Trapped at Berkeley

Many of my friends have been raving about Pinkberry, a new chain of stylish frozen yogurt stores in New York and Southern California. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard about them; they only have a handful of locations and seem to rely upon word of mouth for advertising. That’s not to say that they need it: Pinkberry seems to have cultivated a nearly cult-like following among the people who have heard of them.

Personally, I don’t see anything special about Pinkberry frozen yogurt other than the ridiculous price. Sure, the use of fresh organic fruit and other items as toppings is mildly innovative, but it fails to make up for the lackluster frozen yogurt, which is offered in regular and green tea flavors. I found both varieties lacking in flavor and overly sour. Call me unrefined, but I much rather have a sundae from Costco.

As a frozen yogurt store, Pinkberry fails terribly. As a trendy boutique that attracts yuppie spenders, Pinkberry is wildly successful. I think Pinkberry is trying to do to frozen yogurt what Starbucks did to coffee. The only difference so far is that Starbucks started out with decent coffee.

Anyone who has ever worked on an engineering project is familiar with the endless number of specifications that can be submitted by a client. Sometimes the specifications have a crucial bearing upon project design, and other times the specifications are absolutely meaningless and have no bearing upon the project scope.

Lately, the number of specifications falling into the latter category has increased. I think clients are becoming lazy and not bothering to only submit specifications that apply to a certain project. Rather, it seems as if they just want to submit all the specifications they have available and hope that somebody on the other end will figure out which ones actually apply. Nobody seems to care about boiling down the specifications into what is important, and clients get all upset when some crucial detail they have buried in their mountain of specifications is accidentally overlooked. Furthermore, the sheer number of specifications often leads to contradictory information, puzzling both sides and delaying a project’s design.

As a project manager, I wish clients would produce a list of their most important or unusual specifications and rank them as crucial, flexible, or just a request. While I understand that this may be more initial work for the client, I think it’ll save them a lot of time and headaches in the long run. Having a priority list ensures that crucial details are addressed early in the design phase, keeping everyone happy.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve probably noticed that this site has been experiencing a lot of downtime in the past few days. My server hosting provider has recently installed a new firewall, which has been randomly blocking incoming Internet access. While it appears that they have finally been able to take control of the situation, I am greatly disappointed by their slow response time and their lack of communication with their customers.

I’m currently searching for a better VPS hosting provider. Any suggestions?

T-Mobile offers unlimited Internet access for compatible cell phones through their $5.99 a month T-MobileWeb package. The service allows you to check your email, chat on popular instant messaging networks, and download games and applications.

The email access is very useful. When I’m on campus without my laptop, I use my cell phone to check my personal and academic inboxes for new messages, and I can respond to important messages.

On the other hand, the ability to download games and applications is very disappointing. So far, every decent game I’ve found requires an additional fee of at least $5. You’d think that paying $5.99 a month would entitle you to download a game or two for free. Furthermore, there are no applications currently available to download.

I don’t think I’ll be paying for T-MobileWeb anymore.

UPDATE: I should note that the aforementioned games and applications were found by browsing T-MobileWeb’s main menu. You may use T-MobileWeb to open regular URLs and download J2ME applications, depending upon your phone. A nice selection of J2ME midlets can be found here.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 will also display games in wide-screen, high-definition format. It will be powered by three 3.2-gigabyte processors, compared with a single 733-megahertz processor in the current Xbox.
Eric A. Taub, The New York Times

Three 3.2-gigabyte processors? The new Xbox must incorporate some new computer methodology.

Why can’t a great newspaper like the New York Times hire people who actually understand technology to report about it?

I’m about as “fuck the status quo, change the dominant paradigm” as you can get. I think what the US did in Iraq was totally illegal, and that Bushie and his gang of international thugs should be treated just like we treated the Nazis after WWII: a perfunctory trial, then hangings all around. If I had to choose between having Bushie in the White House and Saddam Hussein in the White House, I’d pick Saddam without even thinking twice.
“As Seen On TV”, Slashdot Comment

Perhaps “As Seen on TV” hasn’t heard about Saddam’s mass graves…

I got this email today:

Dear Bowles Resident:

All current Bowles Hall residents who have applied for a 2005-06 housing contract and indicated a preference to return to Bowles Hall next year will not be able to return to Bowles.

Next year, Bowles Hall has been identified as a First Year Experience (for freshmen only) pilot program. This program is designed for new students to the University, with a particular focus on their successful transition to the University as leaders and scholars.

I’m upset that Berkeley Housing and Dining didn’t notify me sooner. I’ve been living at Bowles Hall for nearly two years, and I had wanted to live there for another year. Students were only able to specify five housing preferences on their housing applications, and I indicated Bowles Hall as my first choice. It’s too late to provide Housing and Dining with a revised list of preferences because housing decisions have already been made. Furthermore, I probably wouldn’t have applied for housing if I had known Bowles Hall wasn’t available. Now, Housing and Dining has pocketed my application fee, and I’m stuck in housing limbo.

The First Year Experience sounds totally stupid — some underworked staffer probably came up with this brilliant idea during a lunch break. One of the great things about living in the dorms is meeting returning students who have had experience with the university system and knowledge of the local area. For freshmen, these dormmates are often much better (and more easily approachable) advisors than the ones the university officially provides.

Why couldn’t the university make a theme program for this? Most of the freshmen who are going to be living at Bowles aren’t going to be interested — the success and popularity of similar programs at Bowles attests to that. Furthermore, Bowles Hall is probably the worst dorm for such a program: half of the residents live in singles, and we have the least common space of any dorm. Bowles Hall is not the best dorm to foster bonding between freshmen.

I’m betting this program is going to be shelved after a year.

I have to echo Matthew Haughey’s comments regarding admins taking down their servers for maintenance on a daily or weekly basis: is it really necessary? UC Berkeley takes down their online schedule and other services for a few hours everyday for maintenance:

I think taking down servers for maintenance is a great idea, and that more admins need to be willing to do that, but do you really have to do it on a daily basis? Most patches don’t even require a reboot, and new software packages don’t come out THAT often (and if you’re upgrading packages on a daily basis via CVS, you have bigger things to worry about).

Some wonderful tools are based upon Berkeley’s online schedule, and they are rendered useless when the server goes down for maintenance. While I thank the admins for at least remembering to perform the maintenance during the off-hours, some students - like me - need to check some schedule-related things early on the morning before class starts.

Yeah, yeah, this is a stupid rant. There are better things I should be doing, like donating cash to the Red Cross to help tsunami victims.

(14:00:44) JTShoes101: you might even be worse than bush!!!

I don’t know whether to take that comment as an insult or compliment.

Some people may take offense at my conservative views. I don’t believe in abortion. I don’t believe in gay marriage. I do believe in moral guidance. I do believe in individual responsibility; there should be no ‘free rides’. People should earn what they get. President Bush agrees with most of my views.

Admittedly, I don’t agree perfectly with President Bush. For moral reasons, I agree with invading Iraq, but I disagree with how we did it - we should have sent more troops and prepared ourselves for an extended occupation period. Like most Americans, I also agree that we need to defend our nation against terrorism, but I don’t think that Homeland Security and the Patriot Act are the appropriate means. Where was Homeland Security during the Washington D.C. area sniper shootings? If Homeland Security can’t protect us from a couple of lunatics, how does it plan on protecting us from well-trained terrorists?

In many ways, I’d probably be a much more conservative president than President Bush.

(22:10:55) tya084: its like trailor trash has become a physical characteristic that u can pass down