Category: Computer

So I had installed Windows Server 2003 awhile back, but had forgotten my administrator password. I tried all the random configurations I could think of, but nothing worked. So being distraught, I knew for Windows XP, you could download a boot diskette or CD which could reset your administrator password. However, at that time, it didn’t work for Windows Server 2003. There are claims now that it works, but I haven’t hit that situation again yet and don’t really plan on to.

There were many other suggestions on another site: How can I gain access to a Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 computer if I forgot the administrator’s password? How can I reset the administrator’s password if I forgot it? But at that time, they didn’t have any suggestions for Windows Server 2003. It was pretty hopeless.

But I searched online some more and ended up on this website: Windows XP Login Recovery. They claim: Login Recovery is a service to reveal user names and recover passwords for Windows NT, 2000, XP, 2003 and Longhorn. As long as you have physical access to the computer, your passwords can be recovered. By following three simple steps, over 98.5% of passwords can be recovered within less than ten minutes. This service does not overwrite passwords, it does not write anything to the hard drive, it does not alter the computer in any way. It simply reads the encrypted passwords for processing through our servers. I didn’t really believe them and if they could break it, I didn’t really want them to know my password either, but I had no choice because I didn’t want to reinstall the OS. I followed their directions and gave it a try.

There are 2 levels of service. My password was actually cracked within 5 minutes, but to get it that fast, I would have to pay £10. I opted for the free service which required waiting 48hours. And indeed it was able to crack my password within 5 minutes. I was shocked at how fast it could do it and could Windows Server 2003 security be that easy to break and when no other sites or software at that time were able to do it? Apparently, I had shifted my index finger one key to the left causing a typo on both the password and confirmation. But it’s fixed now and the password has changed, just in case.

So being curious, I sent a email to the Windows Server 2003 team asking them if they knew how this password retrieval worked and why is it so fast when it’s suppose to be secured. They directed me to this site: Project RainbowCrack. RainbowCrack is a general propose implementation of Philippe Oechslin’s faster time-memory trade-off technique. In short, the RainbowCrack tool is a hash cracker. A traditional brute force cracker try all possible plaintexts one by one in cracking time. It is time consuming to break complex password in this way. The idea of time-memory trade-off is to do all cracking time computation in advance and store the result in files so called “rainbow table”. It does take a long time to precompute the tables. But once the one time precomputation is finished, a time-memory trade-off cracker can be hundreds of times faster than a brute force cracker, with the help of precomputed tables. By having precomputed tables, they’re able to crack these passwords super fast just by making some simple comparisions to the user profile data you sent them.

I’m wondering if I should make a really obscure and long password and see if they could crack it.

So for some reason AIM wasn’t installed on my computer when I got home. My dad’s been using my computer for some time now since his laptop stopped working, but that turned out to be a fluke. For all this time I thought his hard drive had died since that’s what both my brother and my uncle who I learnt how to build computers and troubleshoot them diagnosed it as. So my dad was pressuring me to fix his laptop this break and I was just about to order a 2.5″ notebook hard drive for him, when I wasn’t sure if a height of 9.5mm was small enough to fit.

I asked my dad where the laptop was and just before I started to unscrew the laptop, I decided to give it a whirl to see what the problem was for myself. The battery was all out of juice, so I had to find the adapter to plug it in. The laptop booted, but froze at first screen. There were several options such as getting the boot list or going into setup. I hit ESC for something and it showed me an extended memory test was being ran. It was really slow. Maybe 10MB/sec out of the 512MB of installed RAM.

I went into bios setup and the hdd was detected and nothing seem out of the ordinary. I rebooted the machine, the extended memory test took a few minutes, but then afterwards, Windows XP loaded and I was able to login to his account and all his data was intact. After a reboot, the extended memory test was no longer there and the system was booting up quickly.

