This was a fairly straight-forward use of the Google Maps API and jQuery, but with a few interesting constraints. Google Map’s standard popup boxes had to be replaced with the popup you see pictured for branding purposes, and the coordination between clicking on a search result and zooming in on the marker had to be smooth and seamless. Finally, unlike most store finders, this one allows you to enter any type of location that is accepted by google maps (zip code, city, or street address) making a simpler user interface and more room for unexpected user input.

Every year since USG has had a website, the new administration has made a new one. After five consecutive failed attempts to create a useful website, I developed a strong web presence for the USG that students found extremely useful. This project coincided with SBUlife.com. A major issue for USG is the ease of uploading and updating content. WordPress is the perfect solution for a future-proof website that almost anyone can maintain. We based the organization of the content on the Associated Students of the University of California (http://asuc.org). I’m proud to say that we have a solid and scalable product that can fit the needs of USG for years to come. Finally, another step towards consistency.

When I was a freshman at Stony Brook, I realized that I had no easy way of keeping track of my meal plan. I could check the balance, but that didn’t tell me much about my spending patterns. To solve this, I created a little neat PHP application to login to CampusDining.org with cURL and fetch my balance. Once I had a really simple text-based app working, I started telling friends about it, and they are hooked now too. I have redesigned the app, and soon it will be integrated into SBUlife. For now, check it out at http://dmazza.net/mealplan.php

   In case you haven’t heard, BuddyPress is the latest addition to a series of grassroots social networking software. BuddyPress is no more than a few months old, and just recently out of beta. The concept of a Stony Brook social network has been around almost as long as BuddyPress. I spent months looking for the perfect solution to host a robust campus event system, much like the events application on Facebook. After looking seriously at Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, I found that there is no particular piece of software made for this purpose, but most content management systems have event plugins available. The other social networking solutions, such as Ning, do have event components, but the software itself is unbearable.

   I found BuddyPress completely by accident after already choosing to work with Joomla. I was looking around for better event plugins for Joomla, and I stumbled across a BuddyPress site that was using a primative WordPress events plugin. On that day I decided to switch to BuddyPress, and soon after someone began developing the events component I was looking for.

   BuddyPress 1.0 was released just a few weeks ago and it’s already getting a lot of attention. It is stable and awesome enough for VW to base its cool new TankWars website on BuddyPress. TankWars disables most of the features of BuddyPress, but they have made very similar design modifications to the ones I have made on sbulife. They only allow sign-ups through Facebook Connect, and they have removed most of the redundant navigation. This means that not only is BuddyPress officially awesome, but that sbulife is also awesome, because we have made BuddyPress even more user-friendly. And the highly paid developers at VW can back me up on that. So, where is my check?

The Statesman printed this piece in their first issue of volume 13 on Friday September 19, 1969. It was printed in a special feature section called “The Freshmen Herald.”

As man and boy I have watched Stony Brook evolve from a drive-in movie theater to a used car lot. The rumors that it exists is being investigated. Stony Brook, is itself being investigated; SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] is being investigated; the Statesman is being investigated; and State Senator Ozzie Mandias is going to investigate you, kid. You will inevitably be investigated because you are ripe for investigation. Which brings me to the point: you can always find yourself in hot water if you do not know how to…

RULE NUMBER ONE: Be cool. As man and boy I have watched John Toll for two years, and he watched me for two years, which brings us to the year 1965 when my parents were complaining about taxes and prices and the Prices, who lived next door, were complaining about me. It seems that I fell into the habit of watching the chimney on Christmas Eve, waiting for Santa. Little did I know that Santa was down the street visiting the children who had been perceptively better than I, which brings us to…
RULE NUMBER TWO: Santa will not find you, you must find Santa. You will all graduate in 1973, and by 1973 we will either have a new president or we will have the same president. In either case, the sun will not set on some discontent. Now if you were good kiddies, and read The New York Times, you read that we had a sit-in, and a riot, and an ad in The Times. But no matter how hard you read, and no matter how tediously you scoured the articles, you will never know what happened here. Why? Because you weren’t there. I was there and even I don’t know what happened. And if I don’t know what happened, how can anyone know what happened. And no matter what you read here, we’re not sure.
RULE NUMBER THREE: Be there. Whatever side you’re on be there and don’t hit anybody. Hitting is in direct violation of rule number one. And now down to the brass tacks, which can be painful or helpful, depending on how you use them. Stony Brook is the metaphysical midpoint between Harpo Marx and a premature baby. Stony Brook was not conceived, bred, passed through embyonic and fetal stages, and then born. No. It sprang from the brow of Nelson Rockefeller fully armed and fully confused, and it was thrown upon the world like an eight foot giant with the mind of a two year old. Which brings us to the observation that very often we deal with six-foot giants with the minds of two year olds; in the faculty, Administration, and even in the student body. And the best way to deal with a two-year-old is to…
RULE NUMBER FOUR: Give him his bottle. You take it from there.
Oh yeah, Social life, dating, broads, guys, the whole bit. The best thing you can do is to read Harold Rubenstein’s movie reviews and to take it from there. When the right movie comes up, get working. Remember dances are moods, not hops. A Hop is something that went out long, long, ago. And girls, if you’re looking for a respectable husband who will serve you well, John Toll is single. Which leads us to believe that…
RULE NUMBER FIVE: Nothing is impossible. This freshman class is probably the most sophisticated that this school has seen. You probably don’t need any advice. And when you finally come to the point where you are standing somewhere and tell yourself, I don’t need any advice, you will either be made a university president or you finally won. It certainly paid to buy Park Place didn’t it?
- EVERETT EHRLICH

