Sponsor: Introducing Beer Tees

This post is sponsored by Beer Tees Season Favorite:  Fun Halloween Costumes Popular Product:  Pabst Beer T Shirts Most Popular Category:  Beer T Shirts

We're pretty picky about our sponsors, which is probably why you don't see many of them around here. Today we're pleased to announce one that goes well with what we're about: BeerTees.com.

Specifically Beer Tees wants to promote their Halloween costumes. Head on over and order your beer-related costumes. Last year, a friend from blip.tv went as a sorority girl featured on the site. He definitely pulled it off. Perhaps this Halloween I will be Dr. Shots: one part surgeon, one part party.

Beer Tees will be sponsoring the site from now until next Wednesday. Support us by supporting our sponsors!

Now all they need is a storm trooper with a blaster rifle that dispenses shots... and lasers...

If you or your company would like to sponsor content on HackCollege, please shoot an email to sponsor@hackcollege.com!

Introducing the Bibliograph! Bookmarklet

Contrary to their claims, many bibliography services out there are just not that easy to use. You have to sign up for an account or install some funky Firefox plugin. We here at HackCollege set out to change the way people think build bibliographies for papers.

Introducing, the Bibliograph! bookmarklet. Once it's in your toolbar and you'll be generating MLA bibliography entries on the fly from Amazon.com book pages and select types of Web sites. As we continue to work on this little tool into the future, we will be adding functionality for a greater number of Web sites.

While there are many limitations to this bookmarklet for the time being, we think its simplicity will give people a big reason to use it.

Right now, the bookmarklet works on Amazon.com book pages and a few other blogging platforms. It will work in Safari and Firefox. We will be continuing to work on it as we move ahead. (Think blip.tv and YouTube videos!)

For now, watch our little demo video:

Check out the Bibliograph! page.

If you have any suggestions or bugs, please send them to bibliograph@hackcollege.com.

How to Undo an Overdue Library Book

Sex librarian to lure you into this post.There’s a deadline on everything in college, even your books. When our parents went to school, just a few cents a day accrued for a late book. But today, with extensive inter-library book sharing programs, fines can be more than a dollar per day – it’s how they fund such extensive programs. That sucks. Wouldn't you like to avoid these fines? It seems impossible to turn a book in late and still walk away un-fined, but I’ll show you how to do it.

Book deadline management

For the moment, let’s talk about how to not be overdue in the first place.

Anything date-sensitive should go in one place: your calendar. It doesn’t matter if it’s school work or a credit card payment – so book due dates are included. By forcing all your deadline dependency into one place, you’ll never miss a date.

But if you’re more of an inbox-centered person, you might try Library Elf. It’s a rather primitive system that’ll just email you a little before a book’s due date (if your library doesn't already do that for you).

Back-dating

“Back dating” is not “hooking up with your old girlfriend again.”

Back-dating is the simple secret to lateness without the fine-ness. It is possible for an authorized person at the library to back-date a book – that is, they’ll enter the book as having been retuned on a date in the past instead of today.

You have to find that person, smile, and flirt with that person. Explain your financial woes. Beg. Find that friend-of-a-friend who works in the library. Those are just a few of your options. They'll probably cut your fines down if not forgive them all together.

Find that bin

This is a great method. It'll get you anywhere from 2-5 days of leeway.

Imagine that you work at a library – you’re a student worker, so you’re already a slacker. There are book drops all over campus. Is it really necessary to check these secluded book repositories on a daily basis? Probably not – nobody even checks out books these days anyway. Plus, you have to lug them all the way across campus.

Instead, most book drops are emptied every 2-5 days, depending on holiday breaks and whatnot. All of the books in that bin are automatically back-dated to the last time the book drop was emptied. This means you can drop a book in and have a shot at its return date being overturned.

Wait till Thanksgiving

There will be a canned food drive at your library leading in to Thanksgiving. And though one can of food will equal a dollars-worth of fines -- a can of food does not actually equal one dollar at the store. Never pay your fines right away unless you have to. Wait for fine forgiveness periods like this one.

Rare-book blackmail

Your school has a lost-book charge. Sometimes it varies from book-to-book, but usually it’s a flat amount. It’s pretty lofty – $50 - $150 – depending. But sometimes, your book is worth more than that amount because libraries have old, out-of-print editions.

Look up the book that’s overdue on a book re-selling site (try Amazon or Half). If you can get more dough (or get close to even) by reselling the book than the total of fines-to-date and the lost book fee, then you have two choices: blackmail the librarian with this information, or simply file for a lost book and sell it away.

[photo via Changing World Photography]

The Move to 21

Image courtesy of flickr user TheTruthAbout...

Unbeknownst to most of our generation, the drinking age was--kind of recently--below the age of 21. In fact, it wasn't until the National Minimum Drinking Age Act that the United States mandated that all states change the legal purchase age to 21. Before then, it varied by state. I remember my mom telling me an anecdote of students from WSU driving across the border into Idaho to pick up booze on Friday nights. The age limit for more and more things is trending upwards and the latest thing is credit cards.

