GetchaBooks

Published on August 17, 2010 in Ideas and Tufts. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

I’m proud to announce that my textbook comparison shopping website, GetchaBooks, has officially re-launched for Fall 2010. GetchaBooks is the one-stop-shop of textbook purchasing for college students at ten select schools. If you’re a student at one of these schools, a thirty-second process of selecting your courses is all that separates you from the most informed and understandable breakdown of textbooks for those courses, complete with recommendations on where to buy them across the web.

In the last six months, the GetchaBooks team has redesigned almost every aspect of the site, adding features and crafting a user experience that finally makes the awful process of textbooks purchasing pleasurable. After hundreds of hours of Skype calls, instant messages, whiteboard sessions, code sprints, debugging spurts and usability testing, I’m happy to say that the experience is no less than awesome.

I’d like to thank my friends and family, whose understanding, patience, and feedback were crucial during the development of GetchaBooks. I can’t count the number of social gatherings I missed to work on this project. Aware that it means a lot to me, they’ve always excused my absence and even offered to help.

So, what are you waiting for? Check out GetchaBooks, and let me know what you think.

An Analysis of Tufts’ OCL Advertising Policy

Published on August 11, 2010 in Tufts. 2 Comments

So you don’t have to, I’ve produced a list of changes to Tufts’ Office for Campus Life’s advertising and posting policy from last year to this year. This post is generalizable to how universities handle technology and policy as a whole. It is admittedly highly “inside baseball”, so if it doesn’t interest you, you should skip this post.

As of Monday, August 9, 2010, a Google search for “tufts ocl poster policy” reveals traces of two different, recent policies in PDF form. The “2010″ document has been removed from the OCL website, but the “2011″ document is freely downloadable. For the purpose of this exercise, I’ll ignore publicly accessible the web page last updated “3.15.07″.

Fortunately, when I began this piece, Google’s cache still had a copy of the 2010 document. If it didn’t, a quick trip over to OCL would likely produce one. As of August 10, 2010, the day I’m finishing this piece, the cached document is unavailable from Google. I’ve kept a copy of it here and here in image screenshots.

The 2010 document is mostly well-formatted, with proper hierarchy and understandable use of emphasis like bold and italic type. The 2011 document (PDF, HTML) is a completely different story. Aesthetically, it’s an Arial disaster without any concern for readability. According to its metadata, it was produced by Microsoft Office 2007 and authored by “jgolia01“.

Nonetheless, I’m more concerned with the content of the documents and not their presentation. I took some time to produce plaintext versions of the policies (2010-policy.txt, 2011-policy.txt) and run a diff on them (policies.diff). I tried to standardize the conventions in the two text files as to yield the most useful diff possible, but I didn’t do a perfect job. This is good enough to see the major differences.

A quick summary of the differences:

  • A hyphen was needlessly inserted into the word information.
  • A restriction on the number and size of flyers posted in a single area was changed (now six on the “Campus Center Breezeway between Bookstore and Mayer campus Center and the walls along the Tisch Libray steps” and one elsewhere).
  • Office for Campus Life was condensed to OCL on some occasions.
  • In what can only be read as a response to the Sam Wallis campaign’s use of “spray chalk”, OCL inserts a only bold, italisized, ALL-CAPS’D sentence addressing its use. Literally, this is the sentence with the most emphasis in the entire document. Although I’m pleased this clarification has been issued, I find the execution to be reactionary and completely unprofessional. As a disclaimer, I am remarkably biased in this area.

  • A point on “Off-campus Advertising” is modified. Although it makes sense in context, this section is immediately ambiguous as to whether OCL is trying to regulate advertisements that aren’t on its campus, or advertisements originating from non-campus affiliated parties.
  • Sections dedicated to the Mayer Campus Center and Residence Halls are added.
  • The new policy mentions a collaboration with ORLL, the Office of Residential Life and Learning, on enforcing its dorm policies.

My takeaway from this exercise is that the fragmentation of locations and formatting of past and present policies regarding advertising and posting on the Tufts campus is shameful. The most recent document from OCL sacrifices any regard for formatting while expanding on the previous year’s document, clarifying and expanding on some points. However, some changes to the document seem arbitrary and hasty; I wouldn’t be surprised if they were made by a single individual without any review or vetting process. Finally, the information in these documents should be placed on the web page that already exists to hold this content. A web page with an authoritative URL like this one should always have the latest policy.

