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.

I was born to church-going Catholic parents with enthusiastic hopes for my future as a Catholic, following in the family tradition. Many would say that I was a Catholic child, but I reject that wording for a few reasons. There is no such thing as a “Catholic child,” “Muslim child” or a “Jewish child,” there are only children born to Catholic, Muslim and Jewish parents. If I ever could have been considered a Catholic child, I was never a very good one. I always had big questions and concerns that most children were stifled about. Those questions lead to an early rejection of religious establishment, followed by the existence of god.
My indoctrination began in first grade at the local church once or twice a week. I eagerly received my first communion in second grade; around the time I learned the truth about Santa Claus. These weekly religion classes continued, and by third grade, I felt the irritation of doubt. I always perceived biblical stories to be made up in order to teach a lesson. I never realized that the Bible was supposed to be an historical account of events. When I figured out that these were supposed to be real such as Noah’s arc, I began to question the stories.
The first major trigger of my dissent was the child molestation scandals going on at them time. Every week as I was reluctantly dragged to church, I would hound my family with questions about why any real god would let this happen to children. I asked them why the pope and bishops tried to cover it up. I started to deny everything in anger, and my parents brushed it off as a phase. By the end of the third grade I was already angry about religion.
I calmed down for a while, but I still had occasional arguments with my parents about the existence of god. Around sixth grade my parents gave me an option to stop attending religion classes for confirmation. I decided that I might be too naive to make that decision, and I continued on to get confirmed as David Edward “James” Mazza.

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.

After nearly 2 weeks of planning and a few days of hard work to promote a massive protest against budget cuts and tuition hikes, we had the event in modern Stony Brook style; the style that has earned us the title “Most Unhappy Students” for several years now. Make no mistake, these recent protests are nothing like those that once made Stony Brook “The Berkley of the East.” Something indeed has been missing for a long time since then, and it has been my mission to determine what it is.

1. Motivation: This recent economic crisis has been the most recent driving force for outrage at Stony Brook, although not dissent. Even outrage may be too a strong word considering that only a small percentage of students seem to care enough to rally for an hour of their day when nobody has class.

2. Number of affected students: Statistically this is much better today than it was a few decades ago, because a tuition hike directly affects most of the students and a budget cut affects 100% of the students, faculty and staff. Yet we see statistically insignificant crowds showing up. Compared to a protest against a war or the administration, where very few students are directly affected, this hardly counts as a protest.

3. Promotion Method: Again we see a clear advantage today with the advances of the Internet and Facebook, as well as easy and free printing for posters. I spent all day yesterday putting up more than 80 posters around campus and promoting it everywhere on Facebook and through email lists. At least we know that a massive number of people were aware of the event.

4. Organization: The Students for a Democratic Society at Stony Brook of the 1960’s would bring out 300 students and faculty just to a meeting, just imagine how many they would have at a protest. We are lucky to get that many just to click “join” on Facebook. Our events are also planned differently. They are sponsored by the Undergraduate Student Government (yeah, quite lame). There is more of a focus on crappy music and speakers than student activism. Modern Stony Brook protests are too passive. Perhaps students would be more committed if it involved a risk or some immediate call to action.

5. Context: This gets more into my own speculation, but I think context is important. There once was a trend of activism among young people, espicially for civil rights which was a major issue at Stony Brook. We protested about issues that were both national and local. Although that dissenting spirit may have helped to start major protests on smaller issues as well. Students were in a dissenting mindset. Today we have less activity in general, and a greater trust in authority.

6. Generation: Without any hard facts and numbers left, I will refer to an interesting article that I read about our generation. We grew up in a fairly peaceful decade and we were raised by the television and the internet. Students are so busy they they “don’t have time” to care about important issues any more. We are a selfish generation. We have been spoiled for so long that we don’t know what it means to dissent from authority and cause real change. Why is it that we only protest against people who are too far away to care? When was the last time you heard of an occupation at Stony Brook? The better the school gets, the more people like to complain. We went from being mudville and the Berkley of the east, to having a beautiful campus and some of the least happy students in the nation.

So then the question remains; what is wrong with kids these days? Stop worrying so much about little things like conformity and time management, and start worrying about #1 and #2: Rights and Money! We are rapidly losing both every day.

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.

I’m leaving on a bus to Washington DC during a state of emergency just to see George take off in a helicopter. It has been a long eight years, and I am willing to do just about anything to witness this occasion. I’ll be on the lawn with some friends (around 2-4 million) to watch Barack Obama ride off to the helicopter with George to wish him farewell and good riddance.

This will be an historic event indeed, with record turnout on the National Mall. CNN estimates that if 5 million people show up, we will have one square foot of space each. I’m hoping it is more like 2 million, but it should be a fun time.

I will arrive for the inauguration at 11:30pm on Monday night, and we will do our best to stake out a spot on the lawn. I will be going with the College Democrats of New York, and a few close friends. We worked together for this victory on a national and local level. We made two trips out to Pennsylvania, and several tours around Long Island to canvass for the local, state and national elections.

We had a massive campaign effort on campus by raiding the dorms each week to register voters. Stony Brook University registered the most voters in New York State. We were also very proud to send a massive group of people to paid canvassing for Brian Foley during the last weekend. His opponent Caesar Trunzo attributed his loss to the help that Brian had from the local Universities (Stony Brook).

There couldn’t be a more fitting conclusion to our efforts and George’s reign than this pilgrimage to Washington. Of course it isn’t over yet, because we now have to fill Brian Foley’s vacant seat on the town board with a new and rising democrat; Mark Lesko. I can’t wait to vote again on March 31!

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?

I have a late winter break this year. My last final was on December 23, and I still have 2 weeks left. I decided to spend my break doing freelance and volunteered web development, as well as looking for a summer internship. I am still working on THiNK Magazine’s Drupal website, which became a much larger project than I expected.

We started in september deciding between Wordpress, Joomla, Movable Type and Drupal. I’ve known about Drupal for a while from old hosting clients, but this was the first time I actually worked with it. It isn’t as easy to start using Drupal as they claim it is, and using it for a magazine presents a unique set of challenges. A magazine is focused on strategically placed articles and imagery. Drupal is not inherently good at handling article placement or featuring images. Both require a wide array of modules. Behind the website there also needs to be separation of issues and a special hierarchy of users. Luckily I found an installation profile developed at RIT called “Innovation News.”

I had a lot of hope that Innovation News would make the project easy, but the project grew to be much larger than I expected. I am facing layout problems that I thought would be very simple. I haven’t touched the CSS much yet in order to keep it simple. The other main component we want is a “slider” on top of the front page to showcase the featured articles. This requires some information to be dynamically exported to an xml file, and there really isn’t any module written to do that. There is one that is similar for Drupal 5, but I am using Drupal 6. I have decided to take the module and modify for my needs with Drupal 5, and then try to upgrade it to Drupal 6. If anyone has suggestions please leave it in the comments.

I’ve learned how a team could really help to complete this project. I would love to bounce ideas off of people, and also handle the project in parts. It would be easier to look at the big picture that way. Sometimes I get lost in the details. I don’t have access for a project like this that was supposed to be small. On top of that, I am volunteering my time for it, but it has been fun to learn more about the concepts of a CMS. I’ve jumped right into the fire, what a mess…

Is it someone who cheats on his wife? Is in bed with lobbyists? Flip-flops? Is out of touch? Was involved in a major scandal?

Pick the qualities you think would make the worst possible candidate. It might help you make up your mind in November.

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