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

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!

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…