If this policy were to come from my office, I’d be embarrassed.

277 Days

Published on July 14, 2010 in Ricky and Tech. 1 Comment

After 277 days of flawless power, there was an interruption of service at my house. For 75.9% of a year, my little PowerMac G4 Cube dutifully served files and routed traffic. This post is in memory of its record uptime, cut short by a lack of electricity.

UIOP

Published on July 6, 2010 in Tufts. 1 Comment

QWERTY

Summer Breeze

Published on July 5, 2010 in Ricky. 2 Comments

I’ve been busy. Life is complicated, overwhelming, and hopeful. Much has changed, and much remains the same.

I’m done with the first leg of my summer journey, and I’m mostly pleased with how things turned out. Seeking to avoid the pain that comes with idleness, I decided to move to Medford, Massachusetts for the month of June and work a few web design jobs.

My primary job (40 hours a week) was doing front-end development for a social entrepreneurial startup with a few students at Harvard University. They’ve got a long way to go until launch, but I’m very confident that the project will be successful. It was a pleasure to work with individuals who grasp both web technology and social responsibility. I learned a lot during my time with them, and was sad to leave.

My second job was polishing TuftsBlogs.com, Tufts University’s Undergraduate Admission’s blogging portal, which I built over the last year. I’m pleased with the functionality and aesthetics of the site, overall, and look forward to see how Tufts’ social media strategy continues to pan out.

Finally, I was working for myself. My (recently incorporated!) business, GetchaBooks.com, is less than a month away from launching its next big iteration. My cofounders and I have been working hard to build a killer platform that takes the frustration out of textbook purchasing. We’re currently seeking beta testers and motivated students at schools across the country to help us spread the platform. If you’re interested, check out www.getchabooks.com to sign up for more information.

As you could imagine, working three jobs can be pretty stressful. At times, I felt overwhelmed. Nonetheless, life was awesome. It was exhilarating living away from home, without the burden of classes, completely managing my own time between days jobs, entrepreneurship, and socializing. I was efficient and effective, waking up each and every day with a purpose. I learned things every day, and had complete control of my life.

In that respect, my summer gamble has been a complete success. There were difficult life moments, including a bicycle accident, an incredibly sketchy Craigslist exchange, and a painful breakup that’s tested my character and personal identity. With the support of my friends, I’m working to overcome the obstacles that linger. Despite these problems, after a month of economic self-sufficiency, I’m confident I can succeed in this world. Now that I’ve done it once, I can do it again, and it feels great.

I’m back in Dover Plains, ready to embark on the second leg of my journey. Throughout July, will be director of the Dutchess Community College’s Computer Academy, the computer camp-classroom hybrid that I’ve been working at for the last three years. In addition to managing the Academy, I’ll be teaching a new introductory programming course, taught in Ruby, and something I’m calling “Future of the Web”, a crash-course in web design with a focus on features of the HTML5 spec.

My July will be a radical adjustment from the freelance lifestyle I’ve been living in the last month, but I embrace it with open arms. Education and access to information have always been important to me, and I’m really excited to directly contribute to the lives of children once more.

When the month is over, I plan on returning to Medford, just in time for a Keane concert in Boston that I’m super excited about. After the elation of the concert fades, I’m unsure if I’ll take on any jobs. My August priority is ensuring that GetchaBooks successfully relaunches, but I haven’t yet gauged how much of my time that will take. Certainly, I’ll figure it out.

Regardless, I will bring to August what I brought to June and hope to bring to July — sincerity and focus. Having tasted the lifestyle of a free spirit, I’m content with my life.

Thanks for taking the time to keep up with it, and take care.

Cholesteatoma Information

Published on June 26, 2010 in Tympanoplasty. 1 Comment

A lot of people come across my blog searching for information about tympanoplasty recovery. A reader recently wrote in with his perspective on a cholesteatoma that I feel needs highlighting. Although I don’t agree with Shea’s assessment of anesthesia, it’s a valuable piece of writing. It’s reposted after the jump.

Continue reading ‘Cholesteatoma Information’