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 first took office as the VP of Communications in the Undergraduate Student Government at Stony Book, I decided to tackle a problem that many universities face; centralizing student life information online. We currently scatter this info across Facebook, University Calendars, poster boards and through word of mouth. In many cases, events are held and money is spent without any advertising at all. SBUlife is a campus social network built on BuddyPress for WordPress MU that will automatically post every event that the USG funds as of Fall 2010.

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

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or YouTube

The Washington DC metropolitan area has a major undiscovered crime problem. Today, for the first time, in an exclusive, inclusive, and obtrusive video, we have started the process of exposing these atrocities.

Over the weekend, I began to notice a conspicuous series of clear violations of the law. Be it deceased men on the ground, nazis espousing nonsense or illegally parked drug vans. We found crime to be rampant both in the city and the suburbs. Underground, above ground, over ground and on the lawn. Law breakers, bigots, murders, stealers, bankers, thiefs and lairs. Everywhere. Anywhere. Nowhere at all. Nothing is as it seems.

What an unpleasant weekend.

   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

Congratulations. The republicans have finally taken control of the New York State Senate after the evil democrats’ long tyrannical reign over New York State. The new republicans promise a bipartisan effort to move forward and eliminate the old corrupt ways of democrats doing business behind closed doors and keeping certain people out of the process. After a long and terrifying period of the democrats’ old stagnation politics and back-door deals, we are free at last, free at last.

If this doesn’t sound familiar, then maybe you haven’t been living in New York any time in the last 70 years. Republicans finally get a taste of their own medicine and suddenly they are the party of reform and bipartisanship. I’m not buying it, and neither should any liberal. Democrats gain control for a few months, and immediately the republicans are up in arms as if they haven’t been playing the same games for decades.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to any democrat; we are just as much to blame for the coup as they are. What have democrats really accomplished in their short time? I’ve heard a lot of bickering, not a lot of transparency, and very little progress on important civil rights issues or health care. I am talking to you Mr. Brian Foley. We didn’t elect you to put up with this nonsense. What happened to change and progress? You let them distract you, just like we always do. Democrats never fail to fall apart when it counts, and this late attempt to stop the coup is just the epitome of their attitude towards getting things done.

But, maybe giving the minority party more power will be a good thing in the long run. I think it was certainly a good thing to give the long-standing republicans a scare. Now they know New York is liberal enough to beat them and they may have changed their attitude as a result. The current rhetoric is nonsense, but I hope democrats can learn something from this. Keep the bickering behind closed doors, and make unified decisions in a transparent manner. Republicans will continue to do whatever they can to hold on to power. Appreciate it as part of the democratic process and never stop pushing back.

The Catholic Church continues to deny their crimes against children, or otherwise downplay child rape within their community as isolated and insignificant. As a young Catholic, this was one of my first signs to me that there is no god. When I first heard about priests raping young boys, my eight year-old mind immediately thought that no god would allow this to happen. I realized that there probably is no god when the priest in my own church di not denounce the acts and pray for the children, but rather he played the victim card and accused the media of exaggerating the reports.

This problem is far worse than a few clergymen fondling genitals, this is a mass of people blindly defending and supporting an organization that condones and practices child rape and abuse. My family denounced the acts, but also assumed that the incidents were isolated. They continue to monetarily support the Catholic Church’s mission to cover up their crimes. I am deeply ashamed of my family’s position on the matter, but I try not to think about it.

Bill Donohue

This week a report was released on the rape and abuse of 127 girls in Ireland, Bill Donohue continued to minimalize the incidents as the “culture of life,” an absolutely despicable attitude which permits and enables the crimes to continue. We should be questioning the moral integrity of Bill Donohue and every Catholic who defends and supports the church on this matter. Rather than responding to Donohue, I will link to PZ Myers who has already written a beautiful response: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/05/the_catholic_league_downplays.php

We deserve a better moral standard than this. When people ask me why I oppose religion, I point out these repeated incidents. I couldn’t care less how many homeless people they feed, because any secular organization could do the same humanitarian works. I only hold organizations to the same moral standard that I hold myself. I don’t need an eternal supervisor to tell me that child rape is wrong, but apparently their god finds it to be excusable anyway. I cannot have respect for any member of such an organization, and I hope they will soon recognize the same thing that I did as an eight year-old; these acts are inexcusable, and no proper moral standard to live by.

I remember posting a Facebook status way back in the first week at Stony Brook all in caps; something to the effect that Stony Brook had been awesome, and I was hoping that it would remain as awesome as it had been in that first week. As I sit here around midnight on a regular rainy Wednesday night I am listening to the wonderful sound of a guitar from Sanger, the next building over. I recognize the song immediately and it is one of my favorites from Explosions In The Sky; “Your Hand In Mine.” I am reminded of why I loved Stony Brook so much in that first week and why I love it even more today.

Once again, Tabler is in flames…

A look back at freshman year at Stony Brook