I’m back from a sumer hiatus, with a brief post about facebook.  They just made the new layout the permanent layout–”New Facebook is now the only Facebook,” they say–and I, along with many others, find it much less convenient than the old layout.  Fortunately, there’s a workaround over here.  It does work, in that when I tell it to switch over to MSIE (Microsoft Internet Explorer?) 5.5, it displays facebook in the old layout, with a note at the top of the window saying “Sorry, new Facebook is temporarily disabled.”  Some other things–gcal, for example–will also go funky with the switch, but you can turn it on to use facebook and off for everything else.

Hang on, strike all of that.  It used to work, but I was just checking it while writing this, and it looks like facebook has worked around the workaround.  Far be it from me to understand how this whole thing functions, but I gather that User Agent Switcher mimics old versions of internet browsers, and for a while there, the new facebook wasn’t set to work with some of those versions.  It seems they’ve caught on, though, and have made it work with all old browsers, thereby drowning the last hopes of us change-fearing naysayers.  *sigh*  I guess it’s back to trying to get used to the new layout for me.

We have now the next in what seems to be becoming a series of reviews of the new question and answer site Akatoo. May just ended, which means that the month’s promotion also ended. I finished in third (or maybe fourth) place on the leaderboard as ranked by promotional points gained in the month. To the top twenty at the end of the month go iPod nanos, and to those ranked 21-70 go iPod shuffles. April’s contest winners posted on the site at the beginning of May that yes, they did get their iPods in the mail, so I was satisfied but not surprised when I received an email at the end of May 31 asking me to provide a shipping address to an email address at the Akatoo domain. I did so, and come Monday June 2, the next workday, I received an email back asking for a phone number, as the Apple site required one for shipping (from which I gather that they order them from Apple at the end of each month and have them sent directly to the contest winners rather than via themselves).

I sent that information back that afternoon. Come the morning of Thursday June 5, FedEx left a note on my door to let me know that they tried to deliver a package but couldn’t get the required signature (I was sleeping at the time). I signed the slip and put it back out, and come Friday morning, the package was waiting for me when I awoke. In it was, as expected, an iPod nano–silver, 4 GB.  Quite like the one on the far left here.  I opened the shipping box, but haven’t removed the iPod from its case yet. I’m not certain of I want to keep it, or bring it somewhere and get store credit for something else or to upgrade to a larger version. I wouldn’t be surprised if I ended up on the leaderboard at the end of June as well (I’m sitting at #7 now, having hit #2 and then lost internet connection for a while), and two nanos could well equal a bigger and better model.

So for anyone who’s wondering, I can confirm that yes, Akatoo does give real, legitimate prizes for its monthly promotions.

I finally got around to repairing (again) my headphones.  As I noted, after the cord snagged on a chair, the left and right channel wires broke from their contacts, though the ground was still attached.  I kept meaning to fix them, but then I got used to the earbuds that originally came with the iPod.  They were by no means as good as my real headphones, but they did the job, and I was lazy.  Yesterday, however, they inexplicably lost the right channel completely, and it quickly became time for the repair job.

The physics electrics lab wasn’t there to supply me this time, but my brother was, so I borrowed his soldering equipment.  The first step was to remove the solder from the last repair job from the contacts, since I was reattaching it to the same plug.  Instead of the copper wire that we had last time, he had a handy little pump thing.  You primed it by pressing down on a plunger, then touched the tip to the heated solder and pressed a button, thereby sucking the solder into the depths of the device.  (After a quick google, I’ve found that it’s called a “solder pump,” or the somewhat sillier “solder sucker,” and looks like this.  The wire we had before is a solder wick.)  Since we had no reason to use the solder wick, I can’t compare the two.  I can say, however, that the solder pump worked pretty well, removing the majority of the old solder.  It did leave a sort of solder sheen on the surfaces, but that wasn’t a problem.

Then came the same process as last time, with a few modifications.  First was how I dealt with the tension relief, the fibers around which the wires were wrapped.  Last time, my roommate unwrapped the wires, cut out the tension relief, and then twisted the wires back up.  I tried that at first, but I’m apparently not as skilled as he is, and I ended up with scraggly looking wires that weren’t working well.  I stripped some more of the plastic coating and started again, and this time didn’t bother to unwrap.  I just burned off the painted insulation with a match, which I think probably burned out some of the tension relief as well.  Undoubtedly, most of it remained, but it didn’t seem to be a problem.

