know who he is, Wynton Marsalis is one of the “most prominent jazz musicians of the modern era and is also a well-known instrumentalist in classical music”. I have contacted Perry, our director of Undergraduate Music for tickets. I can go to a Stony Brook football game any other time but, Wynton Marsalis to most of us would be a once in a lifetime event.

I’ll take pictures when I get there and post it on my next post! Peace out!

A current project (SBUGuide) I’m currently working on needed an extra boost of inspiration to push deadlines across to our staff. So I decided to create my own start page for the project. I then made all the staff members add that start page as their home pages on their browsers so they would constantly be reminded to do their work. (neat idea by Joey)

This start page consists of three parts which are easy to implement. The first part is inserting your company logo. Users have to know who’s start page they are seeing, it looks more professional and makes the page look a lot nicer.

Second is to including a simple search field so if at anytime, someone wants to use Google or Yahoo to do a search, they can do it right from the start page. It’s essential for any start page to have www search. Also in addition to adding search, it’s good to add other links as well so they are also quickly accessible by your users. Our staff requested Yahoo and Blackboard to be added as links.

The third step, which is exclusive for our project is the calendar by Google. Jobs and deadlines are color coded so our staff can easily organize and know when things are suppose to be done by when . Of course, the calendar is optional for your start page but it is essential to ours.

I will write up a tutorial on how to make your own start page step-by-step.

In the meantime you can check out our hot SBUGuide Start Page!

Let me know what you think.

Many people go to church on Sunday’s, I spent an hour designing my own vCard contact page. Of course that’s not all I did today, that would be ridiculous! I was able to get some of my work done in the library today and came back and had some fun. But let me tell you more about what a vCard is and maybe you’d be interested in making one yourself. Questions can be asked and posted in the comments area.

What is vCard?
Wikipedia defines (so does the rest of the world) it as “vCard is a file format standard for personal data interchange, specifically electronic business cards. vCards are often attached to e-mail messages, but can be exchanged in other ways, such as on the World Wide Web. They can contain name, address information, phone numbers, URLs, logos, photographs, and other optional fields.” It’s occasionally used with Microsoft Office.

So, it’s like a rolodex and a vCard is just one entry in someones rolodex. Simple right? Well yeah it is! A lot of people also like to create a simple personal webpage to tell people a little about themselves and their qualifications. Things that would go on these pages may include a résumé or a.k.a curriculum vitae (CV) and a vCard so one can download it and add it to their personal rolodex address book.

There’s two easy parts in this, the first part to is to actually make the vCard and the second part is to make the simple webpage that goes with presenting your vCard.

If you want to create a page like this, download my vCard creator package.

Hi, everyone, welcome back to the Fall 2007 semester. This post is a follow up to my previous post on instructions about how to get DC++ working at Stony Brook University. DC++ is a very fast and reliable file sharing client. But please do keep things legal. I do not endorse using DC++ for illegal purposes.

Please following the previous tutorial located here. The reason I wrote a part 2 to this tutorial is because after going though the tutorial, some people are getting this error.

<CroBot> This hub is running version 0.3.36 of the Shadows Direct

Connect Hub Software.

That error can mean two things:

• You are not sharing enough data, you need to share 2GB’s or more. Hash them.
• You have too few upload slots available. Go to settings and sharing and make 5 upload slots.

Doing these two things will allow you to connect to DC++ successfully!

Remember, our hub name is sbushare.no-ip.info. Use DC++ Legally!

If you keep up with my blog, you would know that I’m a regular at Digg.com. A social networking website and if you are familiar with Digg, then you should be familiar with the “Digg effect“. The Digg effect is term coined to mean the amount of digg users to visit your website to causing a server downtime.

Definition of the Digg Effect:
“Digg has grown large enough that submissions sometimes create a sudden increase of traffic to the “dugg” website. This is referred to by some Digg users as the “Digg effect” and by some others as the site being “dugg to death“. However, in many cases stories are linked simultaneously on several popular bookmarking sites. In such cases, the impact of the “digg effect” is difficult to isolate and assess.”

The Experiment
Out of curiosity, I decided to setup an experiment to see my University’s servers at Stony Brook have the bandwidth to withstand the force of the “digg effect“. The web page being used for this experiment is my personal homepage on the university student sites.

My Hypothesis
I believe that servers at a University such as Stony Brook University should be able to handle a sudden increase in traffic such experienced in a digg effect.

http://digg.com/design/Can_University_Servers_Stand_the_Digg_Effect…

I hope that this will be an successful experiment and that users of the Digg community will participate. I’m very excited to see the outcome of this!

BTW: This is my Stony Brook student page.

When Apple OS X 10.5 comes pre-installed with the shipped MacBooks — Will be the time I will purchase it with the Stony Brook University discount. Under the university discount, I’m able to get it for a small -$100. I hope by the time it, OS X 10.5 comes out pre-installed on MacBooks, the hardware would be upgraded as well. That means increased clock speeds on the Intel Duo Core CPU, more RAM or faster RAM, a larger hard drive and maybe a better integrated graphic chip. Anyhow Apple has always been good at surprises so I will keep my fingers crossed.

