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.

The site’s purpose? Display and archive faux pas at Tufts University. Go ahead and report an incident, and you may be featured on the front page!

Ten years ago, I was nine years old. My family had not yet moved to Dover Plains or even to Carmel, the community I lived in before moving to Dover. I spent most of my time playing video games, and struggled in school. I had a hole in my ear drum that prevented me from taking normal showers or swimming with my friends. Never had I operated a modern personal computer. A good deal of my mental energy was absorbed by jingles on TV, some that celebrated a new millennia.

In these ten years, I studied, worked, laughed, and cried. I took hundreds of standardized tests, met many people, and spoke dozens of million of words. I grew closer to some people, and drifted away from others. I had my fair share of heartache, but publicly and unashamedly fell for a beautiful woman at Tufts University.

Although that brief story seems pretty special to me, I bet it’s unremarkable to you. With some luck, your story has similar themes of progress and development. After all, a lot happens in ten years. In these last ten, many of us became completely different people, with something still recognizable from our pasts.

I love looking back every once in a while. It’s comforting, and I benefit as a person by remembering who I was, where I came from, and who helped me get where I am; it’s that benefit that pushes my evangelism of journaling.

If you’re not already taking a few moments a day to jot down what you’re thinking, you’re not really getting the full benefit of these collective, reflective moments. Although I’m not an expert on memory formation, I know you’re missing a lot if you don’t write stuff down. To reflect on what remains in our heads over a long period is incomplete; leave notes to yourself to piece together a more complete narrative.

Entering this new year, give journaling a shot. If you’re celebrating the dawn of a new decade tonight, remember to remember it.

I’m conflicted. Surely, knowing what I wanted to do with part of my life would help, but I think I’ve bought myself some more time to make this decision.

Isn’t college fun?

If you see me in my daily life, you know this by now. However, this blog community is neglected, and it’s time for some loving.

I’m about 90% sure that I’m going to attempt a double major of Computer Science and Political Science at Tufts. I think those two majors pretty much sum up the intersection of my interests in this world. Sure, there’s no cohesive element between them, and I’m fairly certain that a focus on one diminishes my focus on the other, but thinking about this double major makes me happy. That’s what matters, right?

I’ll likely be declaring this soon, but there are a few details to work out. We’ll see what happens.