Car-struck

Our very own Nick was hit by a car this afternoon on his way to work. (see artist's depiction, complete with sound effects.) He's alive and seems to be ok. Or at least as OK as Nick ever seems. If you see him, please give him your sympathy.

Penn Humanities Forum - Siva Vaidhyanathan

As part of the Penn Humanities Forum, media scholar and cultural historian Siva Vaidhyanathan gave a talk at the museum tonight titled The Googlization of everything -- One Company's Disruption of culture, Commerce, and Community. It was a great discussion of the effect Google has on our lives, on the information we consume, and on the way we communicate. I'm posting it here because I saw several library staff and regular users of the lab in the audience, so I'm guessing it has a fairly wide appeal among our blog readers. I'll link to the event page in anticipation of PHF posting footage from the event. The library also has a couple of his books if you're interested in checking them out.

New to Using a Mac?

New to using a Mac? Switched recently from a Windows PC? We'll offer tips to use your Mac productively, perform basic trouble-shooting and housekeeping tasks, and easily move files between Macs and Windows computers. Feel free to bring your Mac laptop with you.

Friday, Feb 29, 2008 , 12pm - 1pm
WIC Seminar Room, Van Pelt Library
Register Now!

Presented by Al Matthews and Jason Watkins from SAS Computing.

Edit Audio with Audacity

Learn to work with audio with Audacity, a free, open-source program for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. In this class, you'll learn to combine music and voice, improve sound quality, and create polished podcasts. There are still seats available for our class this Wednesday, February 27 from 10am-noon. Register free online.

Cheap Flash/Thumb Drives

Just wanted to point out a couple places online that are currently selling a 4GB USB Flash drive for only about $17. Keep in mind we're not endorsing any vendors here, but Amazon.com and Buy.com and NewEgg have this thumb drive available at a price that makes it difficult to turn down.

Music 258 Students

If you're in Music 258, please be sure to tell the lab consultant on duty when it comes time to save your files so that we can save your work on the appropriate hard drive for your class.

Apply for $1000 Technology Grant Soon!

Thanks to the generosity of Jeffrey L. Seltzer and Ana L. Seltzer, the Penn Libraries (Weigle Information Commons) is proud to offer undergraduate research awards for up to six students to conduct research using new media and information technologies. Each award will provide about $1,000 worth of equipment (both hardware and software) and supplies to support a research project for up to one year.* These awards include special consideration for students enrolled in the Huntsman Program. After one year, equipment purchased through the award will return to the Weigle Information Commons for general use. Some examples of technology items that could support research projects include: digital videocameras, audio recorders, virtual reality camera peripherals, microphones, scanners, mobile devices, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

http://www.upenn.edu/curf/research/research_grants.htm#seltzer

Happy Lupercalia!

Yeah, the rest of the country (and much of the world) is celebrating Valentine's Day, but here at the Digital Media Lab, we celebrate a different sort of holiday. No, we won't be sacrificing anyone, but I put some chocolate out which you can enjoy while it lasts.

Possible World Record

Ok, i've been known to exaggerate. But it's still pretty impressive--or at least long overdue. As of this morning, we have all 11 Macs in the lab up and running again! This should help a lot as we head into finals, making sure we have as many workstations available as possible.

Spring Robot

I've had at least 2 people ask me when we're going to put up a new robot sign on the door of the lab. One of them even noticed that the one we've been using was just a re-use of the robot from last Spring. Well, at long last, we've put up our new robot hours sign for Spring 2008. Thanks to Jesse, our robot-artist-in-residence, for the new sign!

The Ultimate Steal

This was just too good a deal not to let y'all know about. Microsoft is making MS Office 2007 Ultimate Edition available to any and all university students for $60. That's sixty, not six hundred. Even the educational price for this package is usually over $200. You just need a .edu email address andyou have to be enrolled in at least 0.5 credits worth of college classes.

Office 2007 Ultimate includes:

• Access™ 2007
• Accounting Express 2007
• Excel® 2007
• InfoPath® 2007
• Groove 2007
• OneNote® 2007
• Outlook® 2007 with Business Contact Manager*(see Obtaining Software below)
• PowerPoint® 2007
• Publisher 2007
• Word 2007

I don't even know what half of those programs do, but they still sound pretty cool. More info at http://www.theultimatesteal.com (yes, this is an official Microsoft website, despite the funky url)

Also, they say "Office 2007," not "Office 2008," which probably means it's a Windows-only thang, at least for now. Definitely check it out if you've been wanting to get office, but you haven't wanted to shell out the $239 it would otherwise cost you as a student.

Thanks to Neal at the Computer Connection for the hot tip! (also, thanks to Neal for showing me the new Macbook Air. Day-am! That thing is thin! Go check it out if you haven't seen it yet.)

User Storage Down!

Our user storage drive is currently unavailable due to a hardware failure in the lab consultant's workstation. This means that any files you've saved here in the lab are not accessible at this time. We are hoping that the files themselves are unaffected, but we won't know for sure until we can get the machine up and running again. We know how important it is to our users that this problem gets fixed ASAP. We've alerted the Library's systems department that this is a top priority, and we hope to have access to everyone's files again by the end of the day.

[update: We've got everything up and running again. All the files on the drive appear to have survived intact. Thanks to Doug for his speedy response!]