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

I was recently having a little debate with Diana over at the Digital Natives blog about how best to manage online identities as a teenager, inspired by Lifehacker’s recent post about managing digital reputations. My main point of agreement was about ‘becoming the source’ for information about yourself, and how important it is to maintain a high-profile place for positive information control. I do that very well with this website–google ’sam jackson’ and you’ll see I’m the fourth result–but right before I saw Diana’s post, I had decided I wanted to cover some other bases.

It’s midterms time here at Yale, and while some people like to go out and shop or buy things to de-stress some, I opted for another route: buying a few domain names. I went to gratuitous lengths to try to acquire a few I’ve been negotiating over for ages, with continued failure. But I did go ahead and buy www.SamuelAJackson.com and www.SamuelABJackson.com. I remain bitter that I don’t have the funds to acquire samjackson.com, or samueljackson.com, etc.

I wish I had been a little older–or a lot wiser–when I was younger, because I would be a lot richer now for my domain purchases if that had been the case. But, in case anyone is ever searching for my full name, I now have some good insurance. These wouldn’t really rank, of course, and I will just have them redirect back here for now. Still–pays to try to cover as many angles as possible, and it’s really pretty cheap. Certainly a much lower down payment now than there will be later, if you have to try to buy a domain off someone or do damage control from high-ranking bad PR.

For a good place to start investigating how to control your public identity online, check out both that lifehacker post and danah boyd’s musings on the subject last fall.

What would college be without participation in random psych experiments?

I won’t be able to personally answer that question because I’m going to have to be a guinea pig in some experiments in order to meet the pretty easy lab requirement for my intro psych course, taught by the excellent Marvin Chun. Signing up for the ‘experiments server’ there is a one hour intro survey which counts for a credit of participation. Some of the questions were normal, but some were pretty weirdly specific. The first two big sets were about spiders and snakes, which questions like:

If I came across a spider now, I would get help from someone else to remove it. T/F

Although it may not be so, I think of snakes as slimy. T/F

I am terrified by the thought of touching a harmless snake. T/F

I would be somewhat afraid to enter a room now, where I have seen a spider before. T/F

And I’m just thinking to myself… are most of the studies the psych department is doing this fall about spiders and snakes? Maybe this is the norm for such things; I have no idea. Some of the sociological questions were pretty creepy, too: “Its OK if some groups have more of a chance in life than others.” (1-7) or “Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups.” Scary.

Lastly, I kept finding the phrasings really funny as the later sections used the term ‘close others’ to describe some weird friend-romantic-family-amalgam with whom one might share secrets, turn to for support, etc.

Anyway I didn’t sign up for any of the first few studies because of timing, but hopefully I’ll have some fun ones to report back about. I can’t get any money for anything I do for credit, but some could be fun on their own. Hopefully.

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.