I’ve been a fan of OverClocked ReMix for as long as I’ve had a computer to type on. I have a script on GitHub that automates keeping one’s music library up-to-date with the latest remixes. If that’s the sort of thing that’d make you happy, go check it out.
Life enthusiast.
Author Archive for Ricky Mondello
I’m not entirely sure why, but I find nonsensical English and harmless typos pretty funny. Enjoy these finds from a restaurant menu in Dutchess County, New York.
It’s been a week of firsts for me. I’m writing this post from the comfort of my grandparents’ home in Florida. It’s the first time I’ve visited them since they moved down here many years ago. After finally working up the motivation to pay them a visit, to get myself down here, I took my first flight on an airplane!
I wasn’t sure how I’d feel when I finally took my first flight. Despite delays in taking off, the security theater of the TSA, and the trial of sitting in front of loud children, I absolutely loved the experience.
I starred out the window admiring the sky for about an hour before I felt the need to even think about doing anything else. During that hour, I would not stop smiling and laughing. After years of relegating myself to the Northeast, I finally gave myself permission to go on a vacation, and it started with an experience I couldn’t have imagined.
My description may sound ridiculous to veteran fliers. One day, I may take the rush of a takeoff, the subsequent arial sightseeing, and the warmth of the sun on my face for granted. That day isn’t today, and while I’m still excited about it, I’m capturing that joy. Perhaps years from now, this post will help me remember the novelty of what then seems mundane.
As I work hard to become skilled and savvy enough to permanently break out of the Northeast, I’m going to be able to do all sorts of things I wasn’t able to do as a child. This summer, I’m proud to say I’ll be interning at Apple in Cupertino, California — a longtime dream of mine. In conjunction with the daily excitement of running a successful business, I’m never bored and always reaching new heights.
Recently, in describing these circumstances to a friend I hadn’t seen in years, I got excited and let this slip:
Honestly, I couldn’t be any happier.
In the week and a half since I said that, I’ve been desperately searching for grounds to retract that statement. If I’m going to drop words like those, I really have to mean them.
Despite my best efforts, my search turned up empty. I’m in a great place right now, and I’d like to thank you for your help getting here.
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.
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.