Help us (via tips) find out how to lead you to these!

According to @ColumbiaFoodPod—a twitter account that keeps CU students up-to-date on daily food truck prevalence whereabouts in Morningside Heights—we should expect two dessert trucks today. Both Cupcake Stop and Sweetery NYC will be parked on Amsterdam between 117th and 120ths streets.

No word yet on times, but tip us or write below in the comments if you see the trucks!

Update: @ColumbiaFoodPod has announced that the trucks will be around campus from 12 until 3 pm. Joining the sweet food trucks will be EddiesPizzaNY, TaimMobile, BistroTruck, and Mexicue. Talk about competition!

Unrealistic expectations via Wikimedia Commons.

Bored @ Butler is on indefinite hiatus, FML is fast becoming a distant memory, and the short-lived MLIA is only funny for about two minutes. With such scant options, Columbia students have decided to take the new frontier of internet procrastination for their own: Jin Ha, CC ’12, started a Facebook group entitled Texts from Last Night: Columbia. Although it’s only been in existence for a few days, the prospect of sharing their most embarrassing, explicit texts was simply too tempting for its 599 members. Columbia hasn’t seen so much sex since the halcyon days of pre-frosh Facebook groups.

Bwog’s Dane Cook (yep, it’s the same name, let’s just move on) reports from last night’s meeting.

The unceasing plea for student support at Columbia sporting events found voice yet again at the outset of Monday’s SGA meeting. Assistant director of sports marketing, Dan Spiegel, attended to encourage council members to attend Saturday’s homecoming football game against the University of Pennsylvania Quakers. Spiegel pointed out that the athletic department represents an especially unique element of the Columbia-Barnard relationship, and also noted the important contributions Barnard athletes bring to their teams under Columbia’s name. Citing lack luster attendance at last year’s event, he appealed to the council, “This is not just Columbia’s homecoming: this is your homecoming as well.” With the provision of free shuttle service and free admittance, Columbia athletics hopes more Barnard students will be at Baker this weekend to unleash the roar. 

Sharmin Ahmed, VP of Finance, took the floor to present recommendations following last Sunday’s co-sponsorship meeting. Seven groups pitched requests for co-sponsorship from SGA for specific club events, and after reviewing the appraisals the council allocated funds accordingly. Engineers Without Borders, the Chinese Students Club, Kappa Phi Lambda, the Muslim Students Association, and Club Dimensions can all expect their piece of the pie along with this year’s CU Dance Marathon. Sadly, however, the Table Tennis Club may have to go elsewhere for the $1,400 they sought to fund training from world class table tennis extraordinaire Wang Chen. Read more…

The health industry is corrupt!  Columbia-affiliated Dr. Martin Leon may have hidden millions of dollars from the university (NYT).

Northern countries are progressive!  The President of Finland advises all leaders to meditate (Spec).

Terrorism is still a threat!  Police retain Queens terror suspect (NY1).

In web journalism, stuff changes!  Spec weighs in on Bwog (Spec).

And finally, Martin Chalfie just couldn’t believe it when he won the Nobel Prize (NYT).

It may not be as fancy as Experience Columbia’s campaign site, but a CCSC 2009 class council member has tipped us off to the Council’s new-ish beta site (they haven’t advertised it widely, at least), which replaces the never-used, never-updated baby blue version of yore. This one, in patriotic red and cobalt, currently houses a few shreds of useful information–including an archive of resolutions presented in the last several years–and promises more. The 2009 section is a good place to go for your senior agenda, because a) who reads Mark Johnson’s e-mails, and b) graduation is too freaking close for comfort. Happy surfing!

The Freshman elections for Columbia College Student Council approach (Bwog is sitting on its hands for October 6th and 7th) and in order to keep you the voter informed, here is a recap of the six parties running and why they think
you should vote for them.

Candor Party

Facebook group size: 76

Website: Features a predominantly beige, grey and blue color-scheme and details on social events and some class-wide and school-wide changes that they want made.

Naive idea: “Pull the Plug Night” hopefully isn’t going to involved Columbia cutting out its power-grid.