Now back to AIM. Since I don’t use this computer often, it usually has the unfiltered unhacked software. Well besides Firefox, which is needed in all computers I use. So I download the newest AIM. Apparently, they’ve dropped the old AIM client and even changed the version # back to 1.x. The new AIM is called AIM Triton. It’s actually quite bloated and I was on the verge of uninstalling it immediately, however I gave it a little bit longer and it actually has some interesting features. By default, all IMs are sent to 1 window and history is stored. Finding someone on your buddy list is a lot easier too and you can enable aliases to be shown instead of screen names. One thing they removed from Triton is the ability to only play a noise when you first received. However, switching between chats is a bit difficult. There is a less bloated version: Aim Ad Hack 5.0 Beta 17 (from Rayalome). I never did get it to successfully installed because ads are still showing, but you can feel free to try it. I got some help from Rayalome. Apparently there’s this extra menu in Preferences which allows me to disable the ads, which isn’t enabled by default. Sweet! Other stuff it gets rid of includes the AOL Explorer and the Viewpoint Player and tons of other junk. It still feels bloated, but it doesn’t have all those secondary programs installed.

There’s a few extra icons next to people’s screen names now such as the water droplet which I have yet to figure out.

Feature creapage (from rayalome) – interesting info regarding the new AIM Triton.

Some of the stuff that I’ve found annoying include the fact that the coloring doesn’t always transfer to the old AIM. Such as my default green color font is showing up as black. Another annoying thing is that when I’m away, messages get queued in a completely different window and won’t show up in the main chat window unless a chat window has already been opened. Rayalome also noted that the direct connection functionality no longer works (where you can connect directly to any other AIM user and send images and have have no limit on the amount of text to transfer through).

First of all, I’d like you to know I’m sitting in a comfy chair sitting in front of a 55″ projection big screen tv with my IBM X31 on my lap, typing this post and watching 24 – Season Four on my Media Center PC. My analysis on Season 4 will come later, since as this title suggests, it’s going to be about MCE.

As I stated in one of my previous posts, I was really impressed with my friend Derek’s Media Center PC. So I decided one of the projects I’d work on this winter break was to upgrade my HTPC (Home Theater PC) to Windows XP MCE 2005 (Media Center Edition). As a Microsoft employee, we’re allowed to “test” the software for free. I also dropped by the Company store before I left and picked up a Microsoft Remote Control for MCE for $25. Supposedly, the Logitech® Harmony® 880 Advanced Universal Remote (which Amazon.com is selling for $230) is a much better remote, but the price tag is a lot more than what the market price for the Microsoft Remote Control is. I was also thinking about getting the Micorosft Remote Keyboard for MCE for $45 (which Amazon is selling for $80)

Installing the OS wasn’t bad. I didn’t really have anything to back up on this system since all the videos were stored on a network drive. However, since my hard drive in this Shuttle XPC SK43G is a SATA and there’s no floppy drive in it, I had to ghetto rigged a temporary floppy drive from my brother’s desktop to be able to load the SATA drivers. The setup was rather simple and like all the other XP installations I’ve done. The only difference is that XP MCE 2005 has 2 CDs and somewhere in the middle, it prompted me to swap discs.

After the OS installed successfully, everything was fine and dandy. Media Center started without a hitch and the setup process went through smoothly. Adding folders to “My Videos” was also easier than expected. The remote control did wonders. However, the moment I tried to play a video, I hit problems. I would get audio, but no picture. The screen would go completely black. After some searching online, it turns out apparently some video cards are compatible with MCE. That meant the onboard video on my Shuttle XPC SK43G which is a S3 Graphics with Via KM400/KN400 isn’t compatible with MCE. I tried a bunch of things like updating the drivers and even trying to look for bios/firmware updates, but there were none. I’ve tried playing with the video settings, but that didn’t get me anywhere. The only thing left to try was sticking in another video card and trying, but it was already 7am and I was tired. Do note, this was my first night home.

So this afternoon when I found some time, I once again borrowed something from my brother’s desktop. I stole his Rosewill Radeon 9200SE and plugged it into my Shuttle XPC. However, S-Video was giving me trouble. The screen was black and white and it was scrolling down continuously and wrapping back at the top. I didn’t really know what this problem was. Was the video card having s-video problems. Was the card loose? I even brought out my 19″ LCD to diagnose, updated to the latest Radeon drivers, and played with the display settings. An initial search resulted people with a black and white problem, but not the scrolling problem. There wasn’t really a simple answer on fixing the problem and at this point I was getting frustrated. While trying to look for updated drivers/firmware and playing with display settings, I was googling for what may be the cause of this problem. Then I hit a thread talking about PAL and NTSC problems and having seen PAL VHS tapes in my NTSC VCR before, this was exactly the problem when a PAL signal is sent to a NTSC device. But there’s no way to configure that setting through software. The user manual wasn’t much help and the online threads were saying something about DIP switches which didn’t exist on my video card.

