the Sam Jackson College Experience

So, given that I am rarely updating this site, it’s all the more frustrating that I have to keep doing this reactive work to cover up for the problems that come when it keeps getting hacked. I’m not sure where the vulnerabilities are coming from, honestly; I’m not prepared to say it’s a hosting problem, or a wordpress problem, but I’m not sure. In each case someone has had root directory access (not su root, but /* root), and has filled my site with garbage. I only notice each time because Google and their malware prevention partners then flag the site and some helpful users lets me know… eventually. Other times the user numbers went down, but this time, not even. Not sure what that says about the quality of my visitors, or their human vs. robot crawler nature.

Either way, I should have fixed the problem, but it will take some time for me to get out of their poison file. In the meantime I still rank well and my pages are indexed, but you may get warnings. What it was this time was less bad that last, which was masked .htaccess injections which redirected people to malware; this was just an attempt to steal my very juicy PageRank to help boost spammy, evil people.

I hate bad, mean hackers

This afternoon I had the pleasure of going to a cozy Yale Daily News workshop with David Pogue ‘85 where we all gathered around a table in the boardroom and learned about Pogue’s unusual path to becoming the technology columnist for the New York Times (from musical comedy to tech journalist!) and then had a chance to ask some fun questions. Let me quote Pogue’s bio, for those who don’t know him:

the weekly personal-technology columnist for the New York Times and an Emmy award-winning tech correspondent for CBS News. With 3 million books in print, he is also one of the world’s bestselling how-to authors. He wrote or co-wrote seven books in the “for Dummies” series (including Macs, Magic, Opera, and Classical Music); in 1999, he launched his own series of complete, funny computer books called the Missing Manual series, which now includes 30 titles.

So, cool guy, influential in tech circles. The story of how he gave up on composing for broadway and turned to tech journalism seemed to be yet another chapter in the big book of “noteworthy people who had no idea of where they planned to go in life and ended up somewhere very different.” You can tell when someone starts off by insinuating that their remarks will be of questionable use to a niche audience (say, student journalists) because of the bizarre path they took to their final career. I’ve concluded that more people take crazy circuitous paths to their futures than realize it having heard that routine so many times at Exeter!

He is here I assume ostensibly for the Calhoun master’s tea he went to immediately afterwards (he was in Calhoun back when he was an undergrad); he is also doing a bigger gadget show-and-tell tonight. I have to do a lot of work so I decided to spend some time before dinner catching up and missing out on the tea because I’m assuming there will be a lot of overlap, but I may make it to the show-and-tell. My question to him would be about his remarks on the NY Times being ‘with the times’ as far as internet went–given that their lame paywall on the website just went down yesterday once they realized that it would bring more organic visitors deeper into the site and increase ad revenue. So maybe I’ll get a chance to ask him later.

In any event, this is just one of the many, many, many prominent and interesting people who come to Yale each week to give lots of public talks… my calendar is full with more in the days and weeks ahead.

It’s still pretty boring–check if you don’t believe me! My edits mainly consisted of changing ‘Exeter’ to ‘Yale.’ I also changed the tagline from ‘all the exciting parts, none of the rejection’ to ‘all the exciting parts, none of the heavy debt burden.’ It would be funnier were it not for all that debt! These cosmetic changes do make me think a little about the focus of this blog now; everyone would always ask me, ‘are you going to keep blogging when you get to Yale?’ and my answer was always ‘yes, of course.’

I like writing for prospective students etc. because I feel I can be a helpful resource for them, and I also like writing for my more professional audience because I like to imagine that some people listen to what I say and use my recommendations to make the admissions experience, or whatever I might be writing about, a little bit better. That split audience has always been a little tricky sometimes, but I see no reason to quit now. It would of course be easier to chart the direction of my blog (life?) if only I had some more reader participation, which is why I encourage you all to comment, comment, comment. Seriously, it’s painless.

First, I got a callback for one of the improv groups that I tried out for last night, The Purple Crayon! The Purple Crayon is the only group on campus that does long-form improv, which is where they take one suggestion and then create a whole show out of it. I think it’s absolutely fantastic and was blown away from the two shows of theirs that I went to. I tried out for the Ex!t Players too but that apparently didn’t go quite well enough to merit a callback. I am surprised to have gotten one for Purple Crayon as is. I don’t expect to make it past this next round of culling, but who knows? We shall find out soon enough. Icannot gush enough about how much I love the Yale improv groups, they’re all pretty uniformly fantastic.

I was also up much much too late last night working on a website for the Freshman Class Council elections, which you can see at http://www.samjackson.org/FCC. If you’re a freshperson in Trumbull reading this, please consider voting for me and joining the Facebook group! If you’re in Trumbull at all, consider voting for me for the YCC–many of my same ideas apply to both. And if you’re not in either, check it out anyways, I put a lot of time into it and puppies are involved.

Mashable had a great post today, “DOWNLOAD EVERYTHING: 30+ Firefox Add-ons For Downloading Images, Videos & Files” many of which are very useful–check it out if you’re a Firefox user (and if you’re not, check it out so you can see why you ought to be). But nestled within those embedded video downloaders and screen grabbing extensions was one which struck me as elegant in its simplicity and dangerous in its potential: Facebook Photo Album Downloader.

Promising to allow users to “easily download whole albums off Facebook” (it does) this should be a good reminder of how easily photos people upload to Facebook can just as quickly be pulled down onto users hard drives and travel from there anywhere in the world.

Be careful, people! I stopped warning people about the content of their facebook albums sometime last year after I found no one would respond seriously to the links to real-life accounts of life implosions and job disasters from Facebook content. Just think about it!