Oh, and I blog.

After being one of their first visitors and an avid reader since their start 3 years ago, today I am extremely fortunate to join the ranks of Onward State, the premier destination for Penn State, State College and beyond, as Social Media Manager. The blog has seen a fantastic rise in readership, a great improvement in quality and is slowly becoming a staple of Penn State life.

I am excited to be joining Onward State at a time when they’re expanding and where I believe that I can truly be beneficial to the operation. Along with Alex Federman, as we jointly occupy this new position, we will be hopefully taking it to the next level, and contributing to the great work that Onward State has done so far.

I hope to see you all at onwardstate.com, on Twitter or on Facebook pretty soon.

Following a Twitter post from OnwardState.com linking to a fresh story on their site, I registered this morning to attend TEDxPSU 2011.While the inaugural edition last year seemed to showcase all of the incredible minds of the community (be it PSU students or alums, State College folk, or international personalities), this year’s second edition is bringing a much-needed theme to the discussion. “Relics to Revolutions” has a great feel to it, and as this year’s TEDxPSU curator explains, there’s a lot to gain from a better understanding of our past:

With the past and the future becoming mere perspectives, we learn from our history in order to inspire and invent the future. (…) Encouraging mankind to think past the present, “Relics to Revolutions” will not belong to those content with the present, but to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. (Zach Zimbler, qouted by OnwardState)

I’m really excited about this conference and I already registered, I did it this morning, not even awake yet, through my iPhone’s Twitter client and its incorporated browser. Last year I sat through some of the most awesome presentations and more importantly I got to share in this with a great group of people that were eager to think and talk about new ideas and formats, some wildly visionary and others pragmatically to the point. I can’t wait for this year to see what challenges and enlightens me.

Now, seating is limited, so you better get on it real soon, by going to the TEDxPSU Attend tab and click on Main Event Registration. Good luck and I’ll see you all there, November 13th.

(Last year’s MC, Dr. Christian Brady, Dean of Schreyer Honors College, and all-around great person, seems to have been confirmed as this year’s MC as well, which makes this even more exciting)

When our lives aren’t exactly peachy, let’s add some color to them.

In true idiot fashion, as a barely tech literate technophile, I decided to be part of the million-downloaders that upgraded to the newest operating system for their Macs. My problems started with the download part which took forever (really slow internet connection + massive downloader pack = 24 full hours of waiting around) and not to mention practically crippled my battery. The installation itself was relatively painless, unless you count the fact that it started literally as I was going to bed and had given up hope on it finishing downloading, at 1 a.m. and took “approximately 33 minutes”, which in non-Apple terms means about 45 minutes.

Half-asleep and vaguely remembering the problems that other people had with it, I played with it a bit, and went happily to sleep. When I woke up this morning, all my scrollable applications were stuck on the first part (needless to say that finger scrolling is important when you have ~40 Firefox tabs open). After trying everything, I realized that all those “Oooooooooh noooooooo, the scrolling” posts on Twitter and Facebook where not inside jokes, but an actual issue.

So Apple decided to change the way scrolling works on Lion. But before that, there were many pundits that decidedly talked about how Lion is a step closer to iOS and how the next obvious step would be to combine the two and give the launch pad and the automatic restore option as examples of synergy. But most overlooked the little things. On of those little things is scrolling. Owning both an iPhone and a MacBook (Pro), I was really used to the user experience with both of them. I never stopped and thought about how I scroll on either of them.

The user experience difference is (or was) based on two different things. On the iPhone, it’s intuitive because you have your finger on the screen and you’re pulling the text, or whatever you’re scrolling, towards you, it feels like you’re actively and directly interacting with it. On the MacBook, for scrolling, you’re indirectly interacting with it, and it’s intuitive just like the qwerty keyboard, it’s legacy, that’s how you’re always scrolled on the mouse, even before the scrollwheel. What was before the wheel (on the mouse)? You would click on the scroll bar and pull the bar. However, the bar worked inversely to the text you were reading, i.e. when you’d pull on the bar towards you (thus down) the text would go up, and viceversa.  The wheel held on to that functionality and still dealt with the scrollbar as opposed to tackling the text, now that you didn’t have to click on the bar. That stuck on and that particular way of scrolling made its way to the pads people use on their laptops and even on their iMacs for Apple people.

If one thinks about it, the new inverted scrolling is not actually unintuitive. It’s very intuitive and not inverted at all, it’s you interacting with the text or image you want scrolled as opposed to the scrollbar. Yes, it’s hard to get used to, because as I said before the legacy way of doing things is much easier to use. However, just because it was the norm it doesn’t mean it was *actually* the easier way to go about it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m still struggling to scroll up in this post so I can correct a spelling error in the second paragraph.

a new version of this blog, more writing, you know, the stuff you’d like in a blog

This is a pretty cool visual of what THON 2010 was.

