Sean's Blog

I didn’t search my actual name, but my typical web name, Sean Et Cetera. I found two sites (here and here) referencing me as the photographer of the image shown here.

One of the many webcomics I read is PHD Comics by Jorge Cham. Billed as “a grad student comic strip”, it puts a humorous spin on the trials and tribulations of the life of grad students. While I may not be a grad student, my wife and brother are, as well as a number of the people I know.

Well, at 4:30 PM on April 10th, Jorge Cham will be at BGSU to give a lecture. It’s even on the calendar of public events at BGSU. I plan on going, as it should be an interesting lecture. I don’t think I can get any of the books he has ordered in time for the lecture/signing, so hopefully I’ll be able to pick one up there.

Thanks to Jim for pointing it out, as I could have missed it today, but BGSU made Slashdot.  The reason is that some students were arrested for possessing Nerf guns in 2006 while on campus for a game of Humans vs. Zombies.  While that issue has been cleared up, BGSU policy at the time (and probably still) dictates that weapons or facsimiles of weapons are not allowed on campus.

It’s not often that I can use the phrase “a firetruck hit Rodgers”, but the universe aims to keep things interesting.

While I was sitting in my office at work, one of my staff IM-ed me with the “A fire truck just ran into Rodgers?” At first I thought it was just something that someone misheard, but I was intrigued enough to go look. Sure enough, a firetruck had rolled into part of the Rodgers residence hall.

The firetrucks were on campus to deal with a grease fire (or so the story goes) in one of the Greek houses. When they went to pressurize the hose, the truck rolled forward on it’s own accord, which happened in front of one of the campus safety officers. The part of the building it hit had a gas line, which of course was immediately turned off. As the saying goes, you don’t see that every day.

I took all of 6 pictures real quick, which are up on my flickr account in a set named the same as this post.

I’m convinced that if we had a sound recording of the incident, we would have heard the following:

(And a thank you to CrackBerry.com)Update: Here’s what a campus update e-mail had to say about it:

Situation under control at Rodgers, Phi Kappa Tau

There was a small grease fire in the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity chapter house earlier this afternoon. In responding to the fire call, the city fire truck unexpectedly moved forward and struck the Mechanical Room adjacent to Rodgers Hall, creating a gas leak and damaging the building’s facade.

There were no injuries as a result of the fire.

The gas leak has now been stopped and students will be allowed back into the building as soon as city emergency officials give the all-clear.

Residence Life staff will remain in the vicinity of the building to keep students updated on the situation until the city gives the all-clear and then will be checking in with students throughout the evening.

I still blame the Decepticons. I am also aware that the firetruck transformer, Inferno, was an Autobot, but I still stand by my claim.

One morning early this summer I saw some students examining the tree. That evening, I stopped to take a look, and at eye-level was a mourning dove nest. A couple days later (May 21) I stopped back to take a picture of it.

After I took the picture, a guy passing by, perhaps a professor or instructor said something along the lines of “they aren’t too smart when they pick a spot for nests”. Well, while you can’t see the entire tree, it’s not very tall (only 20 to 30 feet) with no easy way for a hawk to get into the branches. And despite the nest being 6 feet off the ground, it’s also in a place where it would be difficult for a hawk to get in there. Being in the middle of campus, there’s also small chance of a house cat wandering over and bother the nest. No, I think that overall, this is a good place to nest.

After he walked away, I realized that it was just part of the arrogance of man to say that. Yes, mankind has selected all sorts of great places to build dwellings. Without creating a list, just think of all the places where people live or have lived despite any natural disasters that happen with a regular occurrence.

Yeah, animals got nothing on our ability to pick a place to live.

Each spring, the division of Student Affairs at BGSU holds an awards and recognition program. At this program, there are a variety of awards given out, including the Friend of Student Affairs award. This year, it was announced that the award would be renamed the Timothy D. King Friend of Student Affairs Award. This year’s recipient was Dr. J. Christopher Dalton, the Senior VP for Finance and Administration at BGSU, who was Tim’s first supervisor on campus.

