Back in July, when I created the 2010 Blogger Application, I included as one of the optional essays the following prompt:

You awake one morning to find the zombie apocalypse hath begun. You are in your house, the car is at the shop, and you don't have any firearms. What next?

Prefrosh applicant Emad Taliep '14 used this prompt to share with us his great humor, vigilante vision, and sick drumming talent, as I excerpted on the entry announcing new bloggers:

The smell of decomposing flesh abounded. The nation was cast in eternal darkness, allowing the dead to rise. The shrewd cretins had shut down roadways and laid waste to supermarkets. The end seemed nigh. And the gigantic flamethrower I ordered was stuck in Beijing.

"I've gotta beat them somehow," I said, in an impromptu dramatic monologue. "Wait...beat! That's it!"

I called my friend David - a man so metal, he frequently drew suspicion from airport security - and told him to bring his guitar. My plan? To defeat the zombies with a logic bomb.

We'd play death metal loud enough to wake the dead, yet heavy enough to cripple the living. I took a gamble by thinking death metal could be so intense, it could actually be lethal. But, in paranormal situations, risk-taking is essential.

David plugged in his axe, amp, and mic, cranking up every dial. I put on my headphones, ready to unleash percussive chaos. As the zombies approached, David and I chugged out a window-shattering riff of sonorous death with a pounding rhythm. Our righteous metal threw the zombies into existential limbo, with the conflicting commands to die and reawaken putting their lives in flux.

"Finish them!" I screamed.

David growled into the microphone, rending the skies with his resonant voice. The Gods of Metal replied by raining down utter carnage. Lightning bolts fiercely incinerated the undead oppressors, leaving naught but scorch marks where they once stood.

That'll show my mom not to call my drumming a nuisance...

So why am I bringing this back up?

Because my youngest brother - who just yesterday began as a freshman in video game design at neighboring Northeastern University - just sent me this Kotaku article:

Kill Zombies With Your Rock Band Drums

The wait to use your Rock Band or Guitar Hero drums against the undead is almost over. Here at Penny Arcade Expo, Vancouver-based developer Andrew Laing is debuting Drumskulls. It's like drumming, but it's also like saving the world.

Clearly, this means that either:

a) Emad can tell the future
b) Vancouver-based developer Andrew Laing can tell the future
c) The idea of using death metal drums to destroy the undead is so strongly swimming in the zeitgeist that it would crystallize separately across continents at almost exactly the same time.

I fear a) because I write his paycheck; I fear b) because who is this mystery man from the North; I fear and love c), because that is the kind of world I want to live in with its terrible beauty and associations.

On that note, two last observations for the weekend:

1) Benefits of living in Boston - moving Eric (that's the brother) in this past weekend, and my family stops by Qdoba right by his dorm (a poor shadow of Anna's of course), and who should be signing stuff outside but Tara and Alcide from True Blood!

I waited in line for maybe 30 minutes to get personalized autographs for my girlfriend, who loves the show (as do I) for it's trashy, bloody, epically shameful nature. I endured crazy bald ladies screaming "I drink human blood!!" for this because I am that caring. She doesn't know yet, but that's ok - she somehow spilled like a gallon of water on her iPod, Blackberry, and laptop yesterday, so she's Internetless and will be until after I give them to her. Hooray for expensive accidents moving her outside the stream of time!

2) Saw Machete on Friday night at midnight during The Tepid Thunderstorm Known As Hurricane Earl. Without question the high point of my life, and probably for all of human existence for that matter.

Enjoy the long weekend! Reg day on Tuesday, classes begin Wednesday!

But seriously, let's talk life and love at MIT. I'm not talking about the IAP Charm School (" Join special guests David Rogers and Jed Wartman to learn the ins and outs of dining etiquette and table conversation while enjoying a complimentary meal."), or the Tech's annual "Sex@MIT" survey. I'm talking true life (as opposed to the false, hollow, shadow life of the sort that vampires, actuaries, and Harvard students live) and true love (of the sort they make Disney movies about, albeit with slightly less merchandising).