Unfortunately, I did have to go through the “making sure the channels are right” procedure again, and once again, I had them wrong the first time.  This time, though I wrote down which way they go, so I can do it right if I need to do it again.  On my headphones, at least, the red wire goes to the longer contact, the green to the shorter.  It was also easier to switch them and get them back through the holes of the contacts because I had some very fine-tipped tweezers.  A helpful tool, those.

Finally, this soldering iron was a bit trickier.  The first one was adjustable by a dial, so it could be set however.  This one could be set as either low or high.  Low wasn’t working, so I flipped it to high, but that was still problematic.  heating the surface and touching the solder to that, as I was taught, wasn’t working, so I ultimately had to melt the solder onto the soldering iron and then spread it around on the surface that way.  It gave me a workable join, and the headphones sound perfect, but it did result in some large and unwieldy solder lumps.

All in all, I’m glad to have my headphones back, and I’ll look out for attacking chairs from now on.

My guilty pleasure: popular television shows.

I know, I know. I’m supposed to only like obscure scifi. (I do, really! Lexx is great fun!) Or say in a haughty voice that “I don’t really watch television–I prefer radio as a medium.” (”Of course, I get all my news from NPR. Did you catch yesterday’s This American Life?”) Maybe I should maintain that the best show on television is the Wire. (Well, I’ve seen a few episodes with my roommate. It’s not bad.)

Yet I can’t help falling into those all-too-popular traps. Mostly this happens on vacations, when I actually have the time to watch television, or indeed do anything but read Latin and write papers and go to rehearsal and the myriad of other necessities at school. Last year during winter break, I watched the entire first season of Lost at TV Links, back when it was working. This past winter, I did the same thing with Heroes. And now that I’m out of school for the summer and have free time again, I’ve fallen back into the second season of Heroes, and the rest of Lost is waiting in the wings.

Now, don’t let my tone fool you. I’m not about to say “But I only like them ironically” or anything of that ilk. Someone (I can’t remember who, unfortunately) once wrote an invective against claiming to like something because “it’s so bad it’s good.” If you like it, said this person, then just say it’s good! Don’t be embarrassed and try to over it up!

In that line, I really truly like these shows, no matter what people say. They’re engaging, and fantastical, and have all sorts of different fun plot lines (too many, if the critics are to be believed). Some of my like for these shows probably comes from A. my very clear love for scifi, and B. my secret attraction to conspiracy theories and secret societies and such things. Yes, I certainly did take that book out of the library and read about the Thugs and the Freemasons and the Illuminati before I got to the KKK and got bored of it. Oh yes, I suspect that there are all sorts of secret plots behind things. In fact, this item B is probably responsible for item A. All the “real world” scifi–Stargate, X-Files, etc.–tend to have some elements of the conspiracy theory in them.

And apparently I’m not alone in this interest, given the popularity of these shows. So when the plots of Lost get ever crazier and more all-encompassing and the people pulling the strings get more puppeteer-like, it’s great to watch. When we watch Heroes and get hints of the group of specials running things behind the scenes, we love it.

Are these shows great television? Do they have any larger value? Do they address any of the fundamental questions of humanity? I don’t know. Maybe. That’s something that will be collectively decided once they’ve finished their run and we can look back at them. But they’re certainly damn entertaining, and for that, producers of Lost and Heroes, I doff my hat to you. Even if writers’ meetings do actually look like this.

Whew. Greek is done, after a meh final this morning. It could have been worse, but it was by no means great. Now I just need to study Latin enough to do decently on Wednesday, and I’m done.

I downloaded Quicksilver recently, after reading about it somewhere or other and checking out reviews of it. I can see that it’s useful as a launcher, and probably saves me a little time over wading through the Finder, but it doesn’t seem like a true godsend, which is how people seem to characterize it. Then again, I haven’t gotten into most of the features, so I’m sure there’s a bunch that I’m missing. I could be convinced.

I’ve also continued using Akatoo. I’m mostly rating others’ answers, and answering questions myself only occasionally. One can get enough IKU points from rating answers (indeed, that seems to be the main source) to stay easily in the top 20 (and thereby presumably therefore be one of the contest winners at the end of the month), but it does require a certain amount of time spent reading and rating. Whether there’s worth in it beyond personal gain, I’m not sure, especially if I’m not contributing much of my own anyway. My questions of copyright and reproduction issues are still there, though somewhat muted–I’m certainly not saying anything particularly genius in my use of the site, and I don’t think most others are either. I inquired about the project mentioned in the ad that originally brought me to the site, and it looks like the project is to recruit more people and see what they think of Akatoo, and report that feedback to the company. I’ve never been a fan of the whole “get more people in and you too could win big!” marketing schemes (You know those people who post spam links in facebook groups and forums? I hate those people.), so I’m pretty hesitant to sign onto this.

