Go out and get a drink. The House of Representatives voted to reduce student loan rates from 6.8 percent to 3.4 percent over the next 5 years. You’ll be saving a little money I guess.

Read on: Article

I’m not quite sure why, but we haven’t been using FeedBurner to syndicate our RSS feed. That means we have no idea how many people subscribe to our feed, but we assume the number is in the thousands.

So, update your RSS feeds if you’ve got them to our new feed address:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Hackcollege

Or you could just click on the button in our little task bar at the top that reads “RSS Feed.”

It’s a feeding frenzy!

It’s been about one week since I installed Linux on my Dell 700m laptop. Since then, I have yet to use it to write a paper or do anything too out of the ordinary. I have noticed a few things that are nice about Ubuntu. It makes me wonder what halleucinogenic drug the Windows team must be smoking/inhaling/freebasing/eating/dropping when they decided to not include a feature that a user-created operating system sports.

Read on to your heart’s content »

There are certain points in the history of humanity where large structures are built, idols are worshiped, and all worries are forgotten. This was the scenario on the night of January 13, 2007 at the California Institute of Technology.

Many students may think that Caltech would never throw a successful party. They have no frats. Their IQ’s are too high to be significantly effected by binge drinking. As I was reminded on Saturday, Caltech students don’t do much except study and plan for parties.

Read on to your heart’s content »

Rosario and I are doing some house-cleaning and changing the site’s look here and there. We’re going for cleaner and less cluttered with “non puke-y” colors (as Rosario described them :)).

Pardon our dust while we get the look exactly how we want it. If you’ve got any feedback, please let us know. Hearing from you is like hearing from the President, except you don’t have control over the country. (Some would argue that he doesn’t either, but that’s another post.)

While Kelly is looking over the new themes I sent him, I’d like to share with you all this great video that’s been around for a while. Whenever I watch it, it reminds me of how beautiful life and living… just is. Warning: Emo. Well, not really.

I mean, we preach to you here about how to excel in college and your education and your career, but I’d like to take the time right now to let you all know: Sitting in class or in an office or at your computer, no matter how addicted you are, it isn’t everything.

So I encourage you all to take the time today to answer these questions: What do I need? What do I want? What do I enjoy? And how can I get it?

I remember in my Cognitive Science class with Brian Scholl, he placed on Powerpoint the following quotation:

In any field, find the strangest and most fascinating thing and explore it.

I think it’s been modified from the quotation by John Wheeler. In any case, it says a lot. It’s so hard discovering what interests us. We all went through high school with pre-defined classes to take. Now that we’re in college, it’s hard to break out of that mold.

So for the new year, I encourage you all to break out. Find what you enjoy. Go for it.

Two nights ago, I became very frustrated with Windows XP on my Dell 700m laptop. Among the inferior UI (compared to OS X), innumerable security updates, and other problems associated with Windows being installed too long. So rather than formatting my hard drive and starting off again with a clean copy of Windows XP (a process that I would have to devote an entire day to), I decided to install Ubuntu, a distribution (or version) of Linux.

Read on to your heart’s content »

About a week ago, I wrote about a slick program named Task List in the article titled “Task List: Plan Your Procrastination, Schedule Your Slacking.” In response to the post, one of my friends asked me to give some pointers on how I use the program. So, I fired it up and came up with a few tricks:

Read on to your heart’s content »

Re: Classhack: Turn Your Phone Off in Class

I don’t know for sure, Kelly, but I think the stress you’re talking about is the feeling you get when your phone goes off, the professor notices and either gives you a dirty look or, even worse, actually says something directly at you. So, yeah, you could turn it off, or you could turn it on silent, or you could turn it to vibrate. But… Aren’t we HackCollege? I’d like to introduce you all to the mosquito ringtone (what I personally recommend):

Read on to your heart’s content »

While it’s not the most revolutionary thing in the world, I’ve started turning my phone off before I step into a class.

Since I don’t text my friends while in class anyway, turning my phone off relieves a certain stress. I don’t have to worry about it going off, whether I silenced it, etc.

And besides, it’s always nice turning on your phone and getting several voice mails and text messages. Give it a shot.