Credit Cards, No Longer All Ages

If your parents have been receiving a slew of credit card offers in your name, it's probably because the credit card companies want to lock you in before they legally no longer can, without your parents' consent. The recently passed Credit CARD Act of 2009 will limit raise the age that one can own a credit card, starting February 22, 2010. If you are younger than 21, you'll need a parent or guardian to co-sign on the card. Credit cards already granted will not be affected.

Denying Rights or Protecting Against Irresponsibility?

While we are all for creating a little mischief, credit cards give me the heebeejeebies. For some reason, spending money via a credit card is exactly like procrastinating a paper: we all know it's bad, but we still do it. You can usually procrastinate and still get an A on the paper, but every once in awhile you'll hear a tale of someone misbudgeting their time and screwing themselves.

Some university presidents have banded together recently to form the Amethyst Initiative to re-lower the drinking age back down to 18. We say hell yeah.

While I personally would be an advocate of greater personal responsibility, this bill does make it more difficult for credit card companies to do shiesty things like arbitrarily raising interest rates, falsely advertising cards and more. For that reason, I'm cool with it. Yeah, it's crappy that you can no longer get a credit card at 18. 

So until the bill goes into effect on February 22, make sure you read all of the fine print on that card. And be ready for the rates and terms to change the day you graduate. It's just the way student cards work right now.

What do you think about the Credit CARD Act of 2009? Should we be given a great degree of freedom or is the 21 age-limit a good thing?

The Basics of the Supercomputer at Universities

Oberlin College's Super ComputerMore and more universities are getting supercomputers. Students who are in the computer science department aren't the only people getting a chance to use them either. Supercomputers are being used for intense calculations that are useful for a lot of departments to have. So, here's what you should know about supercomputers should happen to use on in your time at school.

Software

Supercomputers tend to run Linux. Most people don't use this operating system. The interface is generally under-developed so you'll probably be running something like what Tom Cruise hacked into in the first Mission impossible. 

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published a blog post about how software running on these hulked out machines is becoming outdated. The post said that some of the code was from the sixties! So, if you're going to be doing some high-end cosmological research be prepared to be looking at something MS-DOS shit out. The problem is caused by there not being an easy computer language for super computers.

Uses

Supercomputers are generally used for high-end calculations. No American History I term papers are written on these bad boys (or girls). You've got your run of the mill, meteorological calculation for weather patters and such. It's a lot of simulations, where there are more problems solved in one day than a human could do in their lifetime. 

Collaboration

A lot of universities are doing the same types of research. The more data academia has as a who the more likely we'll be able to see patterns create better theories about the world around us. For students working on these types of research projects, you should take the chance to network with students from the schools you're working with.  It makes sense because you're both doing something you love (hopefully). It could end up in partnership that advances your science as a whole.

Have you had any experience with supercomputers at your college or university? If so, comment below!

Image via Oberlin College

Practice Inbox Zero Now, You'll Thank Yourself Later

During my day I see my supervisors and advisors go through tons of emails. And from what I hear it's getting to be the same way for people in other professions as well. While I don't necessarily have a lot of email to go through, it's still nice to be able to clean out my daily mail with inbox zero. Inbox Zero is concept that was developed by Merlin Mann of 43Folders fame. The goal is to get you inbox to have nothing in it by having actions that get rid of messages. Here is his explanation of this at Google's Tech Talks in the summer of 2007.

Featured Desk Space: Orian's Bedroom

Orian makes the best use out of a narrow on-campus room.

Today's featured desk space comes from Orian, an aeronautical engineering major at Rensselaer in Troy, NY. He's living in an on-campus apartment what houses 3 other dudes.

It seems that the HackCollege readers are ultra-productive and have the two monitors to prove it. Orian's rocking an Acer V223-WBD 22-inch monitor to help his Dell XPS M1530 out. Also like most HackCollege readers, Orian reminds me that my desk is messy. With a few other desks we've seen, Orian opted for the wireless Logitech keyboard and mouse, the MX3200 keyboard and Revolution VX, respectively.

Orian uses an external hard drive to store all of his material not critical to his grades: pictures, music and miscellaneous docs. He goes the extra mile and backs up his drive with Mozy, an online backup service (that we should probably review).

To round things out, he's got a lamp and terrarium to set the mood he picked up for about $10 total at a nearby Goodwill.  

While the room looks narrow, Orian has definitely made the most out of the space. What do you think?

If you'd like your desk to be featured on HackCollege, shoot an email over to room@hackcollege.com with a description and pictures of your desk. Don't forget to tell us a little bit about yourself! 

How to Find the Best Coffee Beans in Your Area

Beans, beans the magical fruit. Image from flickr user nate steiner

When it comes to most things, the final product will be crappy if the initial ingredients are crappy, jungle juice being the exception. Because coffee is by now a twice-daily part of your life, shouldn't you treat it with some respect? Today, we'll be talking about getting the best beans in your area.

When it comes to coffee beans, there's the order of quality is usually based on where (non-geographically) the beans come from. In descending order: your backyard farm, a coffee shop that knows what it's doing (e.g. Intelligentsia, Philz, Blue Bottle), a fru fru grocery store (like Whole Foods or Bristol Farms), a local, mediocre coffee shop, Starbucks and its competitors and finally run-of-the-mill grocery stores (Safeway, Ralph's, Vons, etc.).

Click to read more ...