Entries for January 2005
2005-2006 Housing Costs, Exposed!
There has been some heated discussion over at home dot cwru about housing options for next year. What many people fail to realize is that it may very well be cheaper for them to live on campus. The bottom line: it depends first and foremost on your financial aid package, and secondly on how many people you plan to live with. If you receive grant-in-aid from Case, and most people do, disregard the generalizations being made over at home dot cwru and read on—it may save you some money.
The idea that living on campus could actually be cheaper seems like a strange one, especially considering the cost of the new North Residential Village apartments. It revolves around the fact that when you move off campus, you lose $5,030 in grant money, provided of course that you actually receive that much grant-in-aid from Case. That's FREE MONEY, it doesn't need to be paid back, and most people I know here receive it.
The cost of a North Residential Village 4-5 bedroom apartment is $6,990 for the upcoming school year (approximately 9 months), plus $400 for the technology fee ($200/semester). If you lose the $5,030 grant (you lose all of it regardless of your meal plan choice), that leaves you with $2,360 ($6,990 + $400 - $5,030) to work with for the school year if you'd like to match the on-campus solution. With a 9-month school year, that means you'd need to find something cheaper than $262 per month (per person). That includes utilities, internet, and any other services you want that are included in the on-campus housing cost. Good luck!
This obviously doesn't justify the high cost of on-campus housing, but since this grant-money constraint isn't exactly something we can work around, it pays to look at your situation before taking those numbers into account. You're much more likely to save money by getting off the meal plan. Even the cheapest meal plan offered next year is $2,200 per year for 7 meals per week. You could quite comfortably survive on 21 meals per week for not much more than that.
Depending on how many people you plan to share an apartment or house with, you may find a situation where it's cheaper to split the cost than to live on campus. It's actually not too hard to find rooms for rent in the $200–$250/month price range; such ads are posted on the home dot cwru classifieds and craigslist all the time. And if you don't receive that grant money from Case, it is obviously cheaper to live off campus regardless.
Also take into consideration which option you would choose if both housing solutions were the same price. To those who would say off-campus: have you seen the new apartments?! Combine their features with included utilities, the network connection, cleaning, and the Village itself and I'd gladly take the North Residential Village over off-campus housing any day.
If you want numbers you can fiddle with, I recommend taking a look at this Excel spreadsheet created by my friend and suitemate, Franz. It allows you to adjust any variable I've mentioned above to find out which housing solution will be cheapest for you. Please note that housing and meal plan are independent, but appear related in the spreadsheet. You can easily change the on-campus meal plan value to match your actual food costs (the default value is not a sufficient meal plan)—more likely, you should enter the same value as 'off-campus food' if you plan to opt out.
Your decisions are clearly none of my business, but hopefully you'll find this helpful and read the fine print!
EDIT: Access logs tell me that this post is making the rounds in the Housing department. If I'm wrong or there's something I'm missing (for example, if the grant-in-aid is likely to be automatically replaced by another form of aid), please post a comment!
Weblog Persistence
Regarding Jeremy's extended FAQ post, there's one important assumption made about the issue that isn't explicitly stated: people ask the question "what happens to my blog when I leave?" all wanting to hear the same response. Nobody wants to be told that their blog will be wiped. It's the same thing with university e-mail addresses—even though there are dozens of free services that offer better features, it's the principal of keeping what you already have and maintaining that important connection with the Case community. Speaking as a user, ITS should not be asking "are we going to allow blogs to persist?" They should be asking "what needs to be done to allow blogs to persist?" It seems to me that resources like alumni donations and other support for the university would be more easily encouraged by allowing continued use of these established services.
Statistically, I think ITS can justify the persistence of blogs on this service. The total student population is about 9,200 students (note that faculty—2,000 more people—can also make use of this service). Now, ITS probably doesn't expect all 9,200 students to sign up and be active—but since they're all eligible, the resources should exist to do so. Now, look at Home (or 'home dot cwru' as I like to call it)—this is an entirely student-run service, by the way, but I'm not looking at their usage or storage policies. Home has existed since 1998 and allows anyone to sign up (even alumni and unaffiliated users), yet they have only 10,600 user accounts—which isn't much larger than the student population at any given time. Many of those users probably just signed up to post in one thread and never returned, which suggests that there is an even smaller number of active users. I think if ITS reserves the resources to support the entire student population, usage statistics will allow for the persistence of blogs belonging to those separated from the university.