However, the card did have some jumpers. 4 in fact: J1, J11, J12, and J13. The only jumper that connected the 2 pins was J13. I’m not exactly sure why this card was set in PAL mode since I bought it from NewEgg. The user manual didn’t have any information regarding these jumpers, so I ended up taking a risk and unconnecting J13. Bam! No, that wasn’t the sound of my video card blowing up, but it worked! Color and no more scrolling!

Once Windows loaded, the problem came back and I’m like, oh no! WHY!?!?! Then it hit me that the problem may be because of the drivers I installed. I uninstalled them and reinstalled the drivers (same executable), rebooted the machine, and it WORKS! If the driver could control the PAL/NTSC setting, why the heck couldn’t I change it? Grrrrrr.

Anyway, I loaded up Media Center and the videos play fine. w00t!

Now, my brother’s system doesn’t have a video card. I searched Anandtech and Fatwallet for some deals on cheap AGP cards and found that mwave was having one for sale for $15. They also had one with DVI for $2.50 more. So I chose that one instead. I also had a $10 off coupon. After tax and handling fees, it came out to be $13 for a FIC A92 Radeon 9200SE, which is basically the same video card. Hehe.

You can read the Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 Review. The Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 Review is also available. Here’s the official What’s Hot with Media Center. There’s still so much to play with like the online gaming and music which I haven’t had time to check out yet.

I happened to find this link: Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP Media Center Edition which includes Tweak MCE for Media Center Edition 2005, Alarm Clock, Media Center Soltaire, and Playlist Editor.

Hate have 3 different players to play all your media. Needing Apple QuickTime to play .mov files and needing RealPlayer to play .rm and .rmvb files and Windows Media Player to play everything else. Even if you have Media Player Classic, you’ll need both of those respective players installed to get it to play .mov, .rm, and .rmvb files in it.

Unless…

You have Real Alternative and QuickTime Alternative. After installing these files, you won’t have to download the corresponding players and be able to play those files in any media player that you choose. I’d recommending either Media Player Classic or VLC media player. Actually, I’m not too sure that VLC media player will play QuickTime and RealMedia files since I never really tried. No more gunk from these bloated players. The reason why I was looking for these today wsa because I was trying to get MCE (Media Center Edition) to play all the video files I have. MCE is pretty sweet and I’ll be getting into that story later.

Wow! How long has it been since I got this? Over 2 months ago? I purchased the Linksys PAP2 Phone Adapter for Vonage Internet Phone Service awhile ago… well I wouldn’t say purchase. It was FREE after rebate, so I only paid sales tax of $5.44. I’ve already received my rebate already so all is cool. This was basically a cheap toy that I wanted to play with and I’m amazed at what it’s going to save me.

I have 2 guides and ungsunghero to thank in helping me set it up. The guides I used were:
B$: Linksys PAP2 Unlock Info
FW: Linksys PAP2 Phone Adapter FAR (Or Make Money) @ Staples

Setting it up wasn’t that difficult. In fact all the firmware flashing and hacking was quite simple. What really got me was the setting up of the service part. Have you seen the Advance menu of the PAP2? It’s ridiculously complicated.

So the remainder of this section is actually a step by step guide on how to SETUP your PAP2 to work with TelePacket and VoipBuster.

TelePacket:
I actually signed up for this awhile ago, back when it was called CallPacket and during the month of October, they were giving out free accounts with 100 free outgoing minutes to USA and Canada and 99999 free incoming minutes. Yes. that’s 5 9’s. That’s 70 days of non-stop talking on the fone. I don’t even use over 60 minutes a month which basically means I’m going to have probably free incoming calls for the rest of my life + a generation after me. I’ve verified that receiving calls actually work and the quality was very clear. The free plan was a promotion back in Octoboer, but they still have a great deal with their 95 cent plan. Personally I hardly ever receive or make phone calls from my landline. It’s just there so I can give a number to companies and banks so I don’t have to give them my cell phone number. I even set my answering machine to pick up after 2 rings to screen cause or to ignore them. This plan gives you 100 free incoming and 100 free outgoing minutes per month, which should be plenty. The cool part is that you get a local number. The closest to Monterey Park I found was Alhambra, and the closest to Seattle/Redmond was Kirkland and Bellevue. They even have local numbers for Oakland and Berkeley.