Meet Erika Ebbel. Erika is MIT '04, and is currently pursuing a PhD in analytical biochemistry. Here she is on PBS/NOVA's "Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers" describing her work in 30 seconds:

She was your typical biochemistry "whiz kid", who geeked out as a lab rat from an early age, and now spends her time helping other students learn to love science:

What you might not have expected is that Erika Ebbel didn't only grow up to be a professional scientist with an MIT degree, she also...became a beauty queen!

And now, she's a happily married beauty queen!

Can you discuss proper hand waving, pageant butt glue, and biochemistry with equal aplomb, all while marrying the love of your life in Hawaii?

MIT graduates can!

It was an incredibly tough job to do. With an acceptance rate of just under 9.7%, it's actually more difficult to land a job as a blogger than it is to get into MIT in the first place!

However, as with our undergraduate applications, the cruel difficulty of the decisions is no excuse for not making them. Decide we must, and decide we did.

So, without further ado, let me introduce to you our new bloggers!

Class of 2014

• Anna Ho was born in Singapore but has lived in London for the past eight years. Though currently on crutches after a brütal Ultimate Frisbee injury - a dangerous sport indeed - she will be living up high in French House come fall. Anna, who performed her valedictory speech with her friend and salutatorian Sameer in a "Kanye West style duet", isn't yet sure about what she'd like to study, but with interests ranging from FIRST Robotics to MedLinks, she's sure to find something here at MIT.
• Kate Rudolph hails from the Chicago suburbs and is a world-class mathlete. She attended the IMO Training Camp and her research at last summer's RSI was voted one of the top-five papers out of the program. In her long experience writing for a few different blogs Kate excels at sharing how math enters her life in new and interesting ways. As someone who personally never even completed calculus - long story - I loved how much I loved reading Kate's blogs, whether about math or otherwise. Kate will be living in East Campus, although she is envious of how the Simmons elevators play random musical tunes when certain chords of buttons are pressed.
• Natanya Kerper comes to us from the San Diego suburbs. Born in Super Tuesday in an election year, Natanya's been an activist and debater all of her life (JSA Best Speaker '09) and will be a double major in Political Science and Biology here at MIT. Natanya, who plays girls lax and powderpuff football, is tough as nails - as a junior, she broke her wrist playing football, which didn't keep her from acing the APs the following weekend. She toured Harvard, but a toilet there ate her phone, so she'll be coming to MIT and blogging for us instead!
• last but not least of the freshman bloggers, we have Emad Taliep. Emad was born in South Africa but emigrated at an early age to the greater Boston area. He'll be studying Brain and Cognitive Science here at MIT, and writes blog entries with titles like "Eggs and Curry: The Cross-Cultural Culinary Story." When he gets to campus, Emad hopes to join Live Music Connection; I'll post his answer to the "zombie apocalypse question" to illustrate why:
  

  The smell of decomposing flesh abounded. The nation was cast in eternal darkness, allowing the dead to rise. The shrewd cretins had shut down roadways and laid waste to supermarkets. The end seemed nigh. And the gigantic flamethrower I ordered was stuck in Beijing.

  "I've gotta beat them somehow," I said, in an impromptu dramatic monologue. "Wait...beat! That's it!"

  I called my friend David - a man so metal, he frequently drew suspicion from airport security - and told him to bring his guitar. My plan? To defeat the zombies with a logic bomb.

  We'd play death metal loud enough to wake the dead, yet heavy enough to cripple the living. I took a gamble by thinking death metal could be so intense, it could actually be lethal. But, in paranormal situations, risk-taking is essential.

  David plugged in his axe, amp, and mic, cranking up every dial. I put on my headphones, ready to unleash percussive chaos. As the zombies approached, David and I chugged out a window-shattering riff of sonorous death with a pounding rhythm. Our righteous metal threw the zombies into existential limbo, with the conflicting commands to die and reawaken putting their lives in flux.

  "Finish them!" I screamed.

  David growled into the microphone, rending the skies with his resonant voice. The Gods of Metal replied by raining down utter carnage. Lightning bolts fiercely incinerated the undead oppressors, leaving naught but scorch marks where they once stood.

  That'll show my mom not to call my drumming a nuisance...

Upperclassmen

We also are hiring two upperclassmen this year to join our blogging team!