In recent life news, I’ve agreed to assistant direct a (pending Drama Board approval) production of select plays from 365 Days/365 Plays, by Suzan-Lori Parks, next fall. More on that as it develops.

I signed up the other day for Akatoo after seeing an ad on facebook. The ad says “only students qualify for this online project which can pay over $25 per hour, serious inquiries only.” The ad directs here, requesting that you register for and try out Akatoo and see if you like it before signing up for the project.

So I registered, and I’ve taken a look around. The idea of the site is that members ask questions (any sort), and other members answer them. Then those answers are rated by the community so people can see at a glance what answers are most useful. By taking any of the above actions, users accrue points that add to their IKU (thus far I’ve been unable to find out if that actually stands for anything). There are constant promotions going on in which the leaders at the end of a certain time period can win iPod nanos or shuffles.

On the informational level, Akatoo is not bad. Browsing through, I answered a few questions whose answers I knew, and learned some things I didn’t know previously. Questions vary a lot in quality. Many are specific (”How does a silkworm make silk?”) while others address opinion and are intended to spark debate (”What are your morals, values, and ethics?”). Most questions do seem like they could be useful, though I wouldn’t be interested in the majority, but some are clearly inane.

The thing I’m wondering is what those running the service are getting from it. I’d like to think they really are trying to develop a compendium of knowledge for the good of humanity, but I’m guessing there’s something in it for them too. At the very least, unless they’re funding the contest prizes out of pocket, they need some source of income from the site. I haven’t advertising on the site, except for google ads by the sides of individual user answers. When you answer a question, you can allow such an ad to be placed and the profits donated to a charity of your choice. So unless they’re skimming off of those, it doesn’t look they’re taking in ad revenue.

However, a look into the Terms of Use reveals a possibility. Under the subhead “License Grant,” the terms state that:

• By posting a question or answer to the Service, you automatically grant Akatoo a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, edit, translate, distribute, perform, and display the post, or any part of it, alone or as part of other works in any form, media, or technology whether now known or hereafter developed, and to sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of sublicensees. Any deletion of a post by you will not limit the foregoing license grant.
• You further agree that Akatoo has the right to use, without any payment or accounting to you or others, any concepts, know-how or ideas that you post to the Service.

Maybe these is just the standard legalese cover-your-ass jargon that appears in such terms of use; not being a lawyer, I don’t know. And I think it’s not unreasonable to expect that you don’t own exclusive copyright on answers that you freely post in a public forum. But this section allows Akatoo to use your work for their own profit into eternity, in whatever form they like, without any attribution to you. And even if you post it and then decide you want to remove it from the site, Akatoo still has that same license. This seems a little worrisome to me.

Admittedly, most answers given on the site can be readily found already online with a quick google. Most of it is common knowledge (though I’ve found at least one instance of cut and paste plagiarism), in which case this license grant isn’t much of a problem. But I’d caution Akatoo users against posting anything original or anything that they don’t want to see republished in, say, the Complete Akatoo Encyclopedia twenty years from now

I did, by the way, get to SCCS. Kit took care of upgrading my WordPress software. The problem was with Fugu in fact, and not actually a problem so much as a quirk in the way it handles deletion of directories. He also kindly modified this theme to include tags, which you can now see at the tops of posts. Plus, he changed something with permissions that briefly allowed me to upload photos in the old WordPress, but with the new upload system of 2.5, I’m getting a different error message when I try. One of these, days, I’ll be successful.

Had my last seminar on Monday, and my last Movement Theater class (which was actually a joint performance with the Movement Theater II class of pieces we’d been creating throughout the semester) last night. Now it’s just two Greek classes to go, and then just studying for finals. Today was the end-of-year Classics picnic, which featured excellent food and a skit parodying the Agamemnon and much discussion of what this year’s Classics T-shirt should be.

Housing didn’t end up being terrible. By the time they got down to the last hundred or so Juniors, all singles were gone, so they opened up the singles waitlist. Most of the remainder elected to go on it, which meant that the part of my block that will be here next semester managed to get the last two (pretty sizable, actually) available doubles in Mertz.