I would suggest you purchase the PAP2 on your own because they’re charging $60 for it here (in the activation fee).

To setup the PAP2, login to TelePacket. Click on Phone Feature Management -> My IP Phone Config.

The 3 pieces of information you need is:
Sip Proxy : voip.telepacket.com
Sip Username : cpxxxxxxxx
Sip Password : xxxxxx

In your Linksys PAP2 configuration (advance view) for either line 1 or 2, update the following fields:

Proxy: voip.telepacket.com (Sip Proxy)
User ID: cpxxxxxxxx (Sip Username)
Password: xxxxxx (Sip Password)

Dial Plan:
(*xx|<:1aaa>[2-9]xxxxxx|1[2-9]xx[2-9]xxxxxxS0|<:1>[2-9]xx[2-9]xxxxxxS0|011xx.)
Replace aaa with your area code (i.e. 425, 626 or 510)

VoipBuster:
VoipBuster is a bit different than TelePacket. It caters toward a different audience. But the cool thing about PAP2 is there’s 2 lines meaning it can support 2 different VoIP services. TelePacket was more of an incoming phone service where it can replace your landline to recieve calls. VoipBuster is better at making calls. Check out their rates chart. Each month they have a list of countries you can call for free. This month includes: Argentina, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United States. Do note, these do not include cell phone calls. Cell phone calls to foreign countries are more expensive due to the fact that the caller is the one who pays the bill and not the receiver. But Hong Kong and China for 1penny/min is ridiculously cheap. China and Hong Kong I believe were on the free list last month. USA has been on the free country list for the past few months already and there doesn’t seem to be any plans to remove it from the list. There is a caveat. You have to put some money into your account before these free stuff rolls in. The minimum amount is €5, which comes out to be about US$6 and free calls to the USA for life (hopefully)! People have been using it for several months and not much complaints have arisen.

To setup your PAP2, first go to VoipBuster and download their software. This is the only way to register as I found out. Install the software and create your account. Remember your Username and Password because you’ll need them to set up your account.

In your Linksys PAP2 configuration (advance view) for either line 1 or 2, update the following fields:

NAT Mapping Enable: Yes
Proxy: sip.voipbuster.com
Register: Yes
User ID: (Username you created above)
Password: (Password you created above)

Dial Plan:
(<:001aaa>[2-9]xxxxxx|<:00>1[2-9]xx[2-9]xxxxxxS0|<:001>[2-9]xx[2-9]xxxxxxS0|<011:00>xx.)
Replace aaa with your area code (i.e. 425, 626 or 510)

Click on the SIP tab and edit the following fields:
STUN Enable: Yes
STUN Server: stun.voipbuster.com (or any other public STUN server)

Others have also recommended StanaPhone for receiving free incoming calls, but the only numbers they are giving out are New York local numbers.

All in all, I’m really satisfied with this. You know what the best part of this is? I can stop paying my $25/month to Verizon. You should hear my story on how hard it was to disconnect my Verizon service tonight. Maybe I’ll talk about it some later time.

Firefox 1.5 is out! Apparently it’s the exact same version as RC3 which has been the version I’ve been using for awhile since it auto-updated. Some new features include: Automatic Updates, Improved Pop-up Blocking, Clear Private Data, Accessibility. If you’re planning to update or install Firefox, please click on my Firefox button on the right. Much appreciated!

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Random Crap:

Molecule gives passionate lovers just one year – Your heartbeat accelerates, you have butterflies in the stomach, you feel euphoric and a bit silly. It’s all part of falling passionately in love — and scientists now tell us the feeling won’t last more than a year.

Creativity linked to sexual success – Pablo Picasso, Lord Byron and Dylan Thomas had more in common than simple creativity. They also had active sex lives, which researchers said on Wednesday was no coincidence. Psychologists at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the Open University found that professional artists and poets have about twice as many partners as other people.