• Elizabeth Choe, '13, is a Course 20 major from Missouri who lives in Simmons. She plays cell in MITSO, wants to be a comedian, rejected our "Team Jacob vs Team Edward" challenge to write about "Team Leibniz vs Team Newton", and draws things during class:
  
• Becca Heywood, '12, is a Course 1 major from Colorado who lives offcampus in an independent living group. She's traveled the world while at MIT, with a MISTI internship in Mexico, an exchange trip to the Czech Republic, an an Engineers-Without-Borders trip to Uganda, blogging throughout them all. She's on the varsity crew team and is terrified of zombies, so maybe she'll make friends with Emad and his Drums of Doom.

These six special folks won't start blogging right away, as we have to wrangle them here to campus, get 'em trained, and set up into the system in early September. When that time comes, they'll be able to tell you more about their own personal stories, which I assure you are more interesting, compelling, and better written than anything I provided here.

Once again, thanks to all those who applied, and everyone say hi to the new crew!

So starting today, you'll see a "Share on Facebook" link at the bottom of every blog entry. By clicking this link, you may choose to publish the article to the News Feed of your five thousand closest Friends on Facebook. Everybody wins. Your Friends will see cool content they may have never stumbled across otherwise. You get to be the dude or dudette who provides the hook-up. And we get to spread our message to people who might otherwise never have seen it.

I hope all of you found this useful. It certainly was used quite a bit! We had lots of referrals from the Share links, and I think, as I said before, that everyone won.

But that was the beforetimes, and some things have changed. Facebook has moved away from the "Share" model and to the ubiquitous "Like" model - you know, the one that is now on every site across the Internet.

It's no secret that I don't like "Like." And that's because I think that it is misleading. When Facebook underwent a substantial redesign a few months ago, they changed it so that, by default, things you like were displayed publicly on your profile. And that probably isn't what most users wanted. Most users wanted to share things with their Friends like a status update, not the whole world. So we've stuck with the "Share" button, because suited our purposes, wasn't creepy, and worked just fine.

However, we've run into a problem, and that is that Facebook broke the Share button.

If you look at the bottom of the page, where you once saw this:

you now see:

At first, I thought I just needed to update the code. But then I went to the Facebook Share Wizard, and lo, it looks like this:

so it's broken there too.

Finally, on the Facebook Share Developers Wiki, a big blaring red banner across the top reads Note: To share pages from your website, you should consider using the Open Graph protocol and the Like button instead of Share, since it's a simpler and easier to implement solution..

I've emailed Facebook Support and haven't heard back; I can only assume that Facebook Share is deprecated, and that it will not be fixed because Facebook Like is the Glorious New Future.

So what I'm asking all of you is: do you like Facebook Like?

Perhaps more precisely - would you be comfortable with something that looked like this:

at the bottom of every page?

One thing we would do is not include the faces/profile pictures of friends. That means that if friends of yours visit our website, they would not see your profile picture. However, they may see your name, if you have Liked the page. Furthermore, as Facebook says, "this means when a user clicks a Like button on your page, a connection is made between your page and the user. Your page will appear in the "Likes and Interests" section of the user's profile."

As I said, if I had my druthers I would just use the Share button. But we seem to be in a bit of a bind, as Facebook breaks their services to push users and institutions towards preferred practices.

Let me know what you think in the comments below. Are you OK with the Like button? Would you like to be able to easily share content from our site with your Facebook friends? Do you dislike the sort of connection that will be formed between our site and your Facebook presence, or is it A-OK?

In any case, I would recommend that everyone take the time to check their Facebook privacy settings. In addition to the Facebook Privacy Dashboard, I would absolutely run the Facebook Privacy Scanner, Ka-Ping Yee's Zesty Privacy Tool, and Facebook's own ViewAs Functionality; ensure that your Friends aren't revealing more information about you than you'd like; and generally take a few minutes out of your day to police your presence online. The Internet and Facebook are wonderful tools, but it's all too easy to slip up when it comes to managing your privacy and reputation, especially in the case of the latter, the environment and design of which often confounds the privacy practices of the most sensible and sensitive individuals.

So check yourself out, and then let me know what you'd like us to do about social sharing.

Here it is:

The best thing about being affiliated with MIT, hands down, no questions, is the mailing lists.

