end of an era

End of Semester processing for FALL2006-SUMMER2007

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from Information Technology Services, Accounts
reply-to consult@usc.edu,
to meileewo@usc.edu,
date Dec 5, 2007 11:19 PM
subject End of Semester processing for FALL2006-SUMMER2007
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11:19 PM (4 minutes ago)


Dear student account holder:

Our records indicate that you either graduated more than six months ago or are not currently enrolled in fall 2007 or spring 2008 classes. As a result, access to your email.usc.edu and UNIX Student Computing Facility (SCF) accounts will be disabled on the evening of Wednesday, December 19, 2007. Access to USC central services, including myUSC Portal and Virtual Private
Network (VPN), will also be disabled, as will access to many departmental services.

Though your email (email.usc.edu) access will be disabled, email forwarding will continue to work for a limited time. Instructions on how to forward your USC email to another address are available at the following site:

http://www.usc.edu/its/email/help/forwarding.html/.

If you are not currently registered and have not yet taken steps to save the data in your email and UNIX accounts, please do so by noon, December 19th. After that date, you will be charged to have your email files restored. For more information about file restorals of disabled and expired accounts, please see Section 5 of the following website:

http://www.usc.edu/its/policies/procedures/index.html/.

If you are registered for spring 2008 classes and have received this message in error, please contact the ITS accounts office at accounts@usc.edu.

If you are a staff member who took a class in spring or summer 2007, the disabling of your student account will not affect your staff email account or your staff UNIX account and related central services.

because I'm a good soldier of Troy

November 29, 2007

The Honorable Antonio R. Villaraigosa
Mayor
City of Los Angeles City Hall
200 North Spring Street, Room 303
Los Angeles, California 90012
Fax: (213) 847-0680

Dear Mr. Mayor,

I would like to express my appreciation and gratitude for your support of the University of Southern California remaining a tenant of the Memorial Coliseum.

As a recent graduate of USC I was very upset to hear that the Coliseum Commission might not renew our lease and allow us to make very necessary renovations to the building. As I understand it, the school is offering $100 million to make upgrades to return the Coliseum to world-class status. I also think that allowing USC more say in our now 80-year residency at the venue is not too much to ask. The contributions that USC has made and will continue to make to the area and the city as a whole far outweigh any notions of an elusive NFL stadium.

I am a Trojan, my mother is a Trojan and I hope someday my grandkids will be Trojans too. The Coliseum lease is not only important to us in the practical sense of having a place to hold events, but also in terms of our historical presence at the stadium. Trojan traditions are extremely important to us. We are grounded in this storied 127-year history, and this gives us the strength and passion to excel at what we do. I recently returned to campus for homecoming celebrations, as many of us alums do, and I cannot fathom the loss of community that would occur if our home games were moved to the Rose Bowl.

I was saddened to read Commissioner Bill Chadwick’s comments in the LA Times this morning. He said, "I think it would be great if they played at the Rose Bowl for two years. At the end of that two years, the leverage we would have in negotiations would be spectacular." This Marie Antoinette attitude does not reflect a spirit of friendship or even compromise. I truly hope that your positive influence may change the opinion of the Coliseum Commission members so that my school and the venue that we know and love may return to the bargaining table to reach a fair and fruitful agreement.

I know that you went to UCLA, but fight on, sir!

Sincerely,



Meilee M. Wong
Class of ‘07

pie. pie. pie. pie. pie. pie.

When I went home for T-giving last week, naturally my mother freaked out that we didn't have enough dessert to bring to Auntie Ellen's annual gathering.

So for some reason, my sister started blasting Alicia Keys (as I found out later) at 8 a.m. and I had nothing better to do than get up and bake up a storm! What did I choose? PIE.

I don't particularly believe that "baking is an exact science" (sorry Alton), so I poked around online to find general proportions for things and went to town. My first pie adventure: Pumpkin Pie.

First, I set about making crust. I "cut" a stick of (cold) butter into some flour and baking powder (I tossed in some salt because I thought it needed it) with my fingertips, until I got that "coarse cornmeal" that everyone talks about. Moistened it up with one egg, and froze my dough ball for about 1/2 hr.

I carefully sprinkled my work surface (which happens to be my parents' large glass cutting board) with flour, and plopped my dough ball in the center. I carefully floured my rolling pin, and rolled out from the center, going around in a circle until I had a somewhat pie-shaped, 1/4 inch thick round of pie crust dough. Excited about my accomplishment, I lifted up one edge of the pie crust to fold it over for easy transfer to my glass pie dish. Crumble. I bristled at my crust. No matter. I pushed the rips back together, retrieved a large plastic pancake spatula and attempted to lift up the edge again. Crumble crumble. Undeterred, I worked my spatula around the entire 360º outer edge of my crust. EVENT OF MASSIVE CRUMBLE. Little bits of pie dough were molded to the board, and my crust was in a shambles.

