Because of this blog having reached newspaper-mentioned status early in its life, Google had never placed this blog at the top of the search page for “Arizona Growler” until now. That’s good news considering some of the search terms that have been leading here, not the oddest of which has been “sexist jobs“. Moreover, the ASUA elections are just around the corner, and people will undoubtedly be searching just like last year (minus the sex scandal).

Uh, no comment. No description. Just play the file.

There is copyrighted music in here, so I’m reserving all rights.

How to listen:

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For what I believe is the third time in a year, the Arizona Daily Wildcat has changed its online format. It’s still on CollegePublisher, but it’s a good visual improvement either way. It also seems as if the paper wanted to assert its longstanding financial independence from the university, as seen in the caption below “THE WILDCAT ONLINE.” I would have opted for just putting “ARIZONA DAILY WILDCAT” up there. We can already tell it’s online by virtue of operating our computers.

I just received an email supposedly from egreetings.com which contains a link to "postcard.exe", which I scanned with AVG.  The file according to AVG is "IRC/Backdoor.flood".  It was sent to my email.arizona.edu account, so I suspect I’m not the only UA student to receive it.

This is the source code for what I received.  Moreover, you can also read the warning from one of the online businesses with which the email claims to be affiliated.

The basic gist is that if you receive an email claiming to be sending you a postcard from "a family member", don’t click it. 

If you see the same thing and you’re UA affiliated, be sure to notify CCIT.

Update: Looks like BYU got it, too.

Reposted due to a server change.  I’m having to use university servers right now because I can’t use Archive.org when using copyrighted music and sound effects.  Please me know if you’d be willing to host a couple of mp3’s for me.  Originally posted on September 6th, 2006.

Facebook!  It’s where everybody knows your name!  And you know everybody else’s name, et cetera!

How to listen:

Play episode | RSS 2.0 Feed (podcasts) | Subscribe with iTunes or other podcatcher

Update: I just figured out how to isolate the feed to the podcasts only.  You may want to update the feed address to make sure iTunes can see both current episodes.

Update II: I’m submitting this to various blog carnivals including but not limited to Showcase Carnival.

It looks like ERes was down for a while, but DocuFax and Audio reserves are still down.

Commenter "Topher George" astutely noted in a comment yesterday that it could be a hack attempt against the university’s terrorist intelligence tracking project.  It’s certainly a possibility, but I don’t imagine they’d ever tell us.

ASUA is holding its candidate information session today in the SUMC Santa Rita room at 6:00 p.m. Expect my presence. We’re about to find out whether free speech survived the ASUA Senate.

Update: New elections code is online.  From a very quick inspection, there’s only one part I don’t like.

7-2.03    Any and all websites, web pages, and/or profiles on online networking sites
including, but not limited to Facebook and MySpace, utilized for the purpose of
campaigning by a candidate and/or a member of their campaign staff shall be
approved by the Elections Commissioner. Any changes made to the
aforementioned after initial approval do not require subsequent approval;
however, the changes are subject to the rules and regulations of this Code.

The major free speech changes made look to include no longer requiring approval of physical campaign materials and no longer requiring approval for electronic updates.  It looks like liberty has prevailed.  Now we shall see whether we can change "tradition" and make these elections dignified.

Candidates, expect questions much like last year.  Readers, direct questions to ask the candidates by emailing me.  [gpohara at gmail dot com]

Update II: Benny Parsons has passed away.  It’s been a sad winter for NASCAR.  Rest in peace.

Both the Citizen and the Star are reporting that the UA network has been hacked from a French IP address.  The initial break-in happened back in November, but only back on Tuesday did they actually find that something had gone wrong.  Services to students appear now to be restored, but there are concerns over theft of UA credit card numbers and employees’ Social Security Numbers.

THIS PODCAST EPISODE IS NOT SAFE FOR CHILDREN. 

Update (7 Dec): Archive.org, the server where I host the podcasts, appears to be having problems at the moment.

How to listen:

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WorldNetDaily columnist Jim Rutz declared in a controversial column recently that overconsumption of soy products causes males to become homosexuals, citing soy’s relatively-high estrogen content.

“Soy is feminizing,” Rutz claims “and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion, and homosexuality. That’s why most of the medical…blame for today’s rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise of soy formula and other soy products.”

WorldNetDaily editor-in-chief Joseph Farah, amidst massive hate mail from leftist websites, immediately defended Rutz, and called for women to be banned from eating beef, pork, poultry, beans, and dairy, for fear that increased testosterone levels might make them homosexuals, too.

Officials at the University of Arizona complimented the study, and are planning to increase the availability of soy in on-campus food in order to facilitate an increase in diversity. In contrast, Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University has banned tofu, calling it “The Curd of Tinky Winky.”