Source: Statesman vol. 13 no. 1

This story began when I found out that our Career Center is a close partner with the scam widely known as Vector Marketing. They are a company that uses college students as independent contractors to sell Cutco knives. Although their current business model is considered “legal,” their practices are less than ethical not to mention their recruitment methods, which you have all experienced first hand. Although the word about this particular scam has reached most of us, the Career Center at Stony Brook has a very different opinion about Vector Marketing, which throws the legitimacy of this Partnership Council into question.

My biggest issue with Vector Marketing is the way they attract students, both in the content and quantity of their posters. It is usually advertised as part time work, big money and $17.25 for something (sounds awesome to me). I shouldn’t need to remind you. We find this all over campus, in bus stops, on student poster boards, in academic buildings and right outside of the career center. They also tile the posters, which is specifically in violation of the “1 poster per board” policy. I have yet to find out if they have permission from the university to hang any posters at all, which is an entirely separate issue.

I had an interview with the Career Center, who has been vehemently defending Vector Marketing via email. They continued to defend them without much regard for my concerns today. They mostly did this by claiming that all of the companies they work with have had questionable histories, and that it is not their position to judge these companies. They persistently diverted the focus from Vector Marketing to other direct sales companies who they assumed I would trust. About 20% of students who try it out have success with Vector. Apparently Vector is justified in having vague advertisements because of the stigma that is associated with sales. They hope students will come with an open mind If they don’t reveal that it is sales, or commission pay. The career center says this is an excellent marketing technique because it makes students look for more information. They think this is perfectly ethical.

Well, maybe not perfectly ethical. The Assistant Director of the Career Center did sympathize with me to some extent. She says they have had multiple talks with them over the years about their advertising techniques on campus, including a meeting just in January. Since then she claims they have reduced the number of posters they put up because “more posters doesn’t mean better results,” although I think a marketing company should know that. She also says that they monitor Vector’s table at career fairs to make sure they are not misleading the students. I am at least happy to hear that someone is keeping an eye out, but they still maintain a firm partnership with these people.

The Partnership Council is essentially a fundraising outlet for the Career Center. They invite companies whom they have worked with for many years to join this council in order to funnel money into the Career Center’s events and such. Seems fair enough, as long as the companies on the council are making a legitimate effort to serve the students. Our discussion came down to a difference of opinion. Even considering their arguments for the legitimacy of Vector Marketing, I feel that Vector Marketing operates unethically in order to recruit students. The Career Center sees no problem with it, and explicitly denied my requests for them to have further discussions with Vector about their on-campus marketing. They fundamentally disagree with my position, and most students’ opinion about this scam.

A few years ago at a retreat, students and faculty came up with this idea of a free period of time each week that clubs would use to host major events, and the campus could connect at a personal level. They were addressing the issue of campus community, an issue that has faced this campus for as long as we have been here. Many colleges have similar issues, so they throw money at it, and people are content. We don’t have such luxuries, so we need to be a little bit more creative. I love the idea of “Campus Lifetime,” but they have forgotten one important detail; you actually need to tell people about the events you are hosting.

A student rally during Campus Lifetime

It is 12:30pm on a Wednesday today, just a few minutes before campus lifetime, and I am sitting in the basement of the union writing this article. I would be leaving for my physics lab that is scheduled during campus lifetime, but we have the week off, so I am looking for something to do with my day off. I started looking in my own calendar, nothing until Rev. Billy tonight. Then I went to Facebook, same results. I looked at all the Facebook events for today, and I only found some kind of career fair for liberal arts people. Finally the University has a little secret “Student Life” calendar. I won’t link to it, see if you can find it yourself. I use this as a last resort. It is usually full of junk from the fitness center, as it is today. I found out that there will be a table for Alternative Spring Break, and an SAB event. That’s funny, I had no idea there was an SAB event. I didn’t even find that on Facebook. Well it doesn’t look interesting anyway, but at least I know about it now.
I checked SAB’s Facebook group for it, and it turns out that it was rescheduled for April 15, although the official Student Life calendar hasn’t been updated to reflect that. Turns out there is a Baseball game against Hofstra after campus lifetime, so I might go to that.

