umbc underground

Today, Friday May 16 from 1pm to 4pm at Flat Tuesday’s.

From http://www.umbc.edu/blogs/digitalstories/2008/04/umbc_celebrates_international.html

On Friday, May 16 UMBC will participate in the International Day for Sharing Life Stories, a day being celebrated around the world through the sharing of stories in gatherings and virtual environments. UMBC students from classes in Media and Communications, the New Media Studio, Modern Languages & Linguistics and the English Language Center will present digital stories they have produced this semester. This gathering is open to all and will be held Friday May 16, 1-4 p.m. at Flat Tuesdays (Commons).

Tentative schedule includes presentations from MLL, ELC and MCS students as well as stories from CCBC’s Katrina writing project. RL-TV and the New Media Studio’s “Charlestown Digital Stories” project will also be highlighted.

This event is sponsored by the Media and Communications Council of Majors, the English Language Center and the New Media Studio. For more information on the International Day for Sharing Life Stories visit: http://internationaldayblog.storycenter.org

Nice — so, there is going to be an event for getting rid of all that junk we’ve all acquired over the last 8 months.

Donation Day is this Sunday (May 18th) from 12-5 on Erickson Field.  It’s sponsored by the Food Bank I’m pretty sure.  Bring out non-perishable foods, clothes, books, CDs and anything else you aren’t going to use but may be of use to someone else.

There should be some free food, and by donating at least one item you’re allowed to go through the donations of others and see if there’s anything you can use yourself.

Also, if you’ve got big stuff that you don’t feel like taking out to Erickson Field, email your CD.  I have a feeling all the dorms have specific times when a truck will be parked outside to collect donations, which your CD will know about.

Just wanted to remind everyone that RSA will be sponsoring Midnight Desert in the Dining Hall tomorrow, Tuesday, May 13th from 11pm to 1am. It’s usually a lot of fun because there is always a big turnout. I find it a great way to relax and celebrate the end of classes - you know, calm before the storm kinda thing. Desert is free but it will be Bring Your Own Appetite.

I know we’re all doing professor evals in classes these days, and those get annoying quickly, but I’m asking for some help from readers to fill out one more. I’m looking for some feedback about UMBC Underground.

Although I’m getting out of here in… snap! 10 days! … I’d really love to hear what people are thinking about this site because it’ll live on next year and will likely under go some construction and reconstruction this summer.

So.  Yeah, what do people think?  What did you like about this site this year, and not like?  What should be taken out, what should we do more of, or what could be added?  Just say whatever you think, if you don’t mind.  Next year, this site will be headed by some of the same people as this year, and some new people, too.  Whatever thoughts people leave will definitely be taken into consideration as we try to make this site even better for students next year.

Oh, and don’t forget your two-digit major code.

Just kidding.

UMBC is currently considering the fast track creation of an Army ROTC program on campus. This would create a Department of Military Sciences, which would be given space on campus, conduct classes for ROTC members, and place military personnel on campus as instructors.

Two campus wide meetings to discuss this plan are tentatively schedule for Tues, May 13 and Wed, May 14. Final time and place TBA.

There is also a petition already set up for those who are looking to voice their opposition to this.

There were articles about this in InsideCharmCity.com and the Baltimore Sun last week. I personally thought we already had an ROTC program here, so this is all news to me.

Anyone with feelings/opinions on this matter is more than welcome to share. I’m sure there will be many passionate responses on an issue like this, so I’ll remind everyone to please play nicely. This story seems to be in the works, so we’ll keep you updated as it progresses. I’m sure TRW will have something about this tomorrow, too. Thanks.

EDIT: There are two meetings next week for the campus community to discuss this opportunity: Tuesday, May 13, at 1:00 p.m. or Wednesday, May 14, at 12:00 noon. Both will be held in the UC Ballroom.

Some of you may remember a few weeks ago when I posted about the potential for student orgs to publish public Google Calendars.  Well, I want to share some of the other ways Google’s converted me from my usual online tools.  I really wish I knew about these a long time ago - hopefully it’ll help some people out there.

Gmail

Most people I know have created an account, and for good reason.  Gmail accounts have ridiculous amount of space (I’ve had my account since 2004 and am only using 12%), easy to use search (that actually works), convenient labeling (keep emails organized), embedded chat feature with other contacts (gmail had it first, facebook), a solid spam blocker, and I’ve never had a problem with getting my mail when WebMail is acting funky.  That list is short, but possibly most important for students is a Gmail account won’t dry up on you post graduation (if I’m wrong about this, if alumni keep their accounts forever, someone please correct me).  I understand many times you have to give your umbc email for school things - just forward your umbc mail to Gmail.

Gmail Tour

Calendar

Access everywhere, really convenient “quick add” feature (type in something like, econ final monday 1-3, and it will create the event for you), potential to add other public calendars, share calendars with those who need to know what you’re doing.  Freaking sweet.

Google Calendar Tour

Google Reader

Just discovered this one a few weeks ago.  It’s an RSS feed gatherer.  So… instead of going to check for updates from the 10 sites you check frequently, Reader just gathers new posts for you.  Everything in one place = max convenience.  ALSO, you can quickly email posts to people using your Gmail contacts, or “share” something which means others can see it.  The getting all your feeds in one place is the best though.  So many times there’s a website I’ll find that I think is cool, but am not going to remember to check back periodically.  Now I don’t have to remember.