Analysis: Definitely one of the front-runners in this election, at least in the highly inaccurate world Facebook polling, but elections are won by votes, not slick websites with cute pictures.  Read more…

Bwog operative and newly-minted alum Zach van Schouwen noticed something a bit uncanny when visiting the College’s homepage. The following photo, aside from giving the false impression that the 9 train is still running, which it is not, pictures the subway entrance as a grandiose marble affair, which it is not. (See below for visual confirmation and here for a larger shot.) ZvS also found insurmountable evidence something that might lead us to believe in the subway’s Photoshoppage in the form of what appears to be a 1 and 9 symbol that float in midair behind the entrance, as well as JPG jaggies around the white-on-black text. We just hope the class of 2012 isn’t too heartbroken when they find out what the subway entrance really looks like. The blood is on your hands, Columbia College.

(Reality is pictured at right.)

UPDATE: Some things we’ve learned:

• The movie poster on the background on the College’s subway is for Bait, which came out on September 15th, 2000.
  
• Also, noticed how the One sign in the background hangs off into oblivion. (There is no black background surrounding the left edge of the red circular “one.”)
  

Stay tuned, as we unearth this mystery.

Bwogger Lydia DePillis noticed that attempting to reach the Spec‘s website now brings one to the following message:

Ruh-roh. Has Spec not been footing the bill’s for its web presence? Or perhaps it simply went the way of the Barnard Bulletin, whose foray into the world of the Internet was all too brief.

Tipster Stephen Wang informs Bwog that Alma Mater is going to be offering permanent email addresses for its illustrious, tech-savvy alums and seniors. Users will get to choose their own display name (!) and the emails will be able to “enjoy all the features of Google’s Gmail

service while maintaining a Columbia address.” So a lot like what every current student has been doing for four years.

However, our emailing tipster already sends word of a technological slip-up: “You couldn’t sign up on the first day it was available… because it was broken, already.”

UPDATE: Seniors: nab your first name as your display name before someone else gets it first! Ready, set, go.

UPDATE 10:13 PM: Commenter reports that lee.bollinger@caa.columbia.edu. is taken. No word yet on the.butler.marxist, princeton.sucks, et al. Hurry, hurry!

 

In light of CCSC’s recent crusade against juicycampus.com, Bwog wanted to know if it were really possible to ban a website from the campus server. Apparently, it’s not. Resident computer expert and Bwog Web Master Zach van Schouwen explains why in the following bullet-pointed list:

• It’s expensive. They don’t have an existing filter in place, so they’d have to buy expensive, unreliable software
• We’re all forgetting the masterminds of SEAS. It would be approximately 30 seconds before any SEAS hack had a mirror of the site up that was accessible at a different address
• Proxy server. Let’s say you’re visiting Juicycampus. Normally your PC sends them a request, and they send back a website. A site blocker would prevent this request from going through. A proxy server is just a third-party server that you make the same request to; it then makes the request to Juicycampus and sends you the results. This can all be encrypted, too, in which case there’s no way for even a smart CU programmer to know what you’re doing.
• Google cache. You can get to any blocked site by looking at Google’s saved copy. Nobody ever thinks of this. (There are other sites like this too.)
• Tunneling out. If you have login access to any off-campus server, anywhere, you can easily log into it remotely and view the site. (Like, say, the Bwog server.)
• Mirroring. Juicycampus can just change their address, put up a mirror site, identify themselves numerically…
• Copying. Some intrepid kid could just create a site that copies all their content every five minutes.
• CUIT’s never made a practice of it, so it’d be pretty shocking if they shelled out the $1000s for a commercial-grade filter, slowed down everyone’s internet, and blocked a single site. Liberty University probably wouldn’t even do this, let alone… any real university.
  

“The Internet has created new forms of storytelling.  In some cases, the threat may prove fatal.”  What, pray tell, does he speak of?

 Toy Story: the defining allegory of our generation.

We won and we lost!  Hooray for a balanced perspective!

“Vocalist Shirley Simms remained largely silent.”  Good show!

Columbia’s housing selection process is SUITE.  Or not suite enough.

Bwog was stumbling around in the nether-regions of Craig’s List, a confusing place brimming with possibilities of love, sex, and felony. We’ve filtered out the best (and worst) of Columbia-related posts.

