The HP Freshman 15 Laptop Giveaway

There's a 15 blog laptop giveaway going on right now! If you didn't catch us mentioning it on our last two episodes, here it is: HP is giving 15 laptops away through college blogs. Talk about sweet.

HackCollege has one grand prize package to give away and 2 laptop cases to give away.

Each blog has certain dates that we're supposed to give away our laptops. If you watched our podcast episodes, you will know that we jumped the gun a little bit. We won't be accepting submissions to our sob story contest until October 22. We will give away the laptop on October 29.

The Grand Prize Package

The grand prize package includes:

• HP Pavilion dv4t series notebook


• HP xb4 Media Docking Station


• HP 500GB Pocket Media Drive


• HP Photosmart C6380 All-in-One


• HP Protect Messenger Bag

The Participating Blogs

• Sep 26 - Oct 3: Poorer Than You


• Sep 28 - Oct 5: Broke-Ass Student


• Sep 30 - Oct 7: Broke Grad Student


• Oct 2 - Oct 9: Study Hacks


• Oct 4 - Oct 11: Cooking for Engineers
• Oct 6 - Oct 13: College Being


• Oct 8 - Oct 15: Paul Stamatiou


• Oct 10 - Oct 17: DormDelicious


• Oct 12 - Oct 19: Student Bloggers


• Oct 14 - Oct 21: Jessica Mah Meets World
• Oct 16 - Oct 23: UNEASYsilence


• Oct 18 - Oct 25: Gomeler.com


• Oct 20 - Oct 27: CampusGrotto


• Oct 22 - Oct 29: Hack College


• Oct 24 - Oct 31: The University Blog

Check them out and support our friends.

HackCollege Season 2 Episode 2: Say Hello to Mom

Chris and Kelly bring everyone's mom into the mix this week for their second episode with Revision3 Beta.

Topics this week:

• FBI search a U Tennesse apartment for Palin hacker.


• Admissions officers starting to look at Facebook profiles.


• Quinnipiac president bans independent news website setup by students.


• Mom demonstrates how to sanitize a sponge.


• Chris and Kelly try to build a DIY Apple TV


• The HP Freshman 15 laptop giveaway is in full swing!

Sponsors this week:

• Radar.net, the cameraphone picture-sharing service


• HP

HackCollege Season 2 Episode 1: Back with a Free Laptop!

Chris and Kelly are back from the summer with new friends on the Revision3 Beta.

Topics this week:

• Girl auctions virginity to pay for tuition.


• LMU neighbors take complaints to the web.


• College presidents defend rising tuition.


• Build your own dorm-legal A/C.


• Dad teaches you how to find a stud.


• HP is giving HackCollege a free laptop to give away!

HackCollege Turns 2 Today!

Have we really been doing this for 2 years? Our domain registry record says yes.

A big thank you to old and new readers for sticking with us for the past years. It's been one hell of a ride. And on our second birthday we're taking a big leap. HackCollege is now on the Revision3 Beta network!

To celebrate, why don't we give away 2 T-Shirts? Email your favorite HackCollege post or moment on the show to dear@hackcollege.com. Whichever 2 emails elicit the most nostalgia win!

Settling Debts Between Roommates

There's those initial investments we make when we first move in: a garbage can, laundry detergent, an industrial-sized package of red cups. But what if Joey has a meal plan, and won't use any of the cooking oil? And what if Audrey bought her own special shampoo and isn't sharing with everyone else? Or there's prude Eric, who won't pitch in for whipped cream. People get picky about what they will and won't pay for -- multiply that by four roommates, and it can get tricky to split the bill.

Here's how to settle all you roommate debts as fairly as possible without a charlie foxtrot. The basic idea is a simple chart that will break down each charge to account for: who initially paid for it and who's splitting the bill. Once you're finished, money will only exchange hands a few times with almost no change to deal with. Last night, we settled about $400 worth of really small items in about fifteen minutes -- but you can do it with rent, utilities, party supplies -- anything.

1. Gather your roommates, the receipts, a calculator and piece of paper. A spreadsheet is only going to make things more confusing, so just do it by hand.