Result: FAIL

Lesson: Freeze dough ball longer.

While my hastily re-formed dough ball was re-freezing, I set about making my pie filling. One can of pumpkin puree, check. (Thank you, Barefoot Contessa, for erasing my shame.) One egg, check. Brown sugar, check. Nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon, check. Condensed milk...condensed milk...uh oh.

Result: SUBSTITUTE COCONUT MILK.

Lesson: Coconut Pumpkin Pie?

I whisked everything together until I got the consistency of a melted milkshake. Then I covered with saran wrap and returned the whole thing to the fridge so as to allow my dough to finish freezing.

In the meantime, my father had decided that we needed to bake an apple pie "because that's what The People want." If by "The People" he means some kind of Wong Proletariat...no matter. Anyway, during the pumpkin madness I had sent him to the store for reinforcements so by the time I'd whisked my pumpkin to soupy happiness, we were off and running on the apples.

Peeling done with a vegetable peeler, coring done with one of those semi-useless "apple cutters" that look like sinister covered-wagon spokes, last minute corrections to remove seeds and cores done with a paring knife. (Thanks Dad.) I tossed the apples with sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg and let them rest. Simple!

Time for crust #2. The apple pie recipe called for twice as much flour, the same amount of butter/baking powder, and one egg. I threw in a dash of salt because I thought it needed it. The difference here? Spooning one tablespoonful of ice water in at a time, slowly, until the dough came together. I liked this better than the first crust...I didn't have to rely on my one egg for all my moisture, I could tailor it to what I needed. And I ended up with a larger quantity of crust in the end. Enough so I could cookie-cutter a duck for my final project...

Bored with waiting for the dough to freeze, I poked around in cabinets until I found...Ghirardelli Cocoa Powder. I wonder what this would taste like in pumpkin pie...so, I retrieved my pumpkin filling and whisked in a couple tablespoons. No visible color change, but what about the taste?

Once the dough balls had re-frozen, my pies came together like the last 5 pieces of a massive puzzle. Pre-baking the pumpkin pie crust using dried beans to keep its shape, I poured in my filling. For the apple, I rolled out half the dough, poured in the apples, and rolled out the other half on top. Cutting vents and trimming excess dough. With a little extra, I cut out a duck and plopped it on top of my pumpkin pie.

An hour and a little bit later, this is what we got:

Coconut Chocolate Pumpkin Pie

Homemade Apple Pie

Well, how did I do? Well, in competition with three other pies (all store-bought) of pecan, mincemeat and plain pumpkin, there was one slice of my apple left and two slices of my pumpkin at the end of the night. Not bad for my first foray into pie-making.

Things to remember:

• Chocolate makes pumpkin filling taste burnt, even if it's not.
• A half tablespoon of nutmeg is far too much, no matter what the recipe says.
• Fuji apples are much sweeter than Granny Smith. Add lemon juice or other appropriate acid.
  
• No one understands ducks. Avoid.

Other than that, I think this was a fantastic learning experience. All I gotta say is, watch out for Baker Wong at Christmas!

squirrelly republicans

Soo...I visited my old office yesterday, and apparently the second floor of Cannon just recruited its latest member:

Supposedly, Issa's office put out nuts for it. Don't squirrels have rabies?

www.music.ME

With the advent of customization, people are looking for personalized services when they come online into the internet music community. Services such as music.com and myspace music allow aritsts and bands to have a centrally located homepage which is also part of a larger social networking system.

Music.com is primarily an online store where artists can hawk their wares. Artists can set whatever price per song or album they choose, and there is a set fee or percentage that the website charges per transaction. Like iTunes, songs are 99 cents and a user can pick and choose individual songs if they don't wish to purchase the entire album.

Myspace music, on the other hand, is primarily a social networking tool that has a music feature integrated into it. It is extremely useful for small or local bands in that they have a place to post pictures, show dates, blogs and most importantly, their songs. Along with having a host for their songs, bands can become "friends" with other bands or individuals on the website, and thus keep their fan base apprised of their latest updates and records.

