My freshman college roommate flew back east and invited me to go see The Daily Show with some other friends from WPI. We got in line around 2 p.m. for the 6 p.m. taping. This gave us plenty of time to catch-up and shoot the breeze. Meanwhile the crew was rather supportive and handed out water to make sure everyone was well hydrated and let us into the studio a bit early. The studio is rather small and almost resembles being inside a warehouse. It seems to fit around two hundred people and luckily if you are able to get a seat you have a great view.

Before the show began they sent out a warm-up comedian to get the energy flowing and explained to us how the taping works. They use a method called live-to-tape. This means that the show is recorded in (mostly) a single shot and the audience has microphones above them to record their laughter. The Daily Show does not use laugh tracks. They did do a second take on the portion of the show about Charlie Rangel which was then spliced back into the show during editing. After that Stewart answered questions from the audience before they began taping. Finally the experience ended with the recording of a monologue for the global edition of the show. Overall it was a fantastic experience and well worth the nothing that was paid for it.

Maybe the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Original from flickr. HT to Colin McEnroe.

Just wanted to share a copy of the e-mail I sent out about the student trustee election results (below the split).

Dear Friends,

I was waiting for an official announcement to be sent before I sent
this but since it seems that may not happen I wanted to inform you
that Adam Scianna (a Civil Engineer at Storrs) won the Graduate
Student Trustee election. I want to express my sincere gratitude to
everyone that supported me, voted, and sent kind words. It meant a lot
to me and I enjoyed the opportunity to hear your stories and concerns
about our school as I campaigned. While I will not have the
opportunity to tackle these as student trustee, I will continue to
stay involved in other ways.

As always you should feel free to contact our competent and hard
working SBA representatives if you have problems or suggestions for
things on campus. They work hard for you and I know they are more than
happy to try and address problems or suggestions you might have.

Sincerely,

Matt

Every two years graduate students at the University of Connecticut are given the opportunity to vote for someone to represent them on the Board of Trustees. The Board of Trustees is the governing body of our university and the last word on university policies, procedures, and tuition.

I want to serve as an advocate for graduate students across Connecticut. As an undergraduate I spent four years advocating for students as the founder of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute College Democrats. As President of the College Democrats of Massachusetts, I was responsible for fund raising, building relationships with other organizations, getting students resources, and successfully obtained representation for our group on the Democratic State Committee — the “board of trustees” for the state Democratic Party. In one year I transformed our group into a well respected political organization in the state of Massachusetts.

I will work to build a community of engagement. I pledge to hold office hours on all the graduate student campuses across Connecticut. I also pledge to work with all graduate student governments. I will provide you with updates regularly and remain accessible via phone, e-mail, facebook, and yes, even twitter.

I am concerned with ensuring that all the campuses across the state have their interests represented equally. I am concerned about tuition increases that outpace inflation. I am concerned when I see our state taking $23 Million from our operating reserve account to cover a budget gap. Some of these issues are bigger than what happens in the boardroom – to that end, I promise to advocate for our schools both at Storrs and the state capital.

Please feel free to share your ideas and concerns with me. You can e-mail me or contact me via facebook.

I respectfully ask for your vote next week (http://www.vote.uconn.edu/). If I am elected I promise that I will do my best to ensure that UCONN remains an institution we are all proud of.

Sincerely,

Matt

Today I got the 4GB of RAM I ordered to upgrade my 13″ MacBook Pro. Installing the upgrade was quick and painless procedure. However after I successfully installed the RAM the backlight on my keyboard stopped functioning. I called up AppleCare support and after a few prompts I was connected to Megan. The first surprise was that Megan did not seem to be from a foreign country. Second was the manner in which she counseled me through my new problem. She was pleasant and after informing me I was out of phone support she advised me of all my options. I was lucky because when I tried to reinstall the old RAM and I discovered I had knocked a ribbon cable that supplied power to the backlight out of its place. After replacing it my backlight came to life. This is the type of issue that likely would not have been noticed or solved over the phone. However I will never forget how painless and helpful my experience with AppleCare support was.

I know I've neglected this blog quite a bit lately. I pulled a new theme for it from the Drupal theme gallery which I believe looks a bit cleaner than the previous one. I also cleaned up the spam. I hope to update this blog a little more frequently over the coming year. If you have suggestions on issues to write about or for a better theme please feel free to let me know.

Maureen Dowd writes a depressing piece on the outsourcing of newspapers.

An interesting proposal at the Freakonomics blog. It does not sound perfect, but it sounds like a good attempt at trying. Especially for the sport of cycling, which appears to have a lot of doping issues.

The Freakonomics Blog tackles the question. They did make a difference to me at least once. Due to the blurb on Stumbling Upon Happiness by one of the authors of Freakonomics, I decided to pick it up.