Xbox 360 – a good review on the Xbox 360 by Ars Technica.

The Good:

• High resolution graphics with rock solid frame rates and full surround sound
• Classic games on demand
• Perfect online integration with every title
• Xbox Live just keeps getting better and better
• Wireless controllers as a standard

The Bad:

• The heat!
• Strong but unspectacular launch library
• Try buying one; watch the clerk laugh at you
• Confusion over the two versions of the system
• Without an Internet connection and hard drive you won’t get all the features
• A lot noisier than we’re used to with consoles

The Ugly:

• Being able to use the power brick as a heater for your house. The thing barely fits under my bed, and it keeps me warm all night

Nepal to probe mystery ‘Buddha’ boy – At least 100,000 devotees from Nepal and neighbouring India have flocked in recent weeks to a dense forest in southeastern Nepal to see 15-year-old Ram Bahadur Bamjon, who, his associates say, has been meditating without food or water for six months.

Survival Song – a very cute Thanksgiving eCard with a parody of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive.

If you downloaded the newest Mozilla Firefox or got automatically updated to 1.5 RC3, you may have noticed some problems with websites that use Macromedia Flash. It seems to be a problem in conjunction with Adblock. If you disable Adblock, the flash pages work. Turns out they already have a fix for this, but it won’t get automatically updated. In fact, it’s not even on the main page, probably because the one on the main page is for 1.0.7, and not for the beta releases of Firefox.

You can download the Adblock fix here. The one you should be using with Firefox 1.5 RC3 is Adblock 0.5.2.054.

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Random Crap:

MK vs. SF 2 (from stanman) – An awesome flash pitting Mortal Kombat vs Street Fighter 2. The animation was actually done really well and you get to see Ryu fight with Scorpion. Sakura and Lui Kang are in it too, but they played smaller parts. You get to meet a special character at the end, but I don’t want to ruin the ending.

[adult swim] Friday Night Fix (from deadlock) – a bit belated, but these Adult Swim cartoons apparently are posted online for viewing every Friday night starting @ 11pm to Saturday morning 6am. The selection is decent, the quality good, and the speed is great! Great if you have nothing to do on a Friday night and want to watch some toons.

Rocket Boots (from deadlock) – a video showing some guy attaching rocket boosters to his feet which lets him float in the air for half a minute during a sky dive. I wonder when tools like those on Rocketeer will be available to consumers.

Chrono Resurrection (from bittorrent) – I first saw the trailer from a bittorrent download. It was so awesome!!! You can download the trailer here. You may also want to check out the screenshots on that page. Chrono Resurrection is a… well, was a project to resurrect Chrono Trigger (as the title suggests). It was created by fans for fans. The work is just amazing, but not all good things get to suceed, and this time was because they received a cease and desist letter from Square Enix. You can check ou the old site here. Sigh… I really wanted to see this come through. I’m curious if the fair use law is applicable to this. I mean, people do tons of fan work and parodies and they all seem to be legal. What makes this fanwork illegal. Only the storyline was reused, the characters are all redrawn, although they do hold resemblance to the older characters. They’re not planning to making money off it (or I think they’re not).

Square-Inch Plot of Land for Sale on eBay – A square-inch parcel of land will be auctioned this week on eBay for a starting bid of $1,224, although Owen County officials say they’ve had offers for more. What can you do with 1 in² of land?

Student Allegedly Urinates in Ice Machine – A Nicholas County High School student was suspended after he was accused of urinating in an ice machine that at least 31 people got ice from before the incident was reported. Not as bad as the sperm incident from The Squid and the Whale, but pretty similar.

Tears save sick mother from cremation alive – – A Chinese peasant woman who suffered a brain haemorrhage was left at the undertakers alive for cremation because her family could no longer afford hospital treatment, state media said Friday. Morally I know it’s wrong, but in this situation, what can one do?

“Deferred Success” is new term for failure – report – In 2005, some people wanted the word “brainstorming” replaced by “thought shower” so as not to offend people with brain disorders, and they also wanted “deferred success” to replace “failure” so as not to embarrass those who don’t succeed. People these days… why can’t they just accept the truth? Or is it not politically correct if we hurt other people’s feelings?

