Friday, September 22, 2006 Special events aimed at seniors By Thomas Phillips staff writer The Senior Year Experience offers special events lor students graduating this school year. These events are designed to give both advice for life after college as well as some enjoyable times for seniors. Coordinated by Associate Director of Student Affairs Amanda Knerr, this semester-long string of events allows seniors to enjoy their last year at Behrend with entertaining activities, and the goal of making the transition from college to work an enjoyable one. The Senior Year Experience is titled “Senior Pride: The Pride of Penn State Behrend,” giving a focus on the satisfaction of being a senior at Behrend. The Senior Year Experience started this semester with the dedication of the Lion Shrine on September 14. Several events are scheduled each month for the rest of the semester. An upcoming event related to life after college is the Career Fair on October 12, to be held at the Junker Center from 12 pm-4 pm. Following that will be Senior Salute Days, an event which gives information on graduation ceremonies, as well as ordering caps and gowns. These will be held on October 30 and 31 at the McGarvey Commons from 10 am-4 pm. Besides the events that are related to career choices and preparing for graduation, there are Ask ASCII: Double dosage of technology By Logan Stack staff writer Dear ASCII, I keep getting disconnected from the VPN when I have my laptop on the wireless network. How can I prevent this? -Frustrated Dear Frustrated, The VPN disconnects people who are idle. So if your computer has any traffic, it won’t get auto disconnected. To get some constant traffic that won’t interrupt you, we’ll use ping. Ping is a net work analysis tool used to check if you can see other computers online. We’ll abuse it to generate a trickle of traffic. If you’re using Windows, go to Start > Run and type “cmd”. This will bring up a command win dow. In that, type “ping -t psu.edu”. That will start pinging psu.edu once a second. Just leave that open in the background and continue using your computer normally. If the command window clos es, your pings will stop. If you have a Mac or Linux computer, open a terminal (in Mac, that’s Applications > Utilities > Terminal.app) and type “nohup ping psu.edu >/dev/null The “ping psu.edu” part sends a packet to psu.edu once a second, just like Windows, “nohup” keeps this running, even if you quit the Terminal or put your laptop to sleep. If you reboot, you’ll need to type the command again. “>/dev/null” tells it to ignore the output - you don’t actually care if you can contact psu.edu, you just want the traffic. The ampersand tells this to run in the background, so you can still use the terminal, and if you quit the terminal, ping won’t exit. Alternately, you could just type "ping psu.edu” and leave the terminal open like the Windows users must. Dear ASCII, I have dial-up at home. I want to download more pornography faster using the school’s wireless. Are they monitoring more than just my band width? If so, will this cause problems? If so how rUDEUT LI r\r also events which are designed mainly for enter tainment purposes. These recreational events planned for the Senior Year Experience include Midnight Bowling. Fan Jam and a basketball game between the faculty/staff members and stu dents. The Fan Jam and faculty vs. students bas ketball game are both scheduled to be held at the Junker Center in November. An event where the seniors go to an Erie Otters hockey game is also tentatively scheduled for some time in December. Other events scheduled for the Senior Year Experience are a Seniors Celebration, as well as Life After Behrend and Life After Behrend Revisited. The Life After Behrend event is tenta tively scheduled for some time in November, while the Seniors Celebration and Life After Behrend Revisited events are scheduled for December 22. These events are designed in order to help sen iors in their transition from their time at Behrend to the workplace. Seniors are given the opportuni ty to take part in these recreational events, which help them enjoy their last year at Behrend while getting ready to move on from college. It is meant as a way of easing the anxiety that seniors may have as they prepare for their life after college. do I get around it? -Jerry Pohl, Journalism semester 07 Dear Jerry, Rescom promises profusely that they will not monitor content in the dorms. So if you’re brows ing on a friend’s computer, you’re safe from spy ing, at least from PSU. Your friend may have spy ware, keyloggers, or other things to watch what you’re doing. The wireless network is both more and less secure. There is logging, unfortunately. But you’re using your own laptop. This means you don’t need to delete the browsing history. You also know that YOU didn’t install any spying programs, and if you did, that you’re the one monitoring them. The Penn State wireless network requires that you use a VPN client to actually get Internet access. This means that the request to princesskali.com is encrypted, so the other people on the balcony can’t “sniff’ the network and see what you’re doing like they can in the dorms. The VPN server, though, can see it. You could use the lab computers to download pom. They do monitor the lab computers. I could find no policy stating that you’re not allowed to download pom there, but you may be asked to come back later if there is a lack of lab computers and everyone is doing homework. Also, it is against policy to break into password-protected sites or pirate pom (copying/distributing it when you don’t have permission). If you’re worried about leaving kinkparties.com in the computer lab’s log files, you can use a proxy server to hide where you’ve been. Search for “web proxy” at your favorite search engine (Google). Sites like anonymouse.org let you use their web proxy for free in exchange for putting up one of their advertisements on every site you browse. Proxies are slow, but the log files will show that you were at someproxy.com instead of goatse.cx. Do you have a computer question? Then ask ASCII! Send your question to ascii@psu.edu and you may see it answered in next week’s column. Seriously, you can ask anything. Just look at this week’s question. Radio City Riot causing a stir By Chris LaFuria news editor For many people, change is a difficult thing to endure. For local musicians Jon Taccone. Josiah Burnett, Adam Marshall, and Mitch Hmman, alias Radio City Riot, a major change seemed to be the perfect remedy. Formerly known as Calling Blue Skies, the Harborcreek quartet has returned from a few-month long hiatus from producing musical tracks, and has embarked on recording a new release, which is already underway. Calling Blue Skies, the band’s pre vious project throughout high school and into college, had two releases to its name. The 2002 release Thanks to You released on Downfall Records out of Chicago, introduced the band, all of whom were juniors at Harborcreek High School, to the local music scene. As the band began playing local venues, such as Forward Hall, The Hangout and, locally, at Erie Hall on Behrend’s campus, with recently popular bands such as Fall Out Boy, Punchline and Rookie of the Year, CBS developed a local fan base that spread throughout the Erie area. After the release of their self-titled album in 2003, the band found them selves struggling with originality issues and sincerity. “We didn’t all agree on a lot of the songs we were recording,” says guitarist Taccone. “We just burnt out on what we were doing.” Until this past January, the former CBS members played the role of the wandering musicians, trying to find their niche, their expertise. Each of the members found themselves amidst a search for the right kind of sound, nothing too counterfeit, noth ing overdone. “We didn’t want to be pigeonholed into one particular genre. We wanted to expand our influences, as well,” says Taccone. The new release, which currently is up to five biggest difference this time is that there is more songs, is being recorded at Midtown Studios, locat- honesty in the music,” Taccone says, “We all seem ed next to Forward Hall. Shawn Hammer, a long to agree on what goes into our music.” time friend and former bandmate, is producing the The first test for the new sound came on new project. Hammer has been involved with the September 7, 2006 at Forward Hall with & brt&ipi band since they were in junior high, and has devel- v that included Isadora, Knife Fight the Wajfs , ’ftp(f oped a close connection with the band members. Tokyo Rose. You can get your fix of Radio City For those Calling Blue Skies fans who are expect- Riot on Friday, September 22 at 10 p.m. at The Beer ing the same sound under a different name may be Mug, which is located at 1108 Liberty Street. Also, somewhat disappointed. In fact, according to the the band has scheduled a show on October 22, with band, the sound is entirely unique from the former Junior Varsity at Forward Hall. sound. 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