The Pennsylvania State University has decided that spring break will fall between March 8th and March 12th (counting only the weekdays) this year. I have decided that I will not be going anywhere. This means I’m spending a week in State College, PA, a town primarily heralded as being the home-away-from-home for the tens of thousands of students studying at PSU. This week, however, most of them are gone, making State College an empty shell. This is my story about that week.

The last weekday of Spring Break finally got here. You might wonder why I’m not counting the weekends that this week is in between. It’s because there’s a group of students that stay back during the weekend before break, and there’s a group of students that come back during the weekend after break, even if most students just get up and leave on Friday and come back late Sunday night right before classes. So it’s only about the weekday. And it’s the last day of the week already.

The rain that started at midnight the night before continued all day. The day was gloomy and walking around was totally out of the question. I wasn’t going to walk through the rain and the puddles, so I lingered around at home, trying not to get too upset about my really choppy internet (the reason for the really short post on Day 4). After counting the few people still in State College, I decided on meeting up with a friend from an organization, mixing business with pleasure.

He picked me up and we went straight to downtown for some sandwiches and banter at Irving’s. Good conversation and great food make time fly, especially if you’re in the basement where you can’t see the gloomy rain outside. He had some meetings and I needed to get back home, so we parted ways after he gave me a ride home.

A bit of cleaning around the house and some taking care of emails filled the time until 7:30 when I had planned a dinner. Low visibility due to the pouring rain and the fact that it was very dark made it hard to take the right turns. So we ended up at a different place that was just as good.

After that I watched some TV and went to bed. It’s hard to glamorize and blog about a day that had lunch and dinner as its major happenings. And this was the problem with this whole week. While it started as an experiment on the what it feels like to spend Spring Break in an empty college town, it turned out to be an experiment on how excruciatingly difficult it is to squeeze something interesting and blog-worthy out of dull days. And since I didn’t ask any of my friends about whether I was allowed to mention them, some actually asking to be kept out, I had to make it even duller, taking out names of people, places and even taking out whole conversations or events.

In any case, this is the last post about this Spring Break. Now it’s back to, hopefully, more interesting posts about relevant stuff.

- end of day 5/5 -

The Pennsylvania State University has decided that spring break will fall between March 8th and March 12th (counting only the weekdays) this year. I have decided that I will not be going anywhere. This means I’m spending a week in State College, PA, a town primarily heralded as being the home-away-from-home for the tens of thousands of students studying at PSU. This week, however, most of them are gone, making State College an empty shell. This is my story about that week.

It was supposed to rain. It didn’t. Not until 1:00 am. My internet was bad all day. I was bored and walked around, had food, walked some more, came back home, went out, had a drink, came back home. In general was bored. That’s it.

- end of day 4/5 -

The Pennsylvania State University has decided that spring break will fall between March 8th and March 12th (counting only the weekdays) this year. I have decided that I will not be going anywhere. This means I’m spending a week in State College, PA, a town primarily heralded as being the home-away-from-home for the tens of thousands of students studying at PSU. This week, however, most of them are gone, making State College an empty shell. This is my story about that week.

Today was supposed to be rainy. I know this because I watched the local news. WJAC TV is very entertaining, and their weather team is trustworthy. At least that’s what they claim. Not very trustworthy if you ask me, since it only rained for about an hour or so at 9 pm. So as soon as I saw that it was actually just cloudy, I took to the streets.

It’s kind of hard to come up with original descriptions of an empty campus more than twice, so I’ll spare you another round of laments about closed buildings and streets that seem to be widening due their lack of circulation. Instead I’ll tell you about how I remembered something I forgot to mention about racquetball yesterday. As a very recent glasses-wearer, yesterday was the first time I played a sport (an official sport, at least) while actually wearing my glasses. At first I tried the protective large sports glasses that go over your actual glasses and felt just a bit weird as the ball kept wooshing by my racquet. I then tried with just the protective glasses that replace your actual glasses. The ball kept wooshing by, but intertwined with me actually hitting it from time to time. And then I took off any kind of vision-adjustment mechanism and was able to hit the ball much better, but still very bad. And I finally realized I never had good hand-eye coordination, anyway. So much for not wasting your time with this post, huh?

Back to today. Campus-walking ended with a short tour of the University Park Libraries, from the one at the Law School to the main one, to the one in the Engineering building in search of books for friends. Late lunch at the Corner Room and a siesta on the patio of Starbucks off of College Ave followed suite. Maybe it’s because the streets were empty, maybe it’s because they were wearing bright clothing, maybe it’s because of something else, but the local drunks and beggars were very evident and very friendly. Too friendly for our tastes. We decided to “take the party somewhere else” and went to see a movie at one of the local cinemas. And since romantic comedies were out of the question for a group of guys, we went with the action comedy CopOut, and spent an hour and a bit laughing. We tried to keep the funny going as we got to one of our houses, but the premiere is only next week, when we’re back to normal life.

So today was basically just as uneventful.

- end of day 3/5 -