Myspace recognized the popularity of this service, and jumped on the opportunity to create its own record label, Myspace Records. It may seem like a strange idea to merge a social networking site with a record label, but really it makes a lot of sense. The record company has a built-in talent pool - the bands using their myspace.com capability - along with a built-in customer base. The people who are already "friends" with the band on myspace would probably support them when it came time to purchase a new album, and the opportunities for direct marketing are endless. This was a brilliant move on the part of Myspace, which was formerly relegated to the back seat as a creepy version of Facebook.

Alternative Spring Break

For Spring Break this year I did a service project instead of going on vacation, to a place where my family had been imprisoned for 4 years during World War II. The project required a lot of physical labor, outside in the sun, and I took this time to do a lot of personal reflecting and to get to know my groupmates a little better. What struck me was that even though we were working in spaces often smaller than 10 X 10, some of them whipped out their iPods and plugged themselves in as we were working. At first I was slightly irked by it, but then I realized that these kids have never known life without some sort of iPod-like device. After four years of music school, I still don't have an iPod, but this device is completely impacting generations of kids and how they interact socially.

Instead of plugging in, I took some time to think and wrote this after the trip:

When I felt the sun burning into my skin, the dryness of the air squeezing the moisture out of me, and the wind and sand whipping into my body I sort of began to understand what happened to my family. There's this weight around your heart and your soul when there's nothing but desolate stretches of wasteland and emptiness as far as you can see. It feels like hopelessness and desperation and an intense loneliness - like your neighbors and your state and your country have turned their backs and abandoned you in this horribly Godforsaken place. That your freedom, something so sacred to Americans, could be taken away for an interminable amount of time. I wanted to cry but everything was so dry that I couldn't.

I wanted for nothing more in the world than for my Grandma to still be alive so I could call her and tell her what I was doing. I wanted to ask her so badly where my family's barracks were, if she had visited the gardens that I shoveled out from under many feet of overgrowth and windblown sand, where the fire station where my grandpa volunteered was, and where my aunts and uncle had gone to school. Who the man was in the story she told me years ago, that was playing catch with his grandson and wandered too close to the perimeter to retrieve a ball and was shot by the military police because he only spoke Japanese and didn't understand when they told him to move away. But mostly I wanted to tell her that people were coming to Manzanar every day, and looking at the museum and that there were park rangers here from all over the U.S. who cared so deeply about protecting the site and its history. That I was doing
something small but important - helping other people to remember what had happened here and the things that are so much more important than differences and fear and hysteria. When I saw my grandparents in the roster of prisoners, and saw a photograph of my aunt going to
Pilgrimage in the museum there, I knew that what I was doing was important, and I want my kids to do this too. Learn the history of our people but not the anger and hate that I felt for so long.

Causing a Ruckus

In yet another attempt to force college students to stop downloading, the music filesharing service Ruckus has introduced yet another platform into the fray. You can download music onto your desktop for free, and share it with friends too, all legally. The catch? If you want to move your music off of your desktop and onto a mobile player, you have to pay. And it's not compatible with iPod. And the music, of course, is encoded with DRM.

The popularity of downloaded music is huge, and continues to grow. But the problem of illegal downloading has cramped the progress of the industry. It doesn't make sense to allow people to use the music "however they want," but people have gotten used to it and are rejecting DRM.

The University of Southern California, previously subscribing to Napster in a highly unsuccessful campaign to stop downloaders, recently began providing the Ruckus service to its entire student body. Coinciding with 125, the subscription was touted as a leap into the digital future. Interesting, but I don't think it will work. People are so used to BitTorrent, DC++ for public schools and other services that they have absolutely no problem "stealing" media. And when they aren't able to find what they want, people automatically go to iTunes. The 99-cent song/$9.99 album model makes everything seem like a deal, and in theory, you will then own that song forever - at least for your own personal use. For the subscription model, as soon as you get rid of your monthly service, you no longer have access to the songs. And this, for many people, is a deal-killer.

¿Puede la música latina ahorrar la industria?

In a time where record sales are pretty much universally tanking, there is one beacon of light in the shipwreck. The Latin music market has actually been growing slightly every year in terms of sales, giving the labels a bit of hope in a time of drastic changes. Unfortunately, this is a false hope.

The demographic that listens to Latin is quite different from your average consumer. The purchasing power driving these sales are reluctant to use the internet, or may not be savvy enough to be able to use downloading software. No matter what format the consumer is interested in, the demand for Latin music will continue to grow. And it is only a matter of time before the the digital revolution comes to Latin America.