Now I know what you're thinking - OK, Vint Cerf, mailing lists haven't been in vogue since before Nick Carter was but a twinkle in a record executive's eye. And yes, mailing lists are not as fancy or shiny as things like Facebook Marketplace, or Google Groups, or even Craiglist.

None of that matters.

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of mailing lists at MIT, each dealing with countless subjects: web development, LARPing, literature, and so forth.

Let me share with you a few stories of my experiences with MIT mailing lists.

Gallivanting with Gilles, or, How I Came To Own and Love A 'Wagon For The Little Old Lady Who Lived In A Shoe'

For years, I've been driving a 1999 Hyundai Elantra. It was a reliable and practical, if not particularly powerful or attractive, motor vehicle. Its official color was plum (ask me sometime about being hit on by a fifty-something parking attendant who remarked, batting her eyelashes, that it/I were "plum gorgeous"), and it had a really stupid spoiler on the back. Still, it got 30+ MPG, its 5spd stick shift was fun to drive, and I'd planned on driving it until I couldn't drive it any more, purple exterior be damned.

Unfortunately, that end came rather more quickly than I'd planned. The brakes had been squeaking, so I took it into the local vocational technical high school (pro-tip for future starving students: voc techs will often fix your cars at the cost of the parts, saving you hundreds, perhaps thousands, on labor) to get checked out. The diagnosis wasn't good. The brakes were shot, yes - as was the clutch, the exhaust manifold, and the timing belt, which should've been replaced 50,000 miles prior. The cost, even at the voc tech, would've been in the thousands of dollars, more than twice what the blue book value of the car was.

Not having a car was not going to be a huge problem. As regular readers of the blogs know, I prefer to bike to work anyway, and the MBTA gets me almost everywhere I need to go. However, there are still times - like when I want to go injure myself playing Frisbee in NH - that having a car is nice. But buying a car off of Craiglist is always dicey, and I couldn't justify taking out an auto loan or buying something from a dealer.

Enter the Reuse mailing list. Reuse is MIT's version of Freecycling. You have something you don't want anymore? Email Reuse, and someone will claim it. Here are the five most recent Reuse lists in my Inbox at this very moment:

But there are also other sections of Reuse. There's Reuse-Housing, where people can look for houses or roommates; there's Reuse-Ask, where people can ask for things others might have that they'd be willing to park with; and there's Reuse-Sell, where people can try to offload their junk for a fee.

I checked my Reuse-Sell folder, and one of the first things I saw was a listing for a car:

Long story short, this was precisely what I was looking for. An affordable, practical car, which also got 30+ MPG and had a four-door hatchback body that could seat five and yet fold down its seats for storage, being sold for blue-book value. Well maintained - spotless condition really - with no problems in its history or near future, even if, as the NYT auto reviewer had, at the car's launch in 2002, wrote that it "looks like a wagon for the old woman who lived in a shoe."

Because Gilles was a fellow member of the MIT community, we felt we could trust each other: I declined to take the car in for a presale inspection, trusting his word that everything was in fine condition, and he took a personal check from me, trusting that it wouldn't bounce. These are things you wouldn't do on Craiglist, but, as Gilles said, "perhaps [we are] naive, but something about the MIT community meant [we] could trust [each other]." My check went through, the inspection came out clean; Gilles is back in Switzerland, and I'm driving around a peppy, practical car, being mistaken for a little old lady everywhere I go.

YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL COMPUTERS, or, Cheaply Destroying My Life For Fun And (Blizzard's) Profit

Like just about every somewhat geeky male of my generation I grew up playing Starcraft, which is to say spending hours ordering tiny pixellated space aliens around my screen carefully collecting blue minerals until I would eventually get thrashed by hyperactive eleven year old old from Korea who decide that Zergrushing me would help him land that sponsored tournament gig and an Ayreon chair.

And, again like everyone of my demographic and generation, ever since 1998 I've been waiting with bated breath for the release of Starcraft II, through all of its various delays and missteps and mishaps.

When they finally announced the launch date and system specs for SC2, my joy at the first was tempered by despair at the latter - my ancient home Macbook, with its puny integrated Intel graphics card, would not be able to handle the less-pixellated hordes of alien invaders in this game.