Finally, and practically speaking, ITS has the authority to impose whatever policies they see fit. The most obvious solution, from my point of view, would be to purge separated-user blogs that have been inactive for a certain threshold of time. Don't post in your blog for 6 months after leaving Case? Then you get a notification that your blog will be erased shortly. Another obvious policy would be to not offer continued tech support to users separated from the university, but still allow them to go about their business using the service.
In other news, you can probably tell I'm still tinkering with my template. All that navigation and side bar stuff will make a return at some point. It's much easier to build the template piece by piece. Individual entry pages still look ugly at the bottom—haven't customized that yet.
I finally got the number-of-comments-centered-in-a-circle working. If there's one place where CSS is a huge failure it's vertical alignment. Phew! Also finally decided on a trackback icon (a pair of quotes). It's the pink one!
The Blog@Case stats page shows me (exogen) as the top, I think, non-robot host making requests (unless one of those is Jeremy or another admin). I blame my template, for wanting to be tweaked every five minutes.
Portability, Pen Drives, and Python
For Christmas I received a 1 GB Lexar JumpDrive. It's basically just a keychain-sized flash memory card that interfaces via USB. These are pretty common and are also known as pen drives or flash drives. You just plug it into any computer's USB port and it will (hopefully) be recognized as a form of removable media—like a floppy disk. I had seen these around but never pictured myself owning one until it actually came into my possession.
After using it for about a week, it became nearly essential to my computing experience. I no longer had to use Remote Desktop just to run a few Windows applications with my favorite settings. I could just plug the drive into any computer and be able to browse with my own customized Firefox, or listen to music with my favorite media player (and even keep the music on there, too).
Unfortunately, there are a few issues standing in the way of such desired portability (that is, being able to use a program—to its fullest—on any machine without the need for an installation procedure). In order to shed some light on this topic, I will:
- discuss a few problems found in many applications
- show you how I used a portable scripting environment (Python, if you're interested) to solve a common portability issue
- offer some proposals for applications which would lend themselves nicely to portability
- mention a few projects and programs that Do It Right™
The context will mostly be Windows-specific, as that is where the aforementioned issues tend to arise. This entry is going to be relatively long, so I only suggest continuing if you're interested in any of the items above. Now, read on—especially if you own a pen drive.
Continue reading "Portability, Pen Drives, and Python"
The Nog Logs, Volume I
Real people. Real events. Real eggnog. A picture-guided story.
Well, this is my first real post. Let's try our hand at censorship, shall we?
Witness if you will, one Shoeless Sam. A man without fear. A man without shame. A man without shoes. A man who knocked on a door seeking eggnog and found instead the outer edges of... the Twilight Zone.
[00:20] <Kompootor> it's just that i couldn't find any eggnog when i got here
Figure 1: Kompootor = Shoeless Sam
Had he left it at that, this would have been just another ordinary night at just another ordinary school. But he didn't. Sam will unlock this door with the key of imagination, and into the Twilight Zone we will follow.
Warning: For your protection, this entry has been partially censored.
Continue reading "The Nog Logs, Volume I"
File Management
Well that rounding error in Mozilla sure is annoying. If you're on the main page now you'll see the Extended Entry bar on my previous post... that sure is a nice line underneath it! But there are more pressing matters at the moment.
One thing that appears to be missing from the MT configuration interface is file management. To get the images used in my CSS file on the Blog@Case server, I used the Upload File feature to put them in /images. But I can't find a way to get rid of them. I put a few images in the wrong directory and didn't link to them in any posts-- they're just used in the CSS. Perhaps they're gone for good. Or perhaps there's an FTP interface I've yet to notice.
I really should fix up this prototype and change the rest of the template. This color scheme is starting to make me look like an O'Reilly book!
EDIT: Anyone have any ideas for a Trackback icon, similar to the Permalink and Comment icons I have below? When I say I need to implement the rest of the template, I really mean design the rest, then implement it. The design isn't even done. But I'm more of a designer than a writer, so I imagine I'll have more fun making this template then I'll ever have actually using it.
Design Test!
Just testing this Movable Type template I've been working on for the past few hours. The CSS and XHTML are both kinda messy (there are no hacks, but there are a lot of tags), but hey-- it's a prototype! Some features are incomplete and obviously, the rest of the site will soon match.
That little ring at the bottom right will show the number of comments, and the other links down there will look more polished.
Feedback?
Testing code block.
One.
Two.
Three.