Brown banner is THE WORST web site I've ever seen

How can my university pay some people millions of dollars (which was millions more than the anticipated amount) to create the world's worst course registration service. Even the naive paper-based service and boca was better. I can list the bad sides of it, but I don't want to fill my blog with it.
I want my money back. Actually, even I could have designed a much better one for much less money. I am sure someone got rich without deserving, most probably only by using his/her connections. I'm also sure the connection got richer. Yet, I'm not accusing any particular person. They are already aware of this fact.

ipod rocks

Interesting news: Sony gave up its fight against Apple in the music industry. The old giant is replaced by the new one. I tried some sony mp3 players before buying my ipod two years ago, but they had only 3 levels of volume: low, medium, high. You can easily tell how shitty they are. Read the news about their defeat:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,136659-c,onlineentertainment/article.html

BEWARE of amtrak and enterprise

Very well known transportation services, the amtrak train service and the enterprise rental car service, have tried to cheat us. So, be really aware when using them. The incidents are below:

Amtrak: One amtrak agent told something, while the other told the opposite later, denying my right to get back my refund for a ticket cancellation. After waiting for 1 hour 15 minutes on the customer service line, I somewhat managed. But they are not to be trusted.


Enterprise: If they ask you to upgrade your car level, never do that. This means, they don't have that low level car at hand, and they'll have to upgrade anyways. They are just trying to get some more money for that.

Don't think large companies are nice!

lens.com and justlenses.com DO NOT BUY

DO NOT BUY from lens.com or justlenses.com
They try to make every effort for the customer to suffer. Their shipment is extremely SLOW, their sales support is very POOR.
So, NEVER ever SHOP from those two web sites (don't even click):
lens.com or justlenses.com

More new technology

Today's topic is the new Adobe Acrobat Reader (it's name might have changed, but everyone knows what i mean, the pdf reader). Now, it really reads.
Yes, you select some part of the text, and then tell the program to read it out loud for you. It can easily read numbers, percentages, ratios, etc. All this is in just your very basic pdf reader, nothing more...
Note: Don't download the adobe photoshop album starter edition, which they try to make you download with the reader. I hate when they try to trick you doing such things. Such a big company like Adobe should not be doing those tricks.

Ruckus

OK, I have advertised lots of other services I use, why not advertise Ruckus too?

So, it's a free music service for college students (mainly in US). You register with your college e-mail address, and then you can download and play tons of music on your computer. Of course, it's legal and free.

Why wait? Go to
www.ruckus.com

Armenian-Turkish Concert (CANCELLED)

Our Armenian-Turkish concert was prevented by outside parties pressuring our musicians not to perform. The Turkish Cultural Society and Armenian Students' Association at Brown are still committed to creating events of mutual benefit aimed at creating apolitical dialogue. Even though the situation was completely outside our reach, we apologize to all our friends and guests for this unfortunate cancellation and any inconveniences caused by that.

Brown Turkish Cultural Society and Armenian Students' Association

More Technology

I'm discovering more and more Yahoo! products nowadays. They are all good, actually, better than Google in many cases. One of my newest discoveries is the Yahoo audio search. Try it, it finds the audio files for you, easily.

http://audio.yahoo.com

Picasa

I just realized how Picasa web albums are improved. They offer 1GB free space for your photos. By the way, currently my 150 photos take only 25MB with 1024x768 resolution (a pretty good quality). They have lots of new features. Definitely check it out:

http://picasaweb.google.com/

Concert

Nowadays, we are working on a concert project. It's going to be a very nice one hopefully, with very good music and food afterwards. The concert is a joint Armenian-Turkish concert, dedicated to a healthy dialogue.
Come, join, bring friends...
April 6th, Brown University, Providence, RI

http://students.brown.edu/Turkish

Technology

Back to technological issues.
I realized that currently the best image search engine is Yahoo
http://images.search.yahoo.com/

It really is the best. Actually, Yahoo was also the first to introduce the video search engine. They are still good, with better advertising, they'll keep up.