1.30.2005
lottery
Today was the draw date for Keble's Graduate Student housing lottery. It's interesting, because Keble now has space for every single graduate student who needs housing. The catch is that you don't know where you're living until after the lottery, and the lottery was held tonight, and they need to know where we'll be living on Tuesday. So seriously, we have 48 hours to determine where we will live for the 2005 - 2006 academic year.
The good news is that I won the lottery. Seriously. I won the lottery. I got the very first pick of rooms in Keble College. I rule. I should note, just because I'm gloating, that this is not the first housing lottery I have won. In my Junior year of college, I also had the first pick of rooms for Senior year. Of course, I was competing against, oh, eight other people, but the point is that I won that one too. I had the closest Senior room to the Wa, a convenience store on the corner of Alexander and University that was a haven for quick junk food. Interesting note about the Wa, it's a WaWa store, but evidently, two 'Wa' syllables takes too much time to say, so instead, we've now re-named it as "the 'Wa", which is the same number of syllables. Stupid, but I digress.
I'll state for the record that housing lotteries are horrible, and this one moreso that the undergrad ones in the States. The reason for this is that you also declare your economic status with the room that you take - rents are not flat across the board at Keble. In fact, the rooms could be vastly different and the room rates will affect that. So by taking a large room, you might be saying to the rest of the MCR that 'money is not a factor' or 'I am extremely wealthy', or conversely, 'I took the smallest room in college, because that's all I could afford'. I took the most expensive room in the college. It's because I want the space, because the other rooms were tiny closets of rooms, and because I don't want to live a mile away from the college in a flat that I have to get to by walking through a very dimly lit alleyway in which two of my friends have already been mugged. This is, by no means, me saying that I am extremely wealthy, because I'm not. It's me making a conscious decision that I need to live someplace nice, and there are certain things I'll sacrifice in order to do it. Wish me luck...
On a very tangential point, I saw this article in the New York Times today. It's about the ability to steal the radio frequency in a car key and duplicate it, thus allowing you to steal a car with one of these little transponder chips. This has very limited applications in the real world - if you're going to steal a car, a flatbed truck is your best bet, and the cheapest is probably a crowbar and some wire-striping pliers. But the catch is that there are other products into which these little radio transponder chips are inserted, and therein lie the additional applications. They are being used currently in our Fastlane (if you're in Boston) or E-Z Pass (if you're in New York or New Jersey) car tags. They are also being used in the London streets to see if you're driving in the center of the city during the day. If you are, you incur an additional toll for the day. In fact, I'm pretty sure they're in Keble's library books as well, since we can check them out by swiping them across a little radio frequency reader - by the way, it's the coolest library checkout system ever. Applications are being explored to put these chips into inventory in stores, or to implant them into cadavers at the UCLA Med School to prevent theft. Seriously. But the one that brings me back to housing and security is this: they're being implanted into cards for Exxon/Mobil gasoline - the SpeedPass.
The SpeedPass is something that you keep on your keys which you hold up to the pump before you start. There's no authorization needed, no swiping a card, no fumbling around for cash. You hold it up to the pump and then you pump your gas. The money disappears from your bank account without a worry in the world. The SpeedPass technology was mentioned in the article explicitly. This next thing wasn't: Princeton University's housing locks use the exact same technology as SpeedPass. It even works in just about the same way. Your Princeton University ID card has a chip in it, and you hold it up to a reader on the door to get in. People leave them in their wallets and they jump up and bang their hip or butt into the reader to open the doors - it's really quite amusing. I'm just thinking, though, that Princeton isn't the only institution with these kinds of cards, and it'd be really really easy to start to duplicate these cards and their chip ID numbers, which might get people into hospitals, library archives, or storerooms of many kinds. I don't know what it says about me that my first instinct when I heard about the story was to think about my old PUID and who might gain entrance to the dorms with someone's stolen card number, but hmm... It probably just means that I'm crazy. Or creepy. Or both, and many many more things too.
The good news is that I won the lottery. Seriously. I won the lottery. I got the very first pick of rooms in Keble College. I rule. I should note, just because I'm gloating, that this is not the first housing lottery I have won. In my Junior year of college, I also had the first pick of rooms for Senior year. Of course, I was competing against, oh, eight other people, but the point is that I won that one too. I had the closest Senior room to the Wa, a convenience store on the corner of Alexander and University that was a haven for quick junk food. Interesting note about the Wa, it's a WaWa store, but evidently, two 'Wa' syllables takes too much time to say, so instead, we've now re-named it as "the 'Wa", which is the same number of syllables. Stupid, but I digress.
I'll state for the record that housing lotteries are horrible, and this one moreso that the undergrad ones in the States. The reason for this is that you also declare your economic status with the room that you take - rents are not flat across the board at Keble. In fact, the rooms could be vastly different and the room rates will affect that. So by taking a large room, you might be saying to the rest of the MCR that 'money is not a factor' or 'I am extremely wealthy', or conversely, 'I took the smallest room in college, because that's all I could afford'. I took the most expensive room in the college. It's because I want the space, because the other rooms were tiny closets of rooms, and because I don't want to live a mile away from the college in a flat that I have to get to by walking through a very dimly lit alleyway in which two of my friends have already been mugged. This is, by no means, me saying that I am extremely wealthy, because I'm not. It's me making a conscious decision that I need to live someplace nice, and there are certain things I'll sacrifice in order to do it. Wish me luck...
On a very tangential point, I saw this article in the New York Times today. It's about the ability to steal the radio frequency in a car key and duplicate it, thus allowing you to steal a car with one of these little transponder chips. This has very limited applications in the real world - if you're going to steal a car, a flatbed truck is your best bet, and the cheapest is probably a crowbar and some wire-striping pliers. But the catch is that there are other products into which these little radio transponder chips are inserted, and therein lie the additional applications. They are being used currently in our Fastlane (if you're in Boston) or E-Z Pass (if you're in New York or New Jersey) car tags. They are also being used in the London streets to see if you're driving in the center of the city during the day. If you are, you incur an additional toll for the day. In fact, I'm pretty sure they're in Keble's library books as well, since we can check them out by swiping them across a little radio frequency reader - by the way, it's the coolest library checkout system ever. Applications are being explored to put these chips into inventory in stores, or to implant them into cadavers at the UCLA Med School to prevent theft. Seriously. But the one that brings me back to housing and security is this: they're being implanted into cards for Exxon/Mobil gasoline - the SpeedPass.
The SpeedPass is something that you keep on your keys which you hold up to the pump before you start. There's no authorization needed, no swiping a card, no fumbling around for cash. You hold it up to the pump and then you pump your gas. The money disappears from your bank account without a worry in the world. The SpeedPass technology was mentioned in the article explicitly. This next thing wasn't: Princeton University's housing locks use the exact same technology as SpeedPass. It even works in just about the same way. Your Princeton University ID card has a chip in it, and you hold it up to a reader on the door to get in. People leave them in their wallets and they jump up and bang their hip or butt into the reader to open the doors - it's really quite amusing. I'm just thinking, though, that Princeton isn't the only institution with these kinds of cards, and it'd be really really easy to start to duplicate these cards and their chip ID numbers, which might get people into hospitals, library archives, or storerooms of many kinds. I don't know what it says about me that my first instinct when I heard about the story was to think about my old PUID and who might gain entrance to the dorms with someone's stolen card number, but hmm... It probably just means that I'm crazy. Or creepy. Or both, and many many more things too.
