In the last six months, the GetchaBooks team has redesigned almost every aspect of the site, adding features and crafting a user experience that finally makes the awful process of textbooks purchasing pleasurable. After hundreds of hours of Skype calls, instant messages, whiteboard sessions, code sprints, debugging spurts and usability testing, I’m happy to say that the experience is no less than awesome.

I’d like to thank my friends and family, whose understanding, patience, and feedback were crucial during the development of GetchaBooks. I can’t count the number of social gatherings I missed to work on this project. Aware that it means a lot to me, they’ve always excused my absence and even offered to help.

So, what are you waiting for? Check out GetchaBooks, and let me know what you think.

So you don’t have to, I’ve produced a list of changes to Tufts’ Office for Campus Life’s advertising and posting policy from last year to this year. This post is generalizable to how universities handle technology and policy as a whole. It is admittedly highly “inside baseball”, so if it doesn’t interest you, you should skip this post.

As of Monday, August 9, 2010, a Google search for “tufts ocl poster policy” reveals traces of two different, recent policies in PDF form. The “2010″ document has been removed from the OCL website, but the “2011″ document is freely downloadable. For the purpose of this exercise, I’ll ignore publicly accessible the web page last updated “3.15.07″.

Fortunately, when I began this piece, Google’s cache still had a copy of the 2010 document. If it didn’t, a quick trip over to OCL would likely produce one. As of August 10, 2010, the day I’m finishing this piece, the cached document is unavailable from Google. I’ve kept a copy of it here and here in image screenshots.

The 2010 document is mostly well-formatted, with proper hierarchy and understandable use of emphasis like bold and italic type. The 2011 document (PDF, HTML) is a completely different story. Aesthetically, it’s an Arial disaster without any concern for readability. According to its metadata, it was produced by Microsoft Office 2007 and authored by “jgolia01“.

Nonetheless, I’m more concerned with the content of the documents and not their presentation. I took some time to produce plaintext versions of the policies (2010-policy.txt, 2011-policy.txt) and run a diff on them (policies.diff). I tried to standardize the conventions in the two text files as to yield the most useful diff possible, but I didn’t do a perfect job. This is good enough to see the major differences.

A quick summary of the differences:

• A hyphen was needlessly inserted into the word information.
• A restriction on the number and size of flyers posted in a single area was changed (now six on the “Campus Center Breezeway between Bookstore and Mayer campus Center and the walls along the Tisch Libray steps” and one elsewhere).
• Office for Campus Life was condensed to OCL on some occasions.
• In what can only be read as a response to the Sam Wallis campaign’s use of “spray chalk”, OCL inserts a only bold, italisized, ALL-CAPS’D sentence addressing its use. Literally, this is the sentence with the most emphasis in the entire document. Although I’m pleased this clarification has been issued, I find the execution to be reactionary and completely unprofessional. As a disclaimer, I am remarkably biased in this area.

• A point on “Off-campus Advertising” is modified. Although it makes sense in context, this section is immediately ambiguous as to whether OCL is trying to regulate advertisements that aren’t on its campus, or advertisements originating from non-campus affiliated parties.
• Sections dedicated to the Mayer Campus Center and Residence Halls are added.
• The new policy mentions a collaboration with ORLL, the Office of Residential Life and Learning, on enforcing its dorm policies.

My takeaway from this exercise is that the fragmentation of locations and formatting of past and present policies regarding advertising and posting on the Tufts campus is shameful. The most recent document from OCL sacrifices any regard for formatting while expanding on the previous year’s document, clarifying and expanding on some points. However, some changes to the document seem arbitrary and hasty; I wouldn’t be surprised if they were made by a single individual without any review or vetting process. Finally, the information in these documents should be placed on the web page that already exists to hold this content. A web page with an authoritative URL like this one should always have the latest policy.

If this policy were to come from my office, I’d be embarrassed.

I’m done with the first leg of my summer journey, and I’m mostly pleased with how things turned out. Seeking to avoid the pain that comes with idleness, I decided to move to Medford, Massachusetts for the month of June and work a few web design jobs.

My primary job (40 hours a week) was doing front-end development for a social entrepreneurial startup with a few students at Harvard University. They’ve got a long way to go until launch, but I’m very confident that the project will be successful. It was a pleasure to work with individuals who grasp both web technology and social responsibility. I learned a lot during my time with them, and was sad to leave.

My second job was polishing TuftsBlogs.com, Tufts University’s Undergraduate Admission’s blogging portal, which I built over the last year. I’m pleased with the functionality and aesthetics of the site, overall, and look forward to see how Tufts’ social media strategy continues to pan out.

Finally, I was working for myself. My (recently incorporated!) business, GetchaBooks.com, is less than a month away from launching its next big iteration. My cofounders and I have been working hard to build a killer platform that takes the frustration out of textbook purchasing. We’re currently seeking beta testers and motivated students at schools across the country to help us spread the platform. If you’re interested, check out www.getchabooks.com to sign up for more information.

As you could imagine, working three jobs can be pretty stressful. At times, I felt overwhelmed. Nonetheless, life was awesome. It was exhilarating living away from home, without the burden of classes, completely managing my own time between days jobs, entrepreneurship, and socializing. I was efficient and effective, waking up each and every day with a purpose. I learned things every day, and had complete control of my life.

In that respect, my summer gamble has been a complete success. There were difficult life moments, including a bicycle accident, an incredibly sketchy Craigslist exchange, and a painful breakup that’s tested my character and personal identity. With the support of my friends, I’m working to overcome the obstacles that linger. Despite these problems, after a month of economic self-sufficiency, I’m confident I can succeed in this world. Now that I’ve done it once, I can do it again, and it feels great.

