Packing a Dorm Room Into a Car

I wish had pictures to illustrate this post, but I was unable to take any in the frenzy that was packing for me. I had to pack up my entire room last Saturday (5/5) in about two hours mostly due to procrastination and terrible check-out times. I managed to fit my entire room into my sedan.

Here's what I learned on my 1,200 mile drive:

• Pack the largest, most solid items first into your car. For me, it was the former housing of a oscilloscope, a large trunk. Everything inside the trunk was not collapsible (mostly books).


• Pack clothes last. You'll need to do laundry once you get home anyway, don't worry about making clean clothes dirty by packing them around the solids. Or...


• Vacuum-pack your clothes. By a rough estimate, vacuum-packing reduces your clothes to 1/3 their original size. They will be more wrinkly than your feet after a long bath, though.


• Use pillowcases as protectors. My pillow supplements became monitor guardians.


• Remember to keep your tools accessible. Just in case...


• Eliminate squeaks with clothes. Any plastic-vinyl or plastic-leather interaction produces annoying squeaks. Recognize this while packing so you don't have to unload have your car at a rest stop to find that frustrating squeak.

Or, you could try using Amtrak to travel home cheap. Their policies allow a lot of extra baggage for only $10 each.

Happy packing for those who are driving home soon. Don't forget to use Trippish and please drive safely.

28 One Weeks Later

After a week-long packing, driving, and repacking I'm posting again.

A few things:

• We have a new writer, his name is Jason Shore. He is neat. Check out his first post


• See 28 Weeks Later. The movie is much better than the reviews are making it out to be.


• I will be flying to Germany for a month on Monday (5/14) for study abroad. I should post regularly, but my frequency may decrease. That's what Rosario and now Jason are for.

Mother's Day Idea: Create a Mosaic! (Windows)

If you had trouble choosing just one photo to frame for Mom because you have so many good pictures, then why not create a mosaic using all of them?

Although this project will be more expensive to print out for Mom, it is very easy and requires no image-editing skills whatsoever. And, uh, the results are freakin' amazing. (Continue reading for further instruction on how to use the program)

Also available in French: Patchwork Maker 2.1.

After downloading the program and selecting your language (English, in my case --as I speak absolutely no French), set up a folder including all the images you want included in your masterpiece.

(1) Choose one picture to be the main image. (Click the first highlighted button)
(2) Select the folder containing all your images. (Click the second highlighted button)
(3) Adjust to taste. I recommend strong coloration.

Click convert, and then just wait an hour or two. I can assure you; the results are surprisingly very nice for a "free" program.

Mother's Day Idea: Frame an Extraordinary Photo!

For those of you with access to Adobe Photoshop or know your way around Gimp, you might want to frame a picture of you and Mom. Trust me. These always go over very well. 7 steps:

(1) To begin, choose a picture. One with you and Mom. Easy enough.

(2) Then, to turn that ordinary photo into an extraordinary photo, I recommend checking out Blurbomat's Adobe Photoshop Tutorial. I'm not that skilled, but I was able to go from (below) to (further below):

Then, (3) save the final image on a cd or usb disk or other memory card, (4) go to your local printing shop, (5) get it nicely printed to your liking, (6) go and buy a nice frame, and (7) either ship it or deliver it.

Done!

Mother's Day Idea: Prepare Heart-Shaped Pancakes!

Ya'll know the drill:

Mother's Day is a holiday honoring mothers, celebrated (on various days) in many places around the world. Mothers often receive gifts on this day. [via Wikipedia]

Struggling to decide how best to show your mother your appreciation? If you're in-state and will go home for the weekend, why not prepare breakfast?

Don't worry. This is easy. Go pick up some "just add water" pancake mix and make 'em in the shape of hearts. (Or: I guess if you could find a big enough heart-shaped cookie cutter, you could just make normal-shaped pancakes and cut them out)

Awww... For extra fun, pick up some strawberries or strawberry jam [image from lowcarbluxury.com].

College Classifieds

Rosario mentioned yesterday about the new service, Oodle classifieds for Facebook. Although Oodle is a new service, there are some alternative sites that have been around for college students to buy, sell, and barter. Several of these sites will give Facebook classifieds a run for it's money - but Facebook's enormous user base will be hard to contend with.

Chegg - Chegg (as in chicken and egg) started out as a site to buy and sell textbooks, but now have expanded to an online shopping site. You can browse items from numerous campuses and have them shipped right to your door. How is that for convenience?

CollegeMedium - This site is like a Craigslist for college students. CollegeMedium allows you to buy or sell items, look for a job, or even find your significant other. Its also based off of the Facebook API so you can log in with you Facebook user name and password.

College Classifieds - College Classifieds claims to be the "best and most accurate listings for your college campus." The site is powered by Oodle, the same service that is supposedly supporting Facebook's new classified service. College Classifieds supports RSS feeds so you can keep track of newly listed items.

DormItem - DormItem has a pretty basic layout, but is effective nonetheless. You can search through their site for items or keep up to date via RSS feed. With its massive database of classifieds, DormItem is the Google of college classifieds.

Know of any other classified sites? Let us know in the comments!

Source: Facebook Marketplace [via] Mashable!

Graduating Seniors: Sell Your Stuff via Facebook!

Welcome to Oodle Classifieds! Now instead of just sending tons of spam via Email, graduating seniors can now also advertise their couches and textbooks and TVs and lamps and everything else via Facebook. Sweet.

Join the Oodle Facebook Group!

Don't Sleep Through An Early-Morning Exam!

Exams here at Yale start tomorrow. For those of you with an early-morning exam, it's a smart idea to schedule a wake-up call.

You can ask a friend, or you can register with TelePixie.com. They offer free wake-up calls (among many other things). You can even choose whether you want a Female or Male voice to wake you up. Tip: If you're a really heavy sleeper, set, maybe, 3 scheduled calls to ENSURE that you are, indeed, up.

Another service is CallTheFuture.org, which doesn't require you to sign-up but has a limit. Note: They monitor their service, so prank calling is, as always, a no-no.