2. Create the magic square. This thing is a lot like one of those logic puzzles from fourth grade. Each person's name appears once in a column and a row. The columns signify who paid for the bill and the rows signify how much money that person owes to the bill in question. Leave plenty of space to do math in the middle. You can go ahead and put crosses through the boxes that correspond to people and themselves. It's much easier to not pay yourself back...

3. Go through each receipt or bill, item-by-item. For each item, decide who's going to getting in on it and split the price accordingly. For instance, I bought a huge thing of disgusting boxed wine. Kelly is an alcoholic, so he drank about 90% of it. We split it 9 to 1 and we just listed "9" in Kelly's box under the column for my bills -- since I paid for it (and I don't need to pay myself back), nothing goes in my box. Since you'll probably split most things four ways, keep a tally of those things on a piece of scratch paper to the side, total them at the end of the bill, split them four ways and list the amounts in each person's box.


4. Total the boxes and cancel shit out. This is the cool part. Look at the boxes for, say, Nelson and Scarlett -- there's one where Nelson owes Scarlett money and another where Scarlett owes Nelson money. You can cancel these values to simplify the payments. See who owes what to whom and list those numbers out separately.


5. Be logical and make the payments. Now, you can use the transitive property to cancel out even more on paper. For instance, if Bobby owes Cheryl $8 and Cheryl owes Katka $8, Bobby can just pay 8$ to Katka. There are other more complicated simplifications, but don't spend too much time on it. Divvy out the money.

Taxes are something we didn't factor in. Instead, we rounded all the change up to help account for that a bit.

I think it's also interesting to see how "screwed" people could have gotten if you hadn't split everything up. In the end, you might find that it wasn't worth the whole process for one person to get reimbursed for only $10.

I was looking for a program that would easily do this sort of thing. Any tips?

Flat World Knowledge Hopes to Flip the Textbook Market on Its Head

I got to have a phone interview with Eric Frank, co-founder of Flat World Knowledge. His company is hoping to turn the entire textbook industry upside-down by doing something crazy: offering textbooks for free.

HC: What is Flat World Knowledge?

EF: First and foremost, Flat World Knowledge is a publishing operation. We're publishing great authors under a whole new business model, enabled by great new technology.

HC: How did you start Flat World Knowledge?

EF: My partner and I started planning Flat World Knowledge in January 2007. We had both just come out of working for big publishing companies. In the beginning, we had no business plan. We only knew there was tremendous dissatisfaction among students, growing dissatisfaction among professors and growing frustration among authors. We wanted to make sure we did things right, so we spent the first 3 months traveling around talking to students, professors and administrators, and building a plan from those conversations.

HC: Was it difficult to attract authors?

EF: Overall the answer is no. We found it easier to do with Flat World Knowledge than the big guys. The reason is the authors see us as a good opportunity to jump a sinking ship. There's not a lot of difference between any of the big publishers any more. And we've got 2 trump cards: we're playing the good guys and we're going to be first to market with a new model that enables them to build share quickly with a major competitive advantage, and earn more compensation under this model than the traditional one.

HC: What's your business model?

EF: First of all, all of our books are open. That means it's free for everyone: professors and students alike. The books are online and no registration is required.

HC: How are you going to make money?

EF: Good question. We will still actually be selling textbooks. If students prefer books, they can buy them from us for $29 in black and white or $59 for a color version. Students also have the option of buying Kindle, audiobook or PDF versions. Each of those go for $1.99 per chapter or $19.95 for the entire book, or an audio book for $2.99 per chapter or $29.95 for the entire book. We'll also be selling study aides. Each chapter in a book will have at least 3 study aides for purchase: flash cards, executive summaries and online quizes that reflect the test questions.

HC: Is there any cool technology behind Flat World Knowledge?

EF: Of course! First of all, professors are able to completely customize their books. Each professor teaches in a different way, so we want the books to be flexible to their needs. With Flat World Knowledge books, a professor can pick and choose which chapters she wants in her book, add their own materials, and in a later release, actually edit the book for their own class at the sentence level.

Also, there's technology that the students can take advantage of. There are ways that you can treat content where it's tagged, structured and stored in a database. Students will have the ability to comment and ask questions about a specific section of a text. Students in Florida will be able to interact with students in California.

HC: What do you think about Textbook Torrents?

