Earning My Miles

I’ve done the 3,000 mile trip between home and college via just about every form of transport but hot air balloon, but when I have four days to sacrifice, I always opt for Amtrak. Most students don’t even think about traveling by locomotive. Well, it’s time to take off your train-ing wheels and kiss the air goodbye. The iron horse is where it’s at. Read on to your heart’s content »

Is Facebook blocked? Oh, no! Recently, A reader wrote to us, asking:

i am at my new job in this cooperate office…and they block access to facebook. how am i supposed to waste my time at work if i can’t stalk my new neighbors? the only website i know that you can, you know, beat the system is ninja proxy and it’s kinda shittty. I looked on hackcollege and couldn’t find anything on this important subject. help

Read on to your heart’s content »

It’s almost too easy. Yesterday (which is still today for anyone in the USA) my plane touched down in Frankfurt, Germany. I’m studying in Bonn, Germany for a month.

One of my Europe-seasoned cousins gave me one bit of advice to cope with the nine hour time change:

Don’t sleep while you’re traveling.

Simple as that. I pulled the equivalent of an all-nighter across the world. I woke up at 7:00 am PST and went to sleep 30 hours later, the next day at 9:00 pm whatever-Germans-call-their-timezone (GMT +1:00).

And it worked. Right now I’m wide awake and it 7:30 am. I don’t think I’ve been awake this early in a year.

Over and out.

-Kelly Sutton

So many say not to buy any gas today. Fewer say to buy as much gas as possible today. Eh, whichever you do, remember GasBuddy.com.

“Fueled” by fellow motorists reporting where the lowest prices are at, you can get a good look at what’s cheap in and around a particular zip code. Perfect for those summer roadtrips.

Well, Oodle Classifieds was #1 for about 5 minutes. Facebook now has its own “Marketplace”. Login, and you’ll see it. I mean, everybody is talking about it.

So unless Oodle decides to give away free beer, I’m going to have to free up that slot in my Top 30 Facebook Groups.

Wendy Boswell over at LifeHacker (a favorite site here at HackCollege) mentioned a site with awesome tips for saving money while attending college. Every college student knows that money can be tight, especially after you subtract that money for those “beverages” you consume (you know exactly what I’m talking about). So before you go out and spend your hard-earned dough, glance over these tips - they could save you a bundle.

Read on to your heart’s content »

In all reality, your mother really just wants to see and hear “I love you”. So do that.

(1) Send an e-card. There are plenty to choose from. I hear BlueMountain is good, but click around and find the card you really like.

(2) Call her!

And for the international student, Skype is giving out “a gift of gab” today. Aka, free phone calls!

Offer valid from May 13th 2007, 5:00 am (Eastern Time GMT-5.00) to May 14th 2007 4:59 am (Eastern Time GMT-5.00). Offer reserved for residents of the US and Canada. During the offer, calls originating from the US and Canada placed to mobile and landline telephone numbers will be free. Calls to premium numbers and satellite phones are excluded. SkypeOut calls made as a result of using the “call forwarding” feature are excluded.

I wish had pictures to illustrate this post, but I was unable to take any in the frenzy that was packing for me. I had to pack up my entire room last Saturday (5/5) in about two hours mostly due to procrastination and terrible check-out times. I managed to fit my entire room into my sedan.

Here’s what I learned on my 1,200 mile drive:

• Pack the largest, most solid items first into your car. For me, it was the former housing of a oscilloscope, a large trunk. Everything inside the trunk was not collapsible (mostly books).
• Pack clothes last. You’ll need to do laundry once you get home anyway, don’t worry about making clean clothes dirty by packing them around the solids. Or…
• Vacuum-pack your clothes. By a rough estimate, vacuum-packing reduces your clothes to 1/3 their original size. They will be more wrinkly than your feet after a long bath, though.
• Use pillowcases as protectors. My pillow supplements became monitor guardians.
• Remember to keep your tools accessible. Just in case…
• Eliminate squeaks with clothes. Any plastic-vinyl or plastic-leather interaction produces annoying squeaks. Recognize this while packing so you don’t have to unload have your car at a rest stop to find that frustrating squeak.

Happy packing for those who are driving home soon. Don’t forget to use Trippish and please drive safely.

After a week-long packing, driving, and repacking I’m posting again.

A few things:

• We have a new writer, his name is Jason Shore. He is neat. Check out his first post
• See 28 Weeks Later. The movie is much better than the reviews are making it out to be.
• I will be flying to Germany for a month on Monday (5/14) for study abroad. I should post regularly, but my frequency may decrease. That’s what Rosario and now Jason are for.

If you had trouble choosing just one photo to frame for Mom because you have so many good pictures, then why not create a mosaic using all of them?

Although this project will be more expensive to print out for Mom, it is very easy and requires no image-editing skills whatsoever. And, uh, the results are freakin’ amazing. (Continue reading for further instruction on how to use the program)

Also available in French: Patchwork Maker 2.1.

Read on to your heart’s content »