Every now and then there’ll be a comment or conversation in the office about the “BGSYou” advertising that BGSU has been using for the last couple semesters. However, consider what the alternative could be:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7164017067819883937

I need to remember to ask my boss if this is what convince him to come to BGSU in the 90s.

In case anyone really wants that commercial, be sure to check out Media Convert, can take a variety of file types and convert them into other file type. This is useful for turning YouTube or Google videos into Windows Media or Apple Quicktime formats, MP3s to ringtones, or any number of other data or file conversions.

Portable fan forces residence hall evacuation, flooding from sprinkler system.

I saw the fire truck and emergency vehicles over at Founders on my way home last night, but figured it was just a false alarm, as is typical in any college residence hall. Well, at least no one was hurt and the fire was contained. I did like the quote about a student who wanted to air out her room but was concerned about starting another fire. If fans were a large fire threat, they wouldn’t be allowed in to begin with. I have two fans in my office over at Saddlemire, which is mainly due to the fact that the building gets rather hot in the spring, summer, and fall, so I’m assuming I’ll still be able to have them.

I was rather distraught though, that a fire on campus, even though there were not injuries or fatalities, was beat out by the death of Anna Nicole Smith as the main article on the BG News website. That’s almost as bad as Paula Zahn bumping her discussion with Richard Dawkins after the horrifically biased “panel” the other day, so that she could waste air time talking about Anna Nicole.

On a related note, I set off the smoke alarms last night while pre-crisping some pepperoni for our pizza.

read more | digg story

An assistant professor of visual communication and technology education at Bowling Green State University is confronted with network security and campus police after using Tor on his computer. Those of you who attend BGSU may recognize the name of the article’s author, Dr. Paul Cesarini.

All in all, it was an interesting article to read. Without knowing specifically whom from network security spoke with Dr. Cesarini, chances are I’ve spoken with them, due to my position in RCC at BGSU. I can see where someone using that sort of program would cause issues on the network, especially if the user was purposefully hiding their tracks. A big assumption I could make is that it wasn’t anyone in the residence halls they were speaking with, as I probably would have heard about it; then again, that’s an assumption, not a fact.

That is a benefit of working at a university. Had something like this happened in the “real world”, it could have easily led to someone’s termination, whereas in this case there was the benefit of arguing for academic freedom.

read more | digg story

On Friday, January 26, 2007, the TechTrends series at BGSU will host E. Michael Harrington as he presents Copyright Issues in YouTube, Second Life and Other Adventures in the Metaverse: Music, Law, Politics and Higher Education. The presentation will begin at 2:30 PM and go until 3:30 PM, which I believe will be followed by a question and answer session.

Information about the event can be found at the TechTrends series page. The more interesting part will be what he has to say about the “effects of the new 110th Congress upon technology, artistic expression, education and law, and an analysis of the likely role of the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) in new Internet and technology issues.” I’m sure it’ll be a decent presentation, and depending on what I get out of it, I’ll try and put something up afterwards.

For those that care, Dr. Harrington also has a website which can be found at http://www.emichaelharrington.com/.

I also see that there will be another presentation in the TechTrends series on February 28th. (Of course has a multicolor image thing that says “techtrends” but is referred to as “Tech Trends”. Pick one and stick with it.) that presentation will be called Why Should We Care About Net Neutrality?, so I’ve already made plans to attend.

Since I’m kinda bored with playing DDO at home, I should look into some Internet/social network/et cetera literature. I have some books at home, but they’re getting more and more outdated. I have Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, but I lost interest in it after 60 pages or so. One day I’ll get back to it, but I don’t think it’ll be the book to get me back into reading such books. I also have Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and I could re-read that, but since it is published in 2002, it might be a little outdated. I’ll scrounge around and see what the Internet or Amazon suggest, and either order or go purchase something later this week or weekend.