Luckily, MIT IS&T had just announced (via mailing list of course) that they were replacing a bunch of obsolete departmental desktops, and that a limited number would be available for resale to staff.

It was through this program that I bought a dual-core 3.4 GHz Dell with a 250 GB HD and 2 GB RAM...for $42.

Granted, this machine isn't a Cray, but it's a zippy rig for the cost of The Ultimate Answer.

I almost got a graphics card off of Reuse for around $50, but Newegg was having a crazy sale so I picked up one that was twice as good for just a little more.

Vultures@MIT, or, What To Do With That Leftover Pizza

First of all, if you have leftover pizza, you're doing college wrong.

But let's say that for some reason you do (you were at Anime Club meeting - we have the largest private anime collection in the world - and your friends were too busy watching Dragonball Z reruns to eat everything).

Now, you're an environmentally conscious MIT student. You know that you don't want to waste food, because there's more energy used up by food we waste than in all the oil extracted from the Gulf of Mexico per annum. You have a couple of leftover pizzas.

Enter Vultures, also known as "free food". You simply pop open your laptop, email vultures saying "free pizzas, lobby 10, get them while they're warm", and wait.

Now it's like 10 PM on a Friday night, no one is on campus, all is dark and peaceful...until an MIT student pops out of the woodwork, glances around, grabs a pizza and leaves.

It's the most anthropologically interesting list at MIT, and potentially the most (unintentionally) environmentally beneficial one too. If you're a student with too much food, you get to give it away without waste; if you're a student without any good, you get free food without having to dumpster dive.

Indeed, the MIT mailing lists are a microcosm of life at MIT. Rather than being bored or struggling with a dearth of things to do, the struggle instead is with the firehose: learning to manage all of the incoming reuse, free food, and other emails, not to mention zephyr chats and other MIT arcana, might be the toughest part of the job!

Unlike Snively's "Alaska" post of a year ago - which read, in its entirety, have decided that today I will operate under the assumption that I am in Alaska. Not because it's cold or anything, just because it's a change of pace. Your thoughts on Alaska are welcomed. - I actually was in Alaska earlier this month. My family, while not tremendous travellers, has managed to vacation together during the summer before I and each of my two younger brothers went to college. Since the youngest Peterson will be leaving for school in the fall, and since it's unclear when we'll have the time to vacation as a family again like this, they decided to make it a big one, and so we went to Alaska.

Two nights before we left, though, I was back in my hometown in NH, playing a knock-down-drag-out game of ultimate frisbee with my friends from high school, as we have every Tuesday night of every summer since our senior year of high school. We're all a bit older, slower, and fatter than we were then, but we've kept it going, and I'm pretty proud of that.

Anyway, at the end of the game, I dove for the frisbee at a full sprint. I came up with the game-winning catch, but at the price of torpedoing myself neck-first into the turf.

I'll save you the story of my (entirely satisfactory, as always) visit to MIT Medical, but suffice it to say that several xrays and a diagnosis of torn neck muslces later I was boarding a plane to Seattle in a neck brace.

I have to say, though, a neck brace is THE way to travel. Know those overpriced horse collar pillows they sell for $900 in Hudson News?

It's the same as a neck brace! So while my brothers tossed and turned and fought each other for sleeping space in the cramped confinement of coach, I slept like a baby with my head propped straight up in a brace. If it wasn't for the shooting pains in my neck, back, and shoulders, it would've been the most comfortable I'd've ever been while traveling.

We landed in Seattle, rented a Jeep that had been designed by someone specializing in the art of the physically uncomfortable, and drove to the space needle. But we didn't go to the space needle. First, we went on a duck tour of Seattle.

Now, duck tours aren't all that weird. We have them here in Boston. But I've never before been on a duck tour captained by a man who wore a decorated aluminum trash can lid for a hat and introduced himself as "Bob LaBlaugh." Of course I immediately asked him about his law blog (if you don't watch Arrested Development, you will not get this), and he looked at me in complete bafflement. He then started talking about his mom as he drove us at profoundly unsafe speeds through the city, exhorting us to yell "KA-CHING" every time we drove by a Starbucks and blasting the chicken dance out of earshattering speakers on the bus.