I’m back in Dover Plains, ready to embark on the second leg of my journey. Throughout July, will be director of the Dutchess Community College’s Computer Academy, the computer camp-classroom hybrid that I’ve been working at for the last three years. In addition to managing the Academy, I’ll be teaching a new introductory programming course, taught in Ruby, and something I’m calling “Future of the Web”, a crash-course in web design with a focus on features of the HTML5 spec.

My July will be a radical adjustment from the freelance lifestyle I’ve been living in the last month, but I embrace it with open arms. Education and access to information have always been important to me, and I’m really excited to directly contribute to the lives of children once more.

When the month is over, I plan on returning to Medford, just in time for a Keane concert in Boston that I’m super excited about. After the elation of the concert fades, I’m unsure if I’ll take on any jobs. My August priority is ensuring that GetchaBooks successfully relaunches, but I haven’t yet gauged how much of my time that will take. Certainly, I’ll figure it out.

Regardless, I will bring to August what I brought to June and hope to bring to July — sincerity and focus. Having tasted the lifestyle of a free spirit, I’m content with my life.

Thanks for taking the time to keep up with it, and take care.

Richard, great info on here! Hopefully, I can add a little info here for the folks needing tympanoplasty and similar procedures due to cholesteatoma.

I had a modified radical mastoidectomy with tympanoplasty on my left ear when I was about 14. Due to the more serious nature of that surgery and the damage caused by the cholesteatoma, all of the ossicular structure had to be replaced, as well as a cartilege eardrum graft made. For about 20 years, I enjoyed remarkably good results out of that ear given the extensiveness of that surgery and prior pathology. Only recently (I’m 33 now) has there been any noticeable diminution of hearing in that ear, but in having a strong right ear, I never had to wear a hearing aid or contemplate further surgery.

However, one morning I woke up, and I just couldn’t hear worth a crap from my right ear. I thought possibly I had an infection, so I started taking Mucinex and popping my ears more frequently in hopes that this would correct the new deafness. After about 2 months, nothing happened, so I went to the doctor who had been maintaining my previously operated upon ear (cleanings, monitoring, etc.) and he recognized what he thought was a cholesteatoma in my right ear. Sure enough, after he passed me across the hall of the otolaryngology center to a doctor experienced in identification and correction of cholesteatoma, the diagnosis was made, a CT scan ordered, and a hearing test administered. My right ear hearing was now only as strong as my left ear. Before I even left the Dr.’s office, he was working on getting me a loaner hearing aid so that I wouldn’t have to suffer my new deafness when around others at work or home.

So, I just had a tympanomastoid type III w/ ossicular chain reconstruction yesterday. The operation was over at about 2:45 pm, and I was in the car on the way home at 4:15, still dizzy and very sleepy but otherwise feeling fine. Got home at 5:30, after my wife swung by daycare to pick our daughter up and ran into the drugstore to get some mild pain meds. I slept from the moment I got home until a little past 8 this morning. I feel surprisingly good. I have decent balance and mobility, and any impairment I have is probably more due to the mild pain meds and residual effects of anesthesia and hunger than to the effects of the operation. Honestly, I think I may go back to work on Monday if I can pull away from the pain meds sometime on Sunday, which I think I can do.

In yesterday’s surgery, the doctor made the incision behind the ear, removed the cholesteatomatous growth, did a light cleaning on the mastoid, and replaced a part of the incus which had failed or disconnected due to the disintegrating effects of the enzymes present in the cholesteatoma. According to my wife, per the doctor while I was in recovery, an eardrum recreation was not necessary, which is obviously great news for me, and will probably mean that my hearing has a much greater chance to return to normal.

For the time being, however, I have a loaner hearing aid in my left ear to compensate for its historical weakness until (hopefully) the hearing in my right ear returns to the normal range, of which my doctor seemed to believe was the most likely outcome.

So, I’ve had cholesteatomas in both ears now, and had successful operations to correct them. The more extensive operation in my left ear has left a slight impairment due to the fact that I effectively have no ear canal to compress and direct the sounds (canal wall down)as well as having a cartilege – as opposed to skin – tympanic membrane graft. The cartilege prevents a future retraction of the eardrum into the middle ear, preventing another cholesteatoma, but obviously doesn’t have the sensitivity of an epitheleal graft.

20 hours after my surgery, I’m feeling good and I’m excited that I probably won’t be laid out for the next 2 weeks. Who wants to burn all their vacation on recovery from surgery?

By the way, I rather enjoyed the anesthesia as it was first administered. It feels almost like first big drop on an old wooden roller coaster! Coming out of the anesthesia, it’s better to just go back to bed and sleep if off than to try and fight it. The worst part of this operation was getting the IV inserted, and that was even less painful than giving blood for a physical checkup.

I’ll see him again in a year.

(If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I encourage you to read this and this, and optionally, the posts in between.)

For the next several days, I’ll be in Dover. I have plenty of people to see and errands to run! Starting June first, I’ll be living in Medford, MA, working two web programming and design jobs, as well as working on the next version of GetchaBooks. At the end of June, I’m moving back to Dover to teach at the Computer Academy, my normal summer routine for several years now. Finally, come August, I’ll be resting and playing back in Medford, MA, preparing for another semester at Tufts.

The plan is to keep busy, create things, and make money. What could possibly go wrong?

The site’s purpose? Display and archive faux pas at Tufts University. Go ahead and report an incident, and you may be featured on the front page!

Fishy Business

I don’t have any idea what it means, either.