Anyway, if all goes to plan, I’ll only be here a semester anyway. In the spring I want to study at ICCS in Rome. From what I’ve seen in my research of it and what I’ve heard from several people, it’s a great program, and while it’s pretty highly rated in academics, the workload is not bad compared to Swarthmore. I think I could do with a break, especially in Rome. Half of the program is a course that involves multiple field trips per week to go look at old Roman things, so I’m excited.

I’m also trying to figure out what to do in the summer after the program ends. I had originally planned to make a bunch of money sometime between now and then in order to stay in Europe and travel for a while. After speaking with Professor Turpin, however, my new plan is to find some sort of summer program and get the college to pay for it through Classics Department or general Humanities funding. This is a while off, so I have plenty of time to consider, but I’ve been looking at archaeological digs, mainly in the U.K. I’d kind of like to go back to Germany or the Czech Republic, though. If I could come up with my own interest and write a convincing enough plan, I could probably get funding for whatever I wanted, actually. I just need to figure out what that is.

Bollocks. I’ve broken my headphones again.

I was in Sharples (Swarthmore’s dining hall), and walking up to bus my try. The curlicue cord, dangling from my pocket, got caught on a chair back as I was walking by, and pulled my up short. Everything looked fine, but when I tried to listen through them, nothing came through. Once I got home, I opened up the plug and found that while the ground was still attached, both the left and right channel wires had pulled off of their contact points. Well, now that I know how to solder, I can fix it on my own. I just need to get hold of a soldering iron again.

I preregistered for classes today–sort of, at least. My schedule for next semester was going to be Acting II Monday afternoon, Latin seminar (Aeneid) Wednesday afternoon, and Directing I Friday afternoon (plus a likely fifth course–maybe intro to Comp. Sci. or intermediate Greek). For a while, the Latin seminar was going to be moved to Monday, but after surveying students, the department found that Wednesday worked best. Unfortunately, the theater department didn’t follow suit when they changed Directing I to Wednesday afternoon at the last minute. As of now I’m registered for all of those classes, regardless of the conflict. Come next September, I’ll need to talk with people to see if one of those classes can be moved. Otherwise I’ll have to put off Directing until the fall of senior year, which would require a whole bunch of schedule juggling. Grrrr, theater department.

Also, my blockmates and I didn’t get any of our desired blocks for next year. When we got our lottery numbers yesterday, we found out why–they’re terrible. Because we blocked together, we have a series of six numbers in the 760s. Rising Junior numbers cut off at 800, so we’re going to have bad luck picking rooms. Also, our housing lottery is Monday at 7:30, the same time as my Movement Theater class. Grrrr, housing.

Regardless, the semester is almost over. A week and a half of classes, followed by reading week and exams. I don’t have much work left, now that my final seminar paper is done. I’ll have a lot to do to prepare for exams, though, what with catching up with all the Latin reading that I haven’t done. I’m looking forward to a month in which to do nothing before I head up to camp.

Well, it’s been a while since I posted. A week or so ago I was trying to write a post about how to make a small alcohol burning lamp that Bevan and I put together a while ago, but WordPress was uncooperative in photo uploading. Also, I haven’t yet managed to update to the new version of WordPress, but that seems to be more the fault of Fugu, which won’t let me delete the old files. Eventually, I’ll make it over to SCCS and see if they can be helpful.

I handed in my final seminar paper this morning, having pulled an all-nighter to finish it. This is the second one I’ve done on this paper, unfortunately. The other one was a couple weeks ago when the previous draft was due. The paper’s been keeping me pretty occupied since then, so I’m hoping to have a little more free time now that it’s done.

Previous to that, on Wednesday evening, I saw a showing of the documentary Second Skin. It’s about massively multiplayer online games, and how they affect the lives of a few different sets of people. I enjoyed the movie. It looked at gaming from several different perspectives, and let the viewer decide what his or her stance on the issue was. I also found it to be well-filmed and well-edited for the most part. It followed several different story lines, and while the three main ones wound throughout the movie, others were only brief interludes. These gave the film a choppy feel at times, but admittedly, I’m not sure there would have been a better way of integrating them into the rest of the movie.

The film was being shown at Swarthmore because one of the producers is a Swat alumnus from 2000. It debuted at South By Southwest, and the production team is currently looking for a distributor. Hopefully people will be able to see the movie soon. (Anyone out there who works for a distribution company should take a look at Second Skin.) In the meantime, the trailer is available on the film’s website.