Superintendent Arrested After Camera Found – A school superintendent was arrested for allegedly placing a hidden video camera resembling an air freshener dispenser in a women’s bathroom at the school administration office. … According to records, a school business office clerk alerted investigators this week after finding a school credit card statement for a $299 purchase with no vendor name, then discovering it was from a surveillance company. Two days later, Doyen submitted an invoice for the purchase, which included a description of the camera and a Web site address, according to records. Story wasn’t that interesting, but charing it to the school credit card and submitting an invoice for reimbursment? Can anyone get any more stupid?

Friday work meetings may mask love trysts – Employers be warned: workers who schedule Wednesday meetings are potentially going to a job interview and regular Friday afternoon meetings could be an excuse for a rendezvous with their lover. I need to schedule more Fridays off!

Radish in intensive care after murder attempt – A giant white radish that won the hearts of a Japanese town by valiantly growing through the urban asphalt was in intensive care at a town hall in western Japan on Thursday after being slashed by an unknown assailant.

Pit bull ad insults lawyers: court – Responding to a complaint by the Florida Bar, the state’s highest court sanctioned a pair of Fort Lauderdale attorneys whose advertisement showed a spike-collared pit bull in the company logo. The bar also objected to the company’s telephone number: 1-800-748-2855 or 1-800-PIT BULL. The advertisements “demean all lawyers and thereby harm both the legal profession and the public’s trust and confidence in our system of justice,” Chief Justice Barbara Pariente scolded a unanimous decision. I find it funny that most lawyers don’t see themselves as bullies. I guess ignorance is bliss.

Gene turn-off makes meek mice fearless (from /.) – If I remember correctly, wasn’t there something in humans we could remove that’ll make us fearless or never nervous or never feel pain?

Not sure if you’ve read any of the news recently regarding Sony’s Root Kit, but Sony’s gotten into major problems with it. In short, a root kit is a software that allows others to hack into your computer. The Sony Root Kit is installed when you insert any of Sony’s recent music cds into a Windows machine. At first, Sony denied it was a root kit. I mean this was a nasty nasty bug. It would install itself automatically, hide itself from the user, and actually modify the kernel making it extremely hard to get rid of it. When Sony finally admitted it was root kit, they gave a half-ass apology but didn’t do anything about it. Several lawsuits have already been filed against them. A bit later, they finally decide to release a patch to fix this problem, but by installing that patch, they opened a whole new can of worms for users of Internet Explorer. Now anyone on the web can launch any program just by using the script that Sony used. Later, it was found that their root kit actually contained open source software, the LAME MP3 encoder/decoder to be exact. There’s also an article saying how Sony hired a Symantec ex-employee just so that they knew how to bypass the anti-virus softwares installed on your computer. Now they’re offering if you mail the cd back, you can get a new one without the root kit or download a copy from online and finally recalled all the “faulty” audio cds that were already out in the market.

The reason for this post wasn’t to bash Sony, they’ve already gotten quite a bashing already. I’m not saying they don’t deserve it, but I haven’t purchased audio CDs in so long, I don’t even care about all the tactics they try to pull anymore. What this post is about is that many believe Windows is to blame for this problem. I agree Windows should be part of the blame, but I want to talk about the auto-play feature. I personally hate the autoplay feature and many here would agree. Windows should have that disabled by default. However, I actually like the feature when you stick a CD or DVD in, it prompts you for action. How often do you stick a CD in and not planning to take an action on it? Autoplay should be an option in there and not automatically run by default. Just my 2 cents.

The Rules of Distraction (from /.) In sum, a relatively well-behaved class. In my other lectures, nearly half of the students spend time pecking away at laptops, and most of us aren’t just fact-checking the professor. This is the classroom of the future: Students use class time to read the Drudge Report, send e-mail, play Legend of Zelda, or update our profiles on Facebook.com. Last year, during a guest lecture by the estimable K. Anthony Appiah on W.E.B. DuBois and cosmopolitanism, I edited three articles for a campus magazine. But the distraction epidemic is really nothing new. Replace laptops with crumpled notes, and the classroom of the future looks a lot like the classroom of the past.

