I’ve never really gotten into the whole, movie-watching-on-a-PC idea (mostly because the selection on iTunes - not to mention the price - is useless). With the exception of a few high-budget blockbusters (which, coincidentally, also means prices 40-50% higher), it’s mostly gaudy science fiction, or the equivalent quality of most Lifetime movies.

Yet were I not college-bound in a few-months time, I might actually consider investing in the Roku player from Netflix. It’s relatively cheap at $100 (compared to $200+ for the AppleTV), and requires nothing but an internet connection and a subscription to a Netflix plan. You can’t browse the selection from the device, however - you instead have to create a new “internet queue” from your computer, where you select which titles are available to the device.

I have to say though, they skimped on the style factor here. Plus, I absolutely hate tiny remotes. I lose them…

What do you guys think? Worth it to shell out the $100 bucks if you’ve already got a Netflix account? What about you AppleTV users out there - did you make the right decision in buying it?

via WashingtonPost

I’m sitting in the Downtown Mudhouse right now, facing the desktop they have set up there, and having far too good a time. What do most people do when they get on a computer at an internet cafe? One of two things. They either A) Check their email, or B) Check Facebook. But the good folks over at Mudhouse can’t have people on Facebook, taking up the computer for hours…

Now some (such as the Charlottesville City School’s tech department) deal with this problem by simply blocking the offending site. But whoever is in charge of that desktop at the Mudhouse has too developed a sense off humor for that. You see, if you try to visit Facebook on that particular computer, you are redirected to the websites of various non-profit organizations, such as Computers4Kids, or some Linux webpages.

And I must say, it’s far too amusing, watching someone sit down at that computer, set on checking their Facebook profile. Strawberry-Banana smoothie in one hand, the mouse in the other, they open up Firefox. They start tapping on the keyboard. Enter.

Cue: Head-tilt.

The still-unsuspecting individual then hits the back button. They type the address in again. Click.

Cue: Hands flying up in the air, resting on their head.
Cue: Contortion of face, first of surprise, then of anger. You can almost hear the curses they utter at the computer in their mind.

And this is how I spend my Wednesday afternoon… I’m not creepy…

I’m down to the last five days of my high school education.

Wow.

To be honest, I hadn’t really noticed until today. Up until now, I’d just continued to go through the motions of school: going to class, not going to class, doing the minimal amounts of homework associated with senior year… But now that the yearbooks have come out, and people have started asking me to sign them, I’m realizing how big this is: these next two weeks are the last during which I’m regularly going to see all these people. Some of them, people I’ve known since 3rd grade, when I was just a scared little 9-year-old, fresh from Minnesota. After this, everything’s going to change…

Tonight, Dessert Theatre 2008 opens. Tomorrow, it will close. My last production at Theatre CHS will be over - no more tech weeks, no more “dressing to the nines” on opening night. The lights will go down, the costumes put away, and the goodbyes said - and it will be over. Every Dessert Theatre closing night for the past three years, I’ve watched the seniors stand around, saying goodbye to the Black Box. Most crying. And I always think, “I don’t want to be that senior. I don’t want to say goodbye - I couldn’t handle that. I still have three years left here.

two years.

one.”

And now, there aren’t any more years left. I can’t just say, “There’s still next year. I don’t have to deal with it yet,” because this is it - I have to deal with it now. Now’s the time to say goodbye to all of these people - some old friends, others new - but all people I’ve realized I feel connected to on a level I didn’t image was possible. People that got me through the drama and trauma of high school life - who confided in me, and helped me through all those seemingly insurmountable roadblocks. People I’ve loved, people I’ve hated. People that mean the world to me. People.

I know I’m moving on to bigger and better things - goodness knows I’ll meet new friends, create new bonds. Grow even more into the person that I am. But these people around me now - they have guided me and shaped me more than I’ll ever truly realize. I don’t know how to thank them for that. There’s no way to thank them enough. I can’t even promise I’ll remember their names and faces ten years from now. But I know I’ll never forget what they meant.

So thank you, everyone. You won’t be forgotten.

So I’ve been putting off submitting my housing application for NYU - mainly because I hadn’t decided what dorm I wanted to live in yet. But I finally sat down today, and made my top five choices for residential halls:

Weinstein
Hayden
Goddard
Rubin
Brittany

So, with this important step in my college preparatory process complete, I finally made my way over to the NYU Housing Application. Question 1: Gender Identity. “Please enter whether you would like to be assigned a room based on your legal gender, or a different gender with which you identify.” Easy enough. But in the drop-down list, there were only three options:

1. Female
2. Gender Identity Male
3. Gender Identity Female

“What, I can’t just be plain old male?” I ask. It’s then that I look up at the top of my application, and see this:

Apparently, NYU thinks I’m a girl. No joke. I suppose with thousands of incoming freshmen, something on someone’s application was bound to get messed up. But my gender??? *sigh* - I suppose I’m going to have to call someone about this…

I am getting so fed up with these internet filters. Youtube and MySpace have been blocked at Charlottesville High School for over a year now, but our dear friends in the school’s IT department have just recently decided to ban Facebook. And boy, is everone upset. You see, we often use laptops in classes at CHS - to work on powerpoints, do research; we even blogged in my 10th grade English class. Naturally, high schoolers spend about 70% of that time on sites other than those select few academic ones they’re supposed to be navigating.

Solution?

BLOCK FACEBOOK!!!! Hahaha! That will teach those little snot-faced teenagers a lesson. They will know the wrath that is the Charlottesville City School’s filtering capabilities!

Sure, they might stop visiting Facebook and start doing their work. More likely, they’ll find a way around the filter using knowledge no more complex than a simple subdomain switch, using the iPhone version of Facebook (which they didn’t bother to block), or even more likely just go back to playing Flash games all period (remember those?).

Not surprisingly, teachers are also upset about the ban (and they have less free time to find a way around it). Yes, teachers use Facebook for legitimate educational purpose. Same goes for YouTube. Ever heard of using video as a learning tool? But I suppose the IT department deluding themselves into thinking they’re actually preventing slackage among the students is more important than letting the teachers do their job innovatively.

I say all this in an only slightly off-topic response to Congressman Mark Kirk’s proposal to ban Second Life in all libraries and schools - a game he says is riddled with sex and is a breeding ground for online predators, endangering children. Ignoring the fact that only about 10 percent of predators meet their victims online, and maybe the goverment should focus on making the real world safer before obsessing over a statistically tiny minority of cases, this is just another example of conservative fanatics attacking what they deem unsanitary lifestyles (apparently Second Life has a fairly active “adult” second), using child safety as an excuse.

If you want to protect children, Mr. Kirk, do something useful and work on actually protecting them in their physical environment. This effort to ban Second Life isn’t going to stop kids from using the site. Nor will it protect them.