I’ve always wanted a Mac but never made that final decision because of software incompatibility issues but new features will make that problem non-existent. Some new features of OS X is the Time Machine feature which is similar to System Restore on Windows but would be much more user friendly. Another new feature would be BootCamp coming out of beta which allows you to install and dual boot with Windows on Intel based Mac’s. Improvements would be done to Spotlight, the system on-the-fly search tool.

This is a chart of improvements that I would like to see in the next MacBook.*

So if you’re ready for a Mac like me, get a discount through someones academic voucher. Save $100 and use it towards more RAM.

* Of course these specifications are just my hopeful predictions.

I’ve been using a web 2.0 application that was in beta and required invites only for about a month now (called Mint), and I have to say that it is one of THE BEST web 2.0 applications out there. The reason I did not mention it sooner is because I had to respect the press embargo they requested. I could not blog or post screen shots about the beta experience. But if I blogged about it, it would have all been positive stories! This is highly recommended! Learn more about mint, keep reading… Introducing MINT!

So what is Mint anyway? “Mint allows you to view all of your banking and credit card transactions side-by-side, making identifying all of your transactions much easier and faster than ever before.

How does this help you? We make it easy for you to track down erroneous charges or bank fees, and keep a closer eye on your money.

Mint even lets you label your transactions so you know what bills you need to split with your friends or roommates, know which ones need to be reimbursed for your company, and more.”

Features? Wow features! Too many great features to list, read them all here!

I think everyone who has any type of bank account should have a Mint account, it is essential just like having a Google Account. The green interface is robust and sexy. It’s just so easy and friendly to use!

Sign up for Mint today!

Just released from beta literally 30 minutes ago, get it while its hot!

People who are tired of seeing ads on their browsers have been using Firefox’s AdBlock plugin for some time now to block those annoying ads from websites such as MySpace an DoubleClick. But now they are saying that they will sue the creators of AdBlock because it is costing them substantial amounts of revenue.

There is an estimate of 2.5 million plus AdBlock users which means that all 2.5 million of those users skip out on 1,000+ ads we encounter everyday. Thats a whopping 250 billion ads blocked each day. You can begin to imagine how much money they are loosing. If you ever hosted ads on Google via their AdWords program, you know how expensive it can be. It was like $5 a keyword click they would charge you. Imagine Google loosing $5 x 2.5 million because of AdBlock!

AdBlock and Filter.G are again Firefox plugins that automate the blocking of these ads on any website. There is a lawsuit going on that might end the use of these programs. So take my advice and install them and update them before it may be too late! I’m a proud user of them and will hate to see it go away. For those of you who has never tried it, I highly recommend it, you will not be sorry, I promise! Ads are not just annoying, they make pages longer to load!

Actually by doing this, I’m loosing out on money too because my Google ads would be blocked but still I advocate for this plugin! My loss is your gain! Seriously!

If you refer to my previous blog here, you can get info on how to download them.

That’s right, too bad for the guys at iPhoneSimFree. They were the first to announce the software hack for the Apple iPhone which allows you to unlock the iPhone up to version 1.02. On their website, they sell it for $60 per license. But now a group of hackers announced a free open source version of the unlock software called iUnlock! Thank god for the open source community!

Currently the open source packages are scattered around the net, if you want to hack your iPhone, you can figure out what packages to use but if you want to wait a little longer, someone will put together the complete package with detailed tutorials. iPhoneSimFree should not have waited this long to release their hack to the public, that wait cost them a lot of potential money because that was the only hack available at the time, now there is a free competition.

Free Open Source v.s Commercial: Open Source wins if it promises to do the same job. iPhoneSimFree doesn’t even guarantee that their software works for versions after 1.02. I’m sure if the open source hack gets popular, they will make it work for any version of Apple’s firmware. That’s why I love open source, they update each step of the way!

For information about the packages and actually do the hack see here!
BTW, there’s also a GUI hack too which is confirmed to work!

:: Update :: anySIM Download
Get anySIM free for download here!

Okay, it’s about time I blogged to push Vanessa Hudgens down a slot. Over the past 4 days or so, blogging about Vanessa Hudgens and including pictures was a great hit, not only did I made $30 a day via Adsense but I got over 4000+ hits in that period of time. So enough of that! A little update about Vanessa though, generally Vanessa’s fans support her all the way and accepts that she made a mistake. Okay so next story…

A couple of days ago, I went to a photo shoot for my Stony Brook Blog and the pictures finally came in today. I personally wasn’t too happy of them. I initially thought that they were going to be great because they were taken by professional photographers but I guess it doesn’t make that much of a difference.

Here are some of the pictures:

So moving on, I went to the NYPIRG office in Stony Brook University for the first time today. For those of you who reads my blog knows that I’ve been canvassing for NYPIRG since May. I love the organization so much that I signed up to volunteer to work on the campaigns at school! I’m going to do voter registrations soon! Watch out!