In my experiences with my students at a local middle school, I found the Spanish-language boy band Rebelde extremely popular with the next wave of Latino young people. Part of the reggaeton revolution, rapper Pit Bull - who is slated to perform at the Shrine Auditorium - also commands an impressive sway over a younger, more technologically advanced fan base. As these fans grow older and begin to purchase music on their own, I predict that their purchasing method of choice will soon become digital downloads.

The trend is already implementing itself. Although iTunes, Napster or BitTorrent might not yet be household names in Latin America, times are changing. Digital downloads have increased by 15 times since 2005, with high quality ringtones for wireless devices comprising a good amount of that increase. This already shows a shift in the Latin American culture in general. With the explosive popularity of mobile devices, consumers are becoming less and less reluctant to forgo the CD format.

Big Bad RIAA vs. Little Red Trojan Hood

My ninth grade physics teacher always said that for every action, there was a consequence. And in this case, USC students must now come to terms with their misbehavior.

Today the Daily Trojan announced that the school has agreed to help the RIAA catch illegal downloaders - ostensibly students - on campus. The school provided access to information about how their networks are used, and rightfully so, but USC has been put in a difficult position. Do you protect your students or do you obey the law? Kind of a catch-22.

Right or wrong, USC will soon deliver letters to 20 students detailing their downloading misbehavior and offering them a settlement. However, even taking the settlement is bad news because the RIAA may fine you up to $150,000 per infringement, so for every song (file) swapped. Even if you do manage to avoid going to court, it will be expensive regardless.

The record labels have to deal with new and creative downloaders every day. For example, in Japan downloads to mobile devices total almost 350 million while downloads to PCs are only about 23 million. Kids in Japan have already moved on and are downloading directly to their phones, and comparatively ignoring their less-portable desktop computers.

So through all of this, there are going to be 20 very unhappy college students tomorrow. But it all comes back to my personal adage: Why pay for something you can't use however you want, when you could get the exact same thing for free off a file-sharing program that is DRM free?

How Bluetooth Faced Extinction

Although it may seem as if Bluetooth is making its first foray into the music industry, this is definitely not the case. Strangely, the famously wireless company has now released a desk-bound stereo set that is Bluetooth enabled. The idea behind this device is that you can easily play music beamed from your Bluetooth-capable mp3 player directly to the stereo. Sony has also come out with a Bluetooth-enabled amplification system that is even simpler. However, from $150 - $300 per system, I could be very easily convinced to burn mix CDs and physically pop them into a player.

What seems strange is that unlike the rest of the industry that is moving quickly to embrace the demand for portable, all-in-one devices such as the iPhone, some Black Berrys, etc., Bluetooth has created a non-portable, single function device.

Perhaps before they had tried to market Bluetooth-enabled mp3 devices such as the Diva Gem, which comes in three colors. And even earlier, the Sony HBM-40, a simple Bluetooth music-and-phone. Although perhaps these devices didn't sell that well when they were first introduced several years ago, but I think this type of device could be very popular today. People want portable, functional, durable devices that offer them wireless convenience. So before we all start wearing our music players, i definitely think this type of device would be more popular with today's consumer than it was when first introduced.

Dell's latest effort

One giant step backwards for mankind

It appears that the record companies are not willing to let go of DRM. Not only has Steve Jobs' plea to the record companies fallen on deaf ears, but music purveyors are finding new and more intrusive ways to bring DRM into our lives!

The RIAA is still hunting downloaders, most recently releasing a list of the top offenders in terms of college campuses. The worst offenders? Ohio, Purdue, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of Tennessee and the University of South Carolina. They have sent out 15,000 complaints to the schools, which is triple the amount sent last year. And despite everything, music sales are still going down, which they claim is due in part to piracy. However, even though the record companies are working in concert to stop illegal downloading, a student at Amherst (the sixth worst offender on the list) said: "You know, downloading is such a part of student culture that college kids will never stop."

In another step back, BitTorrent has broken down and joined the ranks of the new Napster. They are planning to launch a site called the BitTorrent Entertainment Network which will legalize the software in the eyes of the law. However, just like iTunes, BitTorrent's legal material will be encoded with DRM. It makes sense...this company had been vilified in the eyes of the record labels, which were hesitant I'm sure to take on this deal. However, with Google's purchase of YouTube, the validity of the online video download market is quickly growing.