This news report is brought to you by the Law Offices of Bob Schmuck. Did your mother feed you soy as a infant? Are you sexually confused? Recent medical research has found that your sexual confusion is not your fault, and you may be able to sue for damages. For a free consultation, call the Law Offices of Bob Schmuck at 1-800-SOY-MILK.

Editorial note: I still affirm that homosexuality is a sin just like any other sexual sin, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking Jim Rutz is stupid.

Music is "Stop Yield Go Merge (Extended Les Thorn Mix)" from Derek K. Miller of Penmachine. 

The University of Arizona apparently spent $7.1 million dollars of the people’s money to plan for a now-defunct downtown "rainbow bridge."  Now that the bridge plan is gone, they want the City of Tucson to use the people’s money to pay for $3.6 million of that bill.  Yes, the bill’s justified, but wow, did this one go bad.

Anybody have any better plans? 

Perhaps this will satisfy the critics?

Update: Make that a $65 fee, not $50.  Not only that, it might increase to $100.

I have yet to test out UAWifi,  the bigger and supposedly better campus wireless network funded by the new $50-and-increasing technology fee.  Every time I try to connect, it merely rejects me.

For those who have figured it out (kind of), they don’t like it.  The network apparently mandates the user to run a "policy key" program.  This program supposedly ensures certain things on the computer according to the manufacturer’s website including:

• Authentication and Registration
• Anti-Virus
• Anti-Spyware
• Microsoft Patches
• P2P File Sharing
• Access Point
• Custom Policy Builder

And because I use Comodo instead of the supported programs, my system would theoretically be unsupported.

This isn’t just UAWifi; users in residence halls are also affected.  As for now, the wireless network "UAWireless," while unsecured, is still working and is where I’m posting this from right now.

More than ninety students have joined the Facebook group "Screw Policy Key" and are working to find a workaround, calling it spyware, which is ironically one of the things the policy key is supposed to protect against.  The people responsible for the change maintain that it isn’t.

Meanwhile, I think I might know a way around it, but I also don’t feel like getting sued.  We’ll see whether it works once it, well, works.  People ought to realize that CCIT closely monitors its network traffic in the first place, but requiring people to run intrusive software like this is quite scary.

A portion of the news feed on my Facebook account (friends’ names removed for privacy reasons, as if most of my readers can’t find out anyway)

The new (out)rage in the online college world is Facebook’s new "news feed".  Compiling information from "friends" on Facebook, the feed gives the user on-the-double information about people’s latest activities on Facebook, including posting on people’s "walls", friendships, "group" memberships, etc.

Let’s see: 

• eight of my friends posted on [name]’s wall.  It was his birthday yesterday.
• [name] and [name] are now friends.
• [name] hates the news feed.
• [name] and [name] are dating.
• [name] is weirded out by Facebook.
• and more…

A friend once joked to me in a private message on Facebook that it was "a stalker’s dream come true."  Perhaps this is becoming more true.  Not only is there a news feed for your overall circle of friends, you can zero it down to individual friends’ "feeds". 

The protest group mentioned in the image to the right currently has 26,853 members worldwide (mostly in the U.S., of course), but I think the protest is quite shortsighted.  First, the feed doesn’t show any information to which I didn’t have access in the first place other than times of instance.  For the most part, it only the information easier to find.  These friends’ profiles, as well as profiles of just about everybody at the University of Arizona who happens to use Facebook, are available for my viewing.  Even before "news feed", I could basically sit in a coffee shop, search for the coffee shop’s name on Facebook, find who admits to frequenting it, find pictures of people I recognize, and find out that the girl 20 feet from my port beam has a boyfriend named Mark Burton.

Fellow students, if you don’t want your entire circle of friends (let alone your entire school or the entire Internet) finding out, DON’T POST IT ON THE INTERNET!!!!

I support the news feed.  Overall it might encourage people to use a little more caution, which some of Facebook’s users really need to consider trying.

Oh, and that number I mentioned earlier?  Now it’s 29,080.  And I had just refreshed it ten minutes ago.  Actually, I’ve been refreshing it as I’ve been writing this, and the number was steadily increasing.  Let’s just say it’s going to be at least 80,000 by the time I wake up.

Campus Technology has an article out concerning the uses of blogging in University of Arizona classes.  Interesting stuff.  For the uninitiated, professors at UA will typically put out class websites where students can download lecture notes, homework assignments, etc.  Other classes will have listservs where teachers might put out supplemental information including but not limited to class cancellations, homework reminders, etc.  Blogging brings both of these concepts together and additionally fosters more discussion than forums.

I tried getting the forum idea to work at my high school more than once, but it never caught on.  Not only did many students not have internet access in the home, but they simply weren’t proficient enough at computing to make it a useful resource.  Moreover, bad web design on teachers’ part made the concept of Internet-aided classes notorious.  With blogs’ prevalance and familiarity, we just might be seeing that perception come to an end.

Of course, this is notwithstanding the possibility of computers in the classroom being more of a distraction than an aid.