Stress Free Zone

I am sure everyone has heard about the Stress Free Zone by now. I went to my first Stress Free Zone today and it was absolutely awesome. There is free food, t-shirts, stress balls ( or paws should I say) and all the games in the world. I did not think it would be much fun, but a ton of people were present. Whether you go alone and just relax for a little while with food and completing a puzzle or go with a group of friends and beat them at "Guess Who", it is a great place to take a load off and forget about all the finals coming up over this next week.

Props to Heather Kopf and Jen Kent (and everyone else who has been working on it) who have been working on the Stress Free Zone for awhile now and were there when I arrived at 7:40 in the morning setting up!

Breaking Boards in FYC!

Except it was only one board at a time!

Hey everyone!

So tonight First Year Council had their last meeting of the semester, and an activity we all participated in was one you may or may not be familiar with. I know SGA students, some SEB students, and many other people have learned how to do this exercise, those of you who havn't experienced it, I really recommend trying it! OSL sponsored or conducted the activity taking us step by step through how to go about breaking the wooden boards that were laying on two spaced out cement blocks. First, we all wrote out goals or a main goal we would like to accomplish here at UMBC on one side of the wooden board. Then, on the opposite side we wrote the obstacles we will have to face upon reaching that goal. Finally, after signing a liability waiver, and getting instructions and demonstrations, each member took a turn busting in half this relatively thick piece of wood (obstacle side up-signifying that we were conquering our obstacles in a sense.) A few of the members being a little apprehensive and doubtful at first fed off of each other's courage, and one by one successfully split the boards into two, or sometimes three sections. Using the palm of your hand, the power of your leg muscles, and going with the grain of the wood this once impossible seeming task, turned out to be not that hard at all. This liberating experience definitely relieved a lot of stress, built up agression, and just provided a sense of self-accomplishment. I definitely suggest you go out and try it... maybe with the assistance or guidance of someone from OSL or someone who has experience and can help you a long.

Why Ruckus is Not a Solution

There has been some talk recently about Ruckus, a subscription-based service that has struck a deal with the UMD system to provide its content to students "free" of charge (student tuition and fees notwithstanding). Services like this one continue to be lauded as the "legal alternative to downloading", and indeed this particular incarnation has been endorsed by SGA.
However, services like this one come up short in some key areas which is why to the music enthusiast or serious downloader, they will never compare to what is available on torrent trackers.

• Music can only be played via their software, not your music player of choice and not on your operating system of choice.

• While there is considerable selection, it is nowhere near complete and nowhere near what is available on elite music trackers.

• The DRM-laden songs prevent transfer to a portable music device, like my iPod. Even if you do use software to (illegally) remove the DRM, the files are not .mp3 but .wma, a format that is not compatible with iPods.

• Even after going through all the trouble of freeing the songs, they are still in poor quality. If you decide to transcode to .mp3 to put the songs on an iPod, your quality will go down even further.

The final blow to this model is that using programs like SoundTaxi or TuneBite (programs that actually charge you to use them!) to remove the DRM from these songs is illegal. If one is going to be operating in this gray area anyway, why not just go for the best and get high quality, usable music via bittorrent and torrent trackers?

Blogwars

wow. today was interesting. i walked into the sga office and bam! there is an all out slug-fest going on online between the retriever staff editor and a bunch of other important people- interestingly their names all started with anonymous. this brings up a lot of woes that many individuals have been expressing over the course of my time at umbc. if you would like to participate or just take a peek follow the link.

Keeping up with Blogs

If you keep up with sites that continually update their content, like news websites and blogs, you might want to check out using an RSS Feed Reader. This site has a nice list of some of the more popular ones. There are also useful extensions for web browsers like Firefox - I have used the WizzRSS extension myself with great success so far. Sage is another good one that got featured a while back. Subscribing to feeds is extremely easy - once you have your reader of choice, simply drag that gigantic orange icon in on the upper right into it and you're ready to go.

Popular browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer support adding RSS feeds directly to your bookmarks toolbar, allowing you to quickly see new stories without having to install any additional software.

The benefit of using RSS as opposed to just checking websites is that it puts control back into your hands. Basically you can use a reader to very quickly check the feeds of your favorite sites and see what items are new and which you've already read. Some readers will even give you notifications when a feed changes, so if you're using the computer you can see it and know there is something new to read.

However, if all of these seems a bit complicated, David Hoffman has created a convenient website that pulls together the feeds of a number of interesting UMBC-related blogs, including this one. Simply bookmark the UMBC Blog of Blogs and check it from time to time to receive the latest headlines.

No Honking Policy

This may be of no importance yet, but it is really annoying to be woken up every night by two people outside honking because of a parking situation. Last night was the third night in a row that both my roommate and I jumped while sleeping because of someone who found it necessary to be honking their horn at 2 in the morning! New York City has a policy, there is a fine of $250 in certain areas where you cannot honk. Why should UMBC not have one? There should be a rule, after 9 p.m. no honking until 9 a.m.. That way, the residents of at least Erickson, where I live, can get a full night's rest.