The Long Trail

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When I went to dinner tonight, I felt as though I was sleep walking. My body was moving and I was awake, but I didn’t feel very alive. I think this type of state is more typical on college campuses during this time of the year. There are only 39 more shopping days till Christmas and even fewer days left till the end of the semester. We are in the crunch time and every day is an adventure.

This morning it was still raining when I woke up. I had really no banter or conversation to share with Rob on our way to class – I was just tired. After my first class, I had a group meeting to work on a group policy paper due tomorrow. We got halfway done. Then I went back to my room to call a GE person about an internship, followed by lunch. Then I went back to class to watch the first half of group presentations. My group goes Thursday. The professor also announced our individual assignment for the next project is now due Friday, rather than next week. I am angry.

Somewhere between all that I was supposed to be studying for a Sociology exam I had this afternoon. The exam didn’t go too badly, but I think I could have done better. I did get a short break for dinner. Then it was off to more group meetings. I threw together a PowerPoint for our presentation and helped with some other things. Then my group from this morning came back and we worked on the policy paper. We found out we did a lot of it wrong and have to start over a bit. We decided to call it a night and pick up again tomorrow.

So now I am getting ready for bed. With any luck I will be up early tomorrow working on this policy paper. I also need to get my wash done, or my I will run out of clothes. After I get this policy paper finished and hand it in tomorrow night, I have another group meeting. Then I have to work on my individual assignment. I still am unsure of when I going home for Thanksgiving. Something tells me whenever I go, the work will follow me.

The End of Sony?

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Today Sony announced it will be pulling CDs with its controversial rootkit copy-protection scheme from shelves and halting production. For those of you who aren’t familiar – these CDs installed virus-like software to stop you from copying CDs that is impossible to remove. And there are now trojans out there latching onto this vulnerability corrupt your whole machine. While today’s announcement is the final step in a two week campaign of damage control, the bad press may hurt more than Sony’s music business.

Here’s just one example of how Sony may be shooting itself in the foot with copy protection. DVDFile recently wrote about some of the copy protection implemented in the Blu-ray format. They can restrict what players a disc plays on and revoke your privileges to view a disc you bought. It’s unlikely they’ll actually use all these features on movies. But its not hard to imagine them saying you can only play your PlayStation 3 games on one system.

I don’t know what Sony is planning, but they better be careful. They have a lot riding on the launch of the much-anticipated PS3 system and they will have to compete with a very strong showing from Microsoft. I have to say that all this copy protection talk has made me very wary and has me leaning towards the Xbox 360 rather than the PS3.

Newspaper Readership Down; Online Grows

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News.com has report on the growth of online media, largely at the expense of the traditional print media. This is a disturbing trend for the newspaper business and makes the work I’m doing at the Collegian pretty important. Studies like this emphasize the importance of getting the print media to adjust to serving two formats.

One thing that is interesting note in the article is that NYTimes.com has gotten 270,000 visitors to sign up for its TimesSelect service in 2 months. This is encouraging for the business side of things. Matched with the growth of online advertising, I think there may be a bright future ahead for online media.

T.O.’s Next Job

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I saw SportsCenter yesterday had this clever animation demonstrating how T.O. is unlikely to be picked up by many teams in the league, except maybe Denver. Maybe he will be looking for a career change. My friend Rob sent me this piece from Information Week. Supposedly this is a real memo from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Who knows, its pretty funny though.

To: Safra Catz; From: Larry
Safra: I’ve been thinking about our CFO situation since Maffei left, and I believe I have a solution. I think we should hire the former Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Terrell Owens for the position. Don’t get your back up; it makes sense for a lot of reasons. First, Owens is available right now, due to an unfortunate misunderstanding with his employer. Owens represents the Oracle mind-set in many ways: He’s an independent thinker, an aggressive go-getter, a win-at-any-cost player. Software and football have a lot in common: You have to have a quarterback (me), a strong running back (you), a receiver to pass to (Phillips), and linemen to block and run interference (you know, those other people). As CFO, Owens could be a ringer, in more ways than one. I suppose he doesn’t know much about corporate finance, but he can learn on the job. I have a feeling Owens and I have much in common, and I think we’ll get along very well. Besides, if we hire him now, I can hold onto him until I finally get my NFL franchise. Do you want to contact him, or do you want me to? Thanks. Let me know what he says.

I think hiring T.O. would be corporate cancer for Oracle. I hope they feel comfortable renegotiating his contract on a monthly basis. I assume this is just a joke, but the truth is T.O. might want to start looking at his options. I think he’s going to have a hard time finding good work in the National Football League.

Buckets of Rain

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Earlier today I decided to clean out my backpack. I had all sorts of old newspapers and trash in there. I also took out my umbrella, because it looked like it would be a nice day. That’s a mistake. In State College, there is always going to be rain and tonight was no exception. So I willingly got soaked for the walk back to my dorm. That will teach me a lesson, I guess. It seems funny we still get rain, considering it was snowing just 3 weeks ago.

Here I Go Again on My Own

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So I kind of took a break from blogging for a while and I think I am ready to get back into things. I think one of my mistakes in the past has been imposing too many rules on myself. Hopefully this new blog will be a little more freewheeling.

For starters, my name is Steve Clancy and I am a junior studying IST at Penn State. When I am not working on one of my many group assignments, I also work on the Learning Initiatives website and The Daily Collegian website. While I enjoy technology, I also have a passion for film and collecting DVDs.

Like I said, this is one of my many attempts at blogging and I think this should be a little more successful. I look forward to sharing some of my stories with you.

Turn Around with ASP.NET

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For the first time in a couple weeks, I am feeling pretty good about the status of my Collegian project. We have been toiling in PHP and mySQL for 3 months now and have very little to show for our work. I am not sure anyone at the Collegian is really too disappointed with us, but we are disappointing ourselves. The systems manager pointed out a project at USA Today, with a much smaller scope and a lot more resources, took 4 months. Still, I felt like we were stuck in the road. I have been waiting for some externality to happen that would jumpstart development. It did today and it came from an unlikely source: Microsoft.

When we proposed our project last spring, we used the concept of using open source software as a cost saving measure and a learning experience for students. And I did learn a good deal. Unfortunately neither myself or my partner on the project had a whole lot of coding experience. This makes starting from scratch on a new content management system very difficult.

We had been making our cake from scratch, the news advisor noted, and we need a cake mix. So we’ve decided we’re going to chose ASP.NET 2.0 as our cake mix. Microsoft’s new Visual Web Developer really impressed us and its free to boot. I actually have less experience with ASP, but I have found a wealth of resouces out there to help me catch up. A big selling point, though, was the master template system and some of the other controls offered.

We still aren’t completely sure how we’re going forward. I’m not sure whether we’ll use MS SQL Server. We may try to still use MySQL or we may scale back our proposal and use static pages for the time being. There wasn’t anything wrong with PHP and I would definitely use it other scenarios. I do think that ASP may end up being better for this situation though. The good thing is I am feeling better about the project now and I am actually looking forward to programming again.