Google Reader Tour

Google Notebook

Wow, I wish I had known about this when I wasn’t so far in school.  I used this tool a lot for researching for final papers these past two weeks.  You basically create a folder for small snippets of info you want to keep together.  So, when I was going through a ton of PDF’s to find quotes for research papers, I would just highlight the text I wanted to hold onto and “clip” it in the notebook.  That would be created as a new entry where you’d have the text, where it was from, and a link to get back to the source.  You could also add comments to the text (or image or whatever) and sort it by labels.  There’s a handy Firefox Addon that can sit on the bottom status bar for easy access, too.

Google Notebook Tour

Google Bookmarks

So, until recently, I’d been loyal to del.icio.us to organize my bookmarks, but I’m diggin’ Google’s bookmarks.  There’s a convenient star button on Google’s Firefox Toolbar addon (not unlike del.icio.us’ add on buttons), but Google’s Web History pushed me over the edge.  Web History is a tool that will keep track of the sites you visit when you’re logged into Google.  Not a huge deal if you’re using the same computer for everything, but has been great when I’ve found something at work or in the library that I forgot to save and wanted later. It’s really easy to save these pages as bookmarks from Web History, and to sort clippings in Notebook to certain Bookmark folders, too. It’s also really easy to import bookmarks from your browser — and probably from other places like delicious (didn’t try that though).

Google Bookmarks

Remember the Milk - for Gmail

I’ve been a RTM user for a while.  It’s got a clean layout, intuitive keyboard shortcuts, and has offline accessibility.  I was really surprised (and thrilled, of course) to learn that there was the possibility to embed RTM into Gmail.  I’m not even going to try to explain all the features this has, or why it could be a great tool for anyone with a lot to juggle (college students, anyone?), so just check out this screencast - it explains almost everything.

Google Docs

I gotta jet in a sec, so here’s a quick run down of why Google Docs is awesome and should be used more.

• Keep your docs with you, no matter where you are.  Flash drives are nice, but it’s nice to not have to worry about them, too.
• No more worrying about sending docs back and forth through email, worrying about the most recent copy.  Just share a document with someone else, then you can both edit it and Google will keep a revision record so you can go back if you need to.  Much less confusing.  I wish professors would use this instead of Blackboard or emailing documents.
• You can open .doc files, .ppt files, and excel files IN Docs, making it easy to just save it online instead of downloading it to your HD and putting it on a flash drive or emailing it to yourself or whatever.

Google Docs Tour

There were other things I wanted to mention, but I gotta run.  Google Scholar is great for researching, Blogger is pretty solid, Desktop is handy, and Picassa for organizing photos online.  Here’s a full list.

I think a lot of this stuff could be very useful for student groups and individual students, and hopefully was at least informative.  As always, comments welcome.  Gotta go, peace out everyone.

Today - Friday, May 9th - Lambda Chi Alpha will be putting on an Alcohol Education program at 7pm in Commons 331. There will be a guest speaker and alcohol jeopardy. The prize for jeopardy is an iPod Nano and an iPod Shuffle. Hope to see you there!

The Fee Forum is going to take place today at Free Hour.

It looks like, overall, the proposed fees (that is athletics, transportation and commons fee, student activity’s fee) are going up by 4%.   The student activity fee is proposed to stay the same at 78 dollars a semester.

The Honor’s College will be hosting it’s annual semi-formal dance this Friday, May 9th, which is FREE and open to the entire campus! This year’s Mirror Ball is co-sponsored by the SGA. Thanks SGA!

The Mirror Ball will be held in the Skylight Room. The doors open at 8:00PM, the party begins at 8:30PM. There will be a dance floor again this year, so come ready to dance! Or not dance, if you are so inclined. Did I mention the event is free? A variety of delicious light refreshments and dessert will be served. No tickets are necessary, just come dressed appropriately, bring your friends, and expect to have fun!

Blah, busy, busy.  I’ve had a few articles I’ve wanted to write for a week or so now, but… yeah.

Oh, hey.  I forgot.  I want to do a huge yard sale/swap before the end of the year.  Everyone always starts to move out and realizes they don’t have enough room so they just trash stuff.  What if there were a few places set up around the res halls and apartments where people can take their stuff to trade with others or just give stuff they don’t want away.

I think it might be tough to have just one location, especially if people have a ton of stuff they don’t want, so maybe we could have one like… between Potomac/Patapsco and the DH (for people in SUS, PMC and PAT), and then one like… in front of Chesapeake or something, for HBR, ERK and CPK people.

Problems I’m envisioning:

• What happens when you want to look around at stuff other people have.  Then you have to leave your stuff.  I don’t really think anyone’s going to steal anything (I’d hope not at least, we should be able to be adults at this point), but if someone saw something they wanted to trade you for you’d have to keep an eye out so you could come back.
• If I lived in Potomac, for example, I’d want to see what was going on in front of Chesapeake or in the apartments.  Maybe we could stagger the times?

Or maybe we just take stuff we don’t want but others might want outside, leave it there, walk around and see if there’s anything from other people’s piles we want, and then deal with our hopefully smaller-than-original pile of stuff at the end.  That way you could just take from other people’s piles and they could take from yours - but since it’s stuff you wouldn’t mind living without, everything’d be cool.

Anyone think this idea would be worth it, or have suggestions for making it better?  I was thinking we could do it on Reading Day maybe.  Just an idea - what do people think?