Despite Bob's best efforts, I still managed to enjoy the trip, which gave us beautiful photos of Seattle:

as well as Fremont, which, with its public art, ironic Soviet memorabilia, and bicyclists, rather reminded me of a more overcast Cambridge.

From the top of the space needle, the first thing you notice has nothing to do with the city and everything to do with Mt Rainier, which just dominates the landscape:

We then had dinner down on the wharf, packed (and I use that word advisedly) into our Jeep, and drove two miles into the wilderness, to the town of Leavenworth, WA.

So here's the deal with Leavenworth:

Back in the 1800s, it was founded as a resupply shop on a major railroad line through the mountains, catering to all the things railroads required: wood, coal, taverns, brothels, etc. But when advances in rail technology allowed the railway to save hundreds of miles of travel by taking more direct routes, it left Leavenworth out of the picture, and with no railroad to support it, the town slowly began to shrivel and die.

From the 1920s to the 1960s, Leavenworth was in the throes of a deep depression, and in the early 1960s the town began to reassess its very existence, and how it could continue on existing and not become an abandoned ghost town in the woods somewhere.

I wish I had been at this town meeting, because apparently someone stood up and said something to the effect of "you know, we're in the mountains, and there's snow everywhere: I know, we should become a mock Bavarian Village. So they did. "Barry's Biker Bar" became "The Bar in Berlin", they exchanged leather for lederhosen, and so forth.

So now you go anywhere in Leavenworth, and it's unbelievably kitschy mock-German-village chic. It's like a low budget Disney world where you're exploring Austria in the 1800s.

That said, it is unbearably beautiful:

My brothers went white-water rafting in some class 4 rapids down the road:

And I stayed in and iced my neck while reading Achewood.

The next day, we drove back to Seattle, through the mountain passes that had sustained (and then foiled, and then sustained anew) Leavenworth for so long:

got back to Seattle, and boarded a Norwegian Cruise Lines ship heading north through Puget Sound:

We were on our way to Alaska! As for what happened there...that will wait for my next blog entry...

I, however, love summer, for that's when I break out my bicycle.

an actual photo of me with my bicycle (wikimedia)

I began commuting by bike when I was in college, taking the Norwottuck Rail Trail from my house in Belchertown to school in Amherst or to see my girlfriend in Northampton. At the time, it seemed like a nice way to get outside, get some exercise, and get to places, but I never thought I'd become committed to it. But though I hadn't ridden regularly since I was 10 or so, and my mountain bike was far too small and rusty to boot, I quickly fell in love with biking as a means of transportation.

Once I moved to Boston I went to Wheelworks - the best bike shop in the greater Boston area by far - and picked up a nice, simple commuting bike. It set me back a few hundred dollars, but I like to think of that as just a few car payments, plus the health benefits accrued by exercise each morning. Ever since, I've been biking to work every day that it is reasonably safe to do so, meaning any day during which the rain hasn't rain flooded the banks of the Charles (along which I bike) or which it isn't so cold that I could slip up on hidden snow or ice.

Commuting via bicycle has several benefits, especially in a city like Boston. For one thing, it's great exercise: I bike about 8 miles each way, which gives me about 35-40 minutes of a workout in the morning and afternoon. I arrive at work feeling refreshed and without the jumpiness associated with too little exercise. It's a timesaver, too, since my morning workout is wrapped up within my morning commute.

Biking is also usually faster than any other form of transportation. The route to MIT from where I live in the suburbs has poor access to public transit and the roads are clogged worse than Elvis' arteries. During rush hour, door-to-door via car is usually around 45 minutes; via bus, more like 60. Unless I hit all the wrong lights or get a flat, I can speed past all of them on my bike.

Needless to say, it's also greener - assuming the increased calorie intake is offset - and much, much less expensive. And as long as I shower at the Z Center before heading in to work, I'm not even stinkier!

Now, I know what you might be thinking: biking in a city? Why is this deeply psychotic and apparently suicidal man reading my college applications?

There's a smart way to bike, and a dumb way to bike. I bike very carefully, and almost entirely along bike trails that are off-the-road and devoted to cyclists. There are great regional bike maps - not to mention Google Maps Biking layer - that can tell you which roads are safe, which roads are unsafe, and the varying degrees in between. I always recommend driving (or walking, or busing) a route before bicycling it, because sometimes routes can be deceptive.