EF: As a publisher, I believe in the protection of copyright. Authors that create useful content should be compensated, just like a musician that makes good content. Publishers need to be able to sustain themselves. I'm opposed to pirating content for no reason.

But when you have a situation like this, it is absolutely inevitable that the customers of an industry will find their own solution. With Flat World Knowledge, you don't have to pirate it because it's free! With our other options we believe that if we offer reasonable prices, students are reasonable people and will buy stuff.

HC: Is there anything else that you'd like to add?

EF: We are asking students to help mobilize and assist the adoption of Flat World Knowledge. We're putting together FWK street teams and also looking into hiring student sales representatives, where they will actually be able to make commission on sales.

HC: How should students get in touch with you to get involved with Flat World Knowledge?

EF: They can email me at eric@flatworldknowledge.com.

HackCollege Podcast Returns September 22

It's been a long several weeks without the podcast, hasn't it? A lot has happened since then and we'll be officially relaunching the show on September 22. We've got a few surprises in store.

Mark the date.

Tell your friends.

Make some popcorn.

LMU Students and Neighborhood Residents Take It to the Web

Last Saturday, HackCollege reported on how residents around Loyola Marymount University were blaming Twitter (among other things) on the recent increase in off-campus parties. KNBC4 covered it on Friday and the Loyolan, LMU's student-run newspaper, picked up the story in today's issue. It has officially hit the fan.

Take It to the (Online) Streets

Most interesting though, has been the forum with which the residents and students are bickering. They have taken their qualms online. A Westchester resident has been operating his own blog called WestchesterParents. A few of the recent posts highlight the growing party problem in the neighborhood among other things, like LAX expansion. A few students (including myself) have jumped in on the fray in the blog's comments.

On the KNBC4 video page, 53 comments have been posted on the video at the time of writing. The all-but-defunct JuicyCampus has a thread with 2 comments on the subject. Here at LMU, it's all people are talking about.

The entire scenario has been very interesting to see unfold. To my knowledge, it's one of the first times that an online medium has been the battleground for such a dispute. It might help to get a sense of exactly what is going on by examining the views of both sides...

In the Residents' Corner

The residents in Westchester claim that the off-campus parties and the property damage resulting has significantly increased in the past 5 years. Residents claim that the increase in enrollment is partially to blame. Since 2005, LMU's enrollment has increased from just under 5,500 to 5,699 according to the Princeton Review.

Some of the residents' grievances are as follows:

• Student parties are loud.


• Student parties are sometimes illegal as spelled out by the LMU code of student conduct.


• Students regularly urinate on lawns.


• Students have sex on lawns.


• Students litter.


• Students curse at residents when residents attempt to take pictures of belligerent students.


• Students have technology that allows house parties to quickly reconvene at other locations.

As evidenced by:

• WestchesterParents, a blog run by Westchester parents.


• Living90045.com, a blog about living in the zip code of 90045.


• Comments on the KNBC4 video

In the Students' Corner

The students here at LMU are concerned most with their right to party, myself included. Some of the reasoning on the students' side includes:

• Why would a resident move to Westchester and not expect college parties?


• The parties in contention are only on the weekend.


• Not all residents throwing parties are disrespectful to their neighbors.


• Students are going to party, no matter what.

As evidenced by:

• The Los Angeles Loyolan, the LMU student-run newspaper


• JuicyCampus, our favorite college gossip site


• Comments on the residents' blogs


• Hearsay

The Real Fundamental Issues

While the students and residents seem to be only talking past each other (which only result in escalation), I think there are a few fundamental reasons why the situation has gotten to this point:

• Many Jesuit Universities do not have "frat rows." LMU is one of those institutions. Most frat rows are ugly places, but they concentrate all of the debauchery into one part of the neighborhood. There are many party houses right now, but they are spread out across the neighborhood.


• The drinking age is 21. Freshman, sophomores, and some juniors are not allowed to drink. Getting caught is much less likely off-campus. Students venture off campus to avoid the potential double-whammy of LAPD and LMU smackdowns.


• Americans are uptight about noise, parties and privacy.

Do neighbors of your university complain about off-campus parties? Has your school stepped in to mitigate the complaints? Let us know in a few comments!