Dear Professor Amazing

The way you tear into a argument– you pounce on the main points, you toy with the subtleties– makes me weak. When you take off on one of your brilliant analyses of 19th c. literature, I absolutely swoon. I love the animation of your face, the delicacy of your hands, the precision of your language, the suddenness of your laughter.

Yes, I admit it: I have tuned out seminar discussions to wonder what kind of underwear you might have on. And yes, I have allowed myself a couple ridiculous fantasies in which, through some truly transparent plot device (costume party, your late-night lamp-lit office), I have found an opportunity to kiss you.

But this is reality. So, I shall quietly show up to class tomorrow, make a small remark about James, and be on my way.

Respectfully yours,

The Smitten Graduate Student 

More PG-13 Columbia-centric findings after the jump!

Read more…

Big news in the case for transparency in academia: Starting in the spring, CC students may be able to view the results of their course evaluations online—specifically colorful bar graphs illustrating the section in which students rank the class and the professor from 1-5. CCSC has been working on the project since last year, but ESC has already been doing this for quite some time with a program called Oracle. “Knowledge is power,” proclaims Oracle. Indeed!

Daily reminder e-mails make it pretty hard to forget that it’s course evaluation season, but CCSC Policy dude Alidad Damooei says that the spiffy new system will only become reality if you actually fill them out: “I am pretty confident that the project will come to fruition but the ONLY [his emphasis] possible threat is a low response rate,” Damooei explained in an email.

TAs, meanwhile, have been sweetly suggesting that their students do their academic duty and fill out the evaluations, especially if they’ve had a good time in the class. According to one source, the instructions they were given pronounce that “personal encouragement” is the best way to ensure a high participation rate.

In the realm of the internets, it seems that WikiCU has come to a crossroads –  with the site’s owner graduating in May and most of its editors being Columbia alumni, the future of WikiCU will depend on  either a “marketing strategy” of some some sort, or on someone else taking the reigns. While Columbia itself wants nothing to do with the site for liability reasons, the site’s most dedicated editors are considering  handing it over to some hopefully interested organization, or possibly recruiting moderators from campus, CULPA style. Bwog, meanwhile, is honored to have some mention in the open dialogue (which somehow becomes more amusing with each new rebuttal, if you’d like to read for yourself).

On a similar note, Collegewikis has been around for awhile, but the Columbia Wiki seems to be the place to bring pressing questions (all seventeen of them) such as, “Any recommendations for quiet restaurants where one can take one’s mother?” or cheesy surveys regarding everyone’s favorite professor.  Granted, users have to go through a somewhat annoying registration-and-confirmation process before being able to see any of the pages, and the scope of articles doesn’t come close to WikiCU, which has been around since spring of 2007.

While discussing the not-so-rivaling Wiki pages on the Bwog email threads, however, one staffer brought to our attention that College Wikis is in fact a “New Business Concept” entry into a Pace University entrepreneurship contest, and belongs to Harvard/Stanford Business School graduate Joe DiPasquale. His site rivals a couple of other Columbia-connected projects, including “the first truly environmental superstore” and a payment-receiving service for business owners. Somehow, those two (or the “Beer Pong Cooling Rack,” even) seem more useful/destined for success than a flimsy Wiki site, but hey, we just might be biased.

Bwog has recently been made privy to Grand Central, a Google-owned program that allows users to sign up for one number that will make all your phones ring when called (both landlines and cellphones). Grand Central also has numerous creepy/cool features like requiring people to state the reason for their call before getting to speak with you and allowing you to record calls at a moment’s notice (without the other person’s knowledge, natch.) But like any cool toy, this one comes with a warning:

“Note: If you choose to record, be sure to check your local laws regarding call recordings. Most states only require one party’s consent (yours), but others require both parties to consent. There are significant penalties for recording a call without the other party’s consent in these states so to be safe you should let your callers know you are recording the call. It’s the nice thing to do regardless. ”

Orwellian! We like!

Bwog Arts Editor Justin Goncalves explains that you can actually switch the number from your cell to your room’s ROLM phone (the thing you unplugged and stored under your bed on move-in day), and use the phone to make outgoing calls. Says Justin: “I realize I’m way too excited about this, but I feel like others should know. Save your cell phone bills!”

…meanwhile, Google nerds across the world sit and wait…their imminent reign quietly yet unmistakably approaching.