For example, Massachusetts Avenue, which bisects the MIT campus, ostensibly has bicycle lanes on either side down its entire length; however, the placement of these lanes, sandwiched as they are between the main road and the side parking, makes them somewhat less safe than biking on the shoulder On the other hand, much of Vassar St (another road which bisects campus) has off-the-road bike paths newly installed in the last few years.

If you're not a policy wonk, you may have missed Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood's new policy, which states that "walking and biking should not be an afterthought in roadway design" and will require states and municipalities competing for federal highway funds to include "equal access" for pedestrians and bicyclists. Translation: when roads get fixed in the future, they will be required to add safe, accessible bike lanes to facilitate commuting. So biking will only get better!

I also love the bicycling culture. The bike shops in the area - especially Wheelworks - are all staffed by incredible people who are always happy to show you how to fix something or just hang out. The rear rack on my bike broke the other day, and I went down to Wheelworks and hung out for 45 minutes, borrowing tools and little bolts and getting my hands greasy on their shop floor.

There are also some incredible opportunities for social improvement / justice through bicycling. You can get involved with Bikes Not Bombs, a nonprofit in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston of that works with disadvantaged youth in violent areas, both locally and internationally. BNB runs a bike shop and teaches kids how to fix bikes so they have something constructive to do rather than getting in to trouble. In the last 25 years they've sent over 25,000 bikes to Ghana, Tanzania, Guatamala, New Orleans, and elsewhere.

If you're on the West Coast, you may have heard of the Scraper Bike movement in Oakland. If you haven't, you have to watch this short, wonderful documentary. If it doesn't change your life, it will at least change the way you think of bikes.

Bikes can change health, commutes, communities, and the world for the better. Come ride with us!

One thing you should know about CPW is that it's absolutely massive. We have well over 600 events over the course of a few days, and the prefrosh add 25% to the undergraduate population for the weekend they're here. The MIT community is incredibly devoted to CPW, hosts a ton of excellent events, and generally makes this one of the most BAMF weekends on the East Coast.

The difficulty, of course, posed by such an abundance of awesomeness is how to keep track of it all!

In the past, we've given our CPW attendees novel-length directories of the events and important stuff at CPW. And we'll still be doing that this year.

However, we'll also be introducing some online options, including:

iPhone/iPod App:

Leading off the list is the MIT CPW app for the iPhone OS, available for both the phone and the iPod Touch series. The app is free, and features:

• A searchable directory of events and their descriptions, ordered by date and time, with each listing mashed up with a Google Map so you know exactly where it is on campus.
• The ability to "favorite" or "bookmark" events that then show up in a separate subsection.
• A separate directory of "parents" events (parevents???).
• Shuttle schedule and information.

         

The app was created by Bridger Maxwell '13, a Course VI major and iPhone Developer. The short URL for the app is http://bit.ly/cpwapp.

Calendars

Not everyone uses the iPhone OS, so we're making the calendar available in open formats as well. Ben Weissmann, '14 (a prefrosh attending CPW himself) thoughtfully wrote a Ruby script to scrape the schedule off of our site and put it into iCal format, which we then extended using Google Calendar.

So if you don't have an iPhone, or want to do something with the schedule data yourself, here you go:

• XML CPW Calendar (via Google).
• iCal CPW Calendar (via Ben).
• iCal CPW Calendar (via Google).

And here's the agenda itself:

Twitter

Last but not least, we'll be tweeting up a storm. As with last year, the main account is @mitcpw (managed by Admissions Officer Jen Wong, who deserves a big thanks for managing it). The hashtag is #mitcpw. The whole admissions team will be tweeting to that hashtag (generally retweeted by @mitcpw as well) and I personally am at @peteyMIT.

Hopefully, these web tools will help keep you connected at CPW. If something breaks, or if you have a suggestion of something else we could do to make things more accessible, just drop me a line!

See you next weekend!

* umlauts are performative. Don't try to pronounce it like this unless you want people to look at you weirdly and ask if you're recovering from protracted dental surgery.