The article was quite interesting cause they actually linked the student’s surfing behavior with the grade the got in the course. This observation may be total hooey. But when Cornell University researchers outfitted classrooms with wireless Internet and monitored students’ browsing habits, they concluded, “Longer browsing sessions during class tend to lead to lower grades, but there’s a hint that a greater number of browsing sessions during class may actually lead to higher grades.” It seems a bit of a stretch to impute a causal relationship, but it’s certainly possible that the kind of brain that can handle multiple channels of information is also the kind of brain that earns A’s.

I’ve always thought of the laptop as a distraction tool for most people. But there are several key questions one must think about. 1. Would the student even have gone to class if he didn’t have a notebook? 2. Aren’t there any other “objects” that can be used for distraction too?

I’d like to split the 1st question into 2 groups. The 1st group consists of people that already ditch class *whistles*. Lectures were boring and there was no enticement to go to class, UNTIL they brought high speed WIFI. Now people from that group can have a reason to attend class, even though it’s not the best reason to attend, but it actually gets you to go to class in the 1st place. Although leaning by osmosis is nothing more than a myth, there are times when you would pay attention to the professor, either because you ran outta places to surf to or you’re waiting for something to finish downloading or maybe the professor just said a keyword that your brain reacted to. Either way, I’d still think it’s better than just sleeping through class. Though before I had a laptop, I would often fall asleep in class because lecture was boring. So I figured it was better to sleep at home in bed, then to go to class to sleep in the uncomfortable chairs.

The 2nd group are people who already attend class daily. Having a notebook would be most devastatious to those people. Although a few could do it, it is quite hard to multi-task trying to surf the web, chat with friends, and understand your professor at the same time. Listening to your professor is easy, it’s understanding the concepts he’s trying to push through that is hard. And that’s what’s lectures are all about, professors trying to get you to “understand” the concept, and not just “know of it”.

Some people noted that people who tend to surf the web, were those who already didn’t really bother going to class or if they did, didn’t pay much attention by doodling or falling asleep. I tend to think laptops make it easier to get distracted than falling asleep or doodling. Falling asleep requries a lot of courage, because you never really want to get caught and if you do, it’s quite embarassing. Sometimes it’s fun to look behind you and see al the bobbing heads. Doodling on the other hand isn’t as easy as it sounds. Creating your own content is a good excercise for your mind and requires. Using a laptop doesn’t require you to create your own content cause all the web content has already been created for you. It’s not embarassing either cause the professor can never see what your looking at, though the guys next to you and behind you can clearly see you’re playing Street Fighter 2.

I was discussing this issue with fuzzywuzzy and we moved on to classes the required mandatory attendance and the different methods professors use to get you to class. The easiest one woudl be to pass around a attendance sheet and have people sign it. I’ve actually had a professor that did that, but as fuzzywuzzy noted: I’d just rotate with my friends, and come in, sit in the back, wait for the sheet to get to me, sign in for everone and leave. Then there other professors who’s lecture complimented the readings, basically talked about stuff that was not in your readings and will be on the tests. Then there’s a reason to actually go to class, unless Black Lightning was auditing your class. Then you can just buy the notes from them. Finally, there’s the pop quiz idea. My EE20 professor stated in the beginning of the semester that there will be 4 pop quizes, so people actually came or tried to guess when the pop quiz days were. The 4th pop quiz never showed up and before we knew it, it was already finals. So the last pop quiz was purely not given so that people would still come to class. Fuzzywuzzy said people can easily escape that by having friends call them on their cell phones. I asked wouldn’t it be obvious then and the professor would probably catch them and give them a 0. He goes, then there’s the sneaky text message technique. hehe.

There were actually classes I attended every single class. This would be my Japanese classes and my Sandinavian Literature class. I’m not sure if it was because the class was small or if it was just really fun, bu I had actually read all my papers and books assigned. Did all my homework. I had a great time in 3 classes. CDMCC believes because the class size is small, it’s highly likely that the professor would pick on you to answer some questions and it’d be quite embarassing to not know the answer for a question about the previous night’s reading. Maybe it just coincidentally ended up that way, but I think if the class and the readings were boring, I’d probably end up not doing the work anyway and if I got picked on, I’d pull a move like Walt from The Squid and The Whale.