Long walk or short walk?

When I saw this comic on xkcd.com I immediately thought, that is so true! As an IE I spend a lot of my time (aka all of my classes, except for 407) in the Leonhard building. For those of you that don't know, the Leonhard building or Leo (since I'm lazy and hate spelling Leonhard with an H) is the farthest building from main campus. It's across the IST bridge and beyond EES. This makes it a long walk from wherever you're coming from and when heading over there I always try to take the shortest way possible.

For me, since I live in West Halls, is to cut across Atherton and then through the parking lot. Clearly this is the shortest path. The problem that occurs is just where the applied science building starts and the sidewalk continues straight on towards the EES building. There is no diagonal path towards Leo (I have included a rather sad illistration of this below, thanks paint)! Now, being IE's makes all of us obsessed with officiency and the students have made their own path, literally worn away a dirt path across the lawn. I have been an IE for 3 semesters and the path was there when I started and will be there when I leave, unless somehow, someone knows the sidewalk people of Penn State.

Ruckus Gone, Who Will Step Up?

So Ruckus has finally died. Apparently no one really knows why they are gone, they went down for an update and a while later it shut down, seemingly for good. This article gives the most information I was able to find about the subject.

Personally I was never a fan of Ruckus. Switching from Napster to Ruckus was like being kicked out of your suite at the Plaza and being moved into the Motel 6 in a bad neighborhood. Napster was streamlined and allowed you to access new music and the ability to listen to that music in the same program without being required to go through your browser. Ruckus was stepping down in technology and ease of use. The search function of Ruckus was particularly horrible and would not even provide options for incorrect spellings. Also, the selection Ruckus offered was minimal and spotty.

Napster might have cost the university money but at least people were satisfied. Ruckus was free, after a while, and ran on annoying pop up adds that routinely interrupted my homework. These ads clearly did not work and were a distraction to the user and lowered the quality of the Ruckus program.

My question is what will Penn State do next? Will they return to Napster? Or will they try to find a new provider?

Personally I hope they return to Napster, it is a no brainer for me. Their selection is better, their program is sleeker and more user friendly, and they don't bombard you with pop up ads. As far as I have seen Penn State is not even aware this has happened. There is nothing on PSU Live and nothing that I have been able to find through google. Step up Penn State, don't leave your students without music. Don't leave your students the excuse to start pirating music, again.

Speaking Out Loud

I was reading an article about the cost of people not feeling comfortable speaking up with their ideas. The article said that companies risk losing ideas by not making their employees feel comfortable about giving their ideas, no matter how crazy the ideas might seem. In my experience this happens a lot and the eventual, "Oh I thought of that two months ago, but didn't want to say anything," comment just makes it worse. While I participated in Odyssey of the Mind members of my group, myself included, would often see things at the final competition that they had thought about but not said out loud. By keeping those ideas to themselves they deprived our team the possibility to "piggy back" ideas off of that idea.

Knowing that people might not always feel comfortable giving ideas seemed like a strange thing to me when I worked with Odyssey of the Mind. However, after my internship this summer I have seen that often times the people with the best ideas are the people who are out on the floor working on the product or working in the area that is being changed. The people I worked with this summer felt comfortable talking to me, rather than management, about ideas they had for improving their work area.

Providing people with a comfortable way to present ideas would be helpful to companies with a large amount of employees. The article suggests setting up a service where employees can give their ideas without leaving their name. I think that idea could be useful for companies with many employees, however for small groups a different approach would be needed.