So here I am, and it is almost campus lifetime, with no plans. I have been talking to some friends as I write this, and they also don’t know about any events going on today. Almost everyone is out of class with nothing to do. I am sure there are plenty of club meetings, but I can’t even find a current list of clubs no less their meeting times and locations. We have a serious problem here folks.

What we need is a central location for students and clubs to post events. Stony Brook needs a social network, and I think I just may have the solution. I started developing http://sbulife.com a few weeks ago with this grand vision. Clubs will create profiles and post events in one central location that students can check at any time. It works almost exactly like Facebook, and you can even use your Facebook account to connect with it instead of creating a new account. It’s not out of beta yet, but sign up now if you like the idea. We are still working on design and branding, so I am very open to ideas. Feel free to comment below.

First, two simple facts of life:

1. Software changes.
2. Facebook is software.

Once you have accepted that, then we can continue. I must stress that I do not intend to waste your time by telling you to suck it up and deal with the changes, although that might be the best thing for you to do. It seems that every time Facebook releases an update to their software, a ton of angry groups and status messages pop up around facebook in opposition of the changes. I rarely ever see anyone in favor of the changes, or even a specific reason why the changes are so bad. From what I can tell, apparently facebook got it right the first time, and every change they have made since then is making it worse and worse. People now threaten to leave Facebook and go back to myspace (who has also been making a lot of changes).

There must be something about the new Facebook that you like, or at least you will like it once you get used to it. Most of what I see is complaints about being lost, or just a dislike for the new layout. These are only temporary issues that aren’t worth mentioning. Suppose there is actually something specific about the new facebook that you don’t like. Instead of inviting all your friends to some anti-facebook group and complaining, you should tell the developers specifically what you have a problem with. They are always open to ideas and suggestions, they want your feedback. If you think you have a better idea, please share it!

This is how software works. A relatively small group of people plan and develop it based on their own ideas and user studies, and then that software is released to the user base. Ideally, that user base should come back with suggestions and ideas, and the developers use that feedback to make small updates to the release. If the developers are flooded with messages like “I hate the new facebook” or “Bring back the old facebook,” that doesn’t help them at all. The entire facebook community might hate it, but that wouldn’t change anything. If the entire facebook community came back with specific ideas and suggestions, we would have almost a Utopian facebook.

So my question to you is; are you going to keep hating facebook and wishing for the old one, or are you going to do something about it and make positive suggestions? Until you make up your mind, please stop bothering me about it. I do not hate the new facebook, and I will never join your stupid group of over 9000 idiots who think the same way as you.

Now I am no fan of censorship, but there is one banner ad that has recently appeared all over the place titled “Flat Stomach Rule.” I usually find it right next to an article I am trying to read, and after being completely distracted and disgusted, I usually give up on the article. I rarely click on banner ads because I prefer text ads myself. This one in particular is simply too hard to ignore. The only way it could be worse is if it was animated. I won’t show it on this page, because then you would be too distracted to read the rest of my blog, but you can glance at it here.

What ever happened to ad content quality standards? I know they exist because I have been both an advertiser and a content publisher. As an advertiser I had to comply with certain standards to fit into a criteria for certain target websites. Although these standards usually only restricted adult content and profanity, the content publisher has even more control by blocking certain ads from appearing. I thought the system worked fairly well until now.

Are we now too sensitive to bogus diet ads to block them? Am I the only one who finds this distracting and distasteful? At the very least they could have put a little more effort into the design of the ad. In any case, I hope content publishers will find these soon and start blocking them. I also hope that bogus dieting companies will find better ways to trick me into shelling out a monthly fee (if I ever require their services). Until then, I’ll just have to try harder to ignore it.

My current email address is webmaster at [firstlast] dot net, which is nice, but I really always wanted [first] at [last] dot com. Mazza, and even David Mazza is a popular name. It’s estimated that around 7500 people have my last name. David doesn’t help make my full name any more unique because it is the sixth most common name in the US. It’s so popular that even Anonymous has taken it on as an alias; “David Davidson from Davidsonville.” Apparently 96 other men in the US share my full name.

Mazza.com may be taken, but that wasn’t going to stop me from finally getting the email address I’ve always wanted. I finally decided to search again for other options and found that Mazza.me is still available. I purchased it, making mazza.me the shortest domain I own at only 7 characters. You can now find this website at http://david.mazza.me/ (or just mazza.me) and you can send an email to david at mazza dot me.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 96 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?