A recent study claims that 62% of record executives think that dropping DRM - so that people can use the songs on any mp3 player - will encourage people to increase online sales. So where's the action behind those words?

iCompetition

Surprise, surprise RIAA. Despite your campaign to hunt down the downloaders (with tacit approval from the Big Four), about 1 billion illegal songs are still traded every month. Suing grandmothers and 12-year-olds may be a scare tactic, but it's clearly not an effective one. Since the iTunes Store was launched in 2003, more than 2 billion songs have been sold through its 99-cents-per-song model. However, compared to a potential 44 billion songs illegally traded through P2P software - such as Gnutella, BitTorrent, Kazaa, the old Napster - the iTunes Store seems like small change.

The threat of a lawsuit doesn't seem to faze the small army of illegal downloaders. So instead of laying the heavy hand of the law upon them, why don't we encourage them to behave otherwise? How can we make the concept of legal purchase more palatable to a mass audience?

Convenience! Steve Jobs has already come out in opposition to digital rights management in his open letter to the Big Four last week. His iPhone concept is tying into the idea of convenience. Consumers can download any track from the iTunes Store, anytime, anywhere with a click of the touchscreen. A company in Europe and Asia actually beat Jobs to the punch with their MusicStation concept.


Omnifone is a company that operates in Europe, Asia and South Africa, and their MusicStation is quite a slick program. It works on almost any music phone, 2.5-3G, and allows you to download any digital track in their system for a weekly flat rate of £1.99 or €2.99 (slightly less than $4 US). Unlimited downloads for $4 a week? I'll take it! Downloaded directly to my phone, with PC compatibility? Even better! However, there is one pitfall. Just like the iTunes Store, the MusicStation digital tracks are encoded with DRM.

The current use of DRM by the record companies is not encouraging consumers to walk on the good side of the law. Why pay for something that you cannot use freely, while you can download a DRM-free track for nothing and be able to do whatever you want with it.

When will the record companies let go of their chokehold on digital music? If they want to survive, they need to change.

ribbit

For all the work that record labels do to prevent downloading, a popular symphony in England has avoided the issue entirely by offering their tracks online for free download through a music management company called BlueFrog. The Lancashire Sinfonietta has 10 songs posted on their website, and they allow the user to use them however they wish - burning to CD, uploading to an mp3 player, and they even have the CD album art and booklet available for download and printing. They also offer their CDs for £7.50 on the same website, which is about $12 or $13.

To download the songs, the user must register with the website and provide very minimal personal information (name, email and country). Then the site provides you with a "passcode" to download the songs. They say that they won't sell your personal information, so I'm guessing that they just use the information to track and market to their existing fan base.

Their press release notes that "this is great for people who want to try out classical music for the first time as there's no need to fork out for something you're not sure you're going to like." So BlueFrog and the Sinfonietta are effectively providing an on-demand sample of classical music so users can try it out for free. And, you are not "borrowing" the tracks. The absence of DRM sets this model apart from the Napster and Ruckus model.

However, at the same time, I realize that the British model is quite different from the American system of capitalism. The arts receive many times more funding from their government - through regional Arts Councils - than they do here, and they probably aren't as concerned with "stealing." The Lancashire Sinfonietta is probably not going to bankrupt itself by offering its tracks online for free. Despite the differences in how the recording industry works in the U.K. and America, I think the record companies here could take a lesson from this model. Offer some tracks online for free, and allow users to do whatever they want with them. If they like what they hear, they will come back for more. And when they come back, they'll bring their credit cards with them.

the only music student without an ipod

When I was sitting in class last week, the Professor asked everyone if they had an iPod, a Zune or "other." I thought to myself, I am probably the only person in class who doesn't have anything at all. I don't even own a CD player anymore.

I remember in junior high my father bought me the Rio 500. It was light and about the size of a deck of cards, and ran on a card - 64 mb. Seems puny now, but at the time it was the coolest thing in school. I think it held about a CD's worth of music...maybe less.

First I was waiting for a generation that didn't break down as much. And then I was waiting for something smaller. And then I was waiting for something with more storage. And then I was waiting for something that had the storage of a video iPod in the size of a Nano. And then I realized that I hated Apple products.

I think they finally may have invented something that makes everyone happy. The iPhone is on Cingular and is a cell phone, iPod and web browser, all in one. It is a high function device and works just like an iPod. The touchscreen allows you to call someone by touching their name in your address book. Also, the iPhone has Safari loaded on to it already. And as I understand it, Safari is basically impervious to computer viruses. However, some applications that I like to use, such as Google Chat, don't work on Safari.

One big problem, and I think the majority of my classmates' foremost concern, is that if you lose your iPhone you're totally out of luck. But at the same time, you have less electronics to keep track of so maybe you'd be less likely to lose it.

Maybe the iPhone is enough to break me. Maybe I will finally get an iPod.