Let us fill in for Pitchfork for a moment and keep you up to date on MGMT’s whereabouts. You guys know about MGMT, don’t you? Here is their story: Wesleyan, “Time To Pretend”, “Electric Feel”, Justice Remix of “Electric Feel”, Sex Drive, Tim “The Freak” Lincecum, “Kids”, Sarkozy, NHL 2K10, new album coming out. And now everybody’s all up to date! Usually when we tell awesome stories like that, people are like, “More! Tell us more! That can’t be the end, can it?” Usually it is the end, but not this time – the next thing the band is up to is a free concert right here in Philadelphia on Sunday as part of Kia Presents: The Soul Collective Tour (so catchy). To get a pair of tickets, you have to test drive the new Kia Soul at the 23rd St. Armory, but driving is so fun, right? We all miss driving when we’re at school, right? That’s why we all brought racecar beds this year, right?

Full details here and after the jump.

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Doing laundry in the dorms sucks. For those of you who might be too far removed from the experience (or the spoiled among you who send your laundry out), let me paint you a picture. Imagine me dragging my hamper to the laundry room, only to discover that one of the dryers won’t turn on, another one doesn’t have heat, and all four washers are full. Now, picture me dragging my laundry across Hill only to find myself in the same situation. If you really close your eyes and imagine, you can probably hear me saying “Fuck this, I’m taking a nap.” Lather, rinse, repeat every two weeks for three months.

But even though Facilities still hasn’t fixed all of the dryers (probably still working on the high rises’ toilet situation), Penn Housing Services has at least answered some of our prayers. No longer will I have to wander throughout Hill like an Israelite, because I have seen the future: LaundryAlert.com.

“An Internet laundry machine monitoring system,” LaundryAlert monitors all of the laundry rooms on campus and lets you know how many machines are available or being used. More than that, the website tells you how long you have to wait for that washer to free up so you can relentlessly throw some poor sap’s clothes on top of the dirty machine. And it will even send you an e-mail when that time finally arrives. (You need a password to use the site–search your email archives, Penn Housing already sent one out.)

Yes, it’s true, the website is ugly as sin (seriously, Helen Keller could have done a better job with this thing). And I’d much prefer a notification text over an e-mail, but the fact that I will no longer have to make 30 trips to the laundry room every day is enough for me to welcome LaundryAlert into my heart.

When we opened the DP yesterday and read about the opportunity to get paid for note-taking, we were thrilled. After all, once we’re done with a final, we dump all of the semester’s information out of our brains to make room for the next set of classes. Wouldn’t it be nice if we were rewarded long after our blue-books were handed in (you can say what you want about learning being its own reward; we’d rather have cold, hard cash)? Besides, since my degree will likely only prepare me for a career as a secretary, this would be great to list as relevant work experience.

But more than that, I was also excited that GradeGuru.com would help me with my econ problem. Okay, full disclosure: I have many econ problems, but the one that I’m most concerned about is my inability to concentrate at 10 a.m. during a class I abhor so wholeheartedly. My notes mostly consist of random graphs and doodles, plus some indecipherable words and equations. Clearly the best method to a good GPA.

My curiosity piqued, I headed over to GradeGuru.com and checked it out (you get 50 free sets of notes without registering). Here’s what I found: Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody knows the best way to keep abreast of what’s new at Penn is to look down.  That way, you can kill two birds with one stone by avoiding eye contact with flyer-wielding classmates AND simultaneously checking out the chalkings.  Which is to say, we noticed, or more accurately, stepped on, the URL “PennCourseReviewED.com” enough times over the past few days that it piqued our curiosity.  So we checked it out.  A UTB appraisal:

• Straight off the bat, we were annoyed we had to register and make up a screenname.  Our lives are complicated enough.
• Aside from a rather spirited debate on the merits of Introduction to Cognitive Science (who knew?), the site is looking pretty empty.  It relies on user-submitted reviews, but no one’s going to start writing reviews until the site gets popular, and blah blah blah vicious circle.
• Which brings us to another point: we already have Penn Course Review, and we read last week that that shit is going online-only, making this site totally redundent as of next semester, which we don’t actually feel that bad about, since the site grew out of a class project and doesn’t seem to have any kind of agenda. (But they could have named it whatever they wanted to differentiate it from PCR, and all they came up with was adding -ED?  Really?)
• The site is also not very intuitively designed–the majority of courses don’t have reviews, but every class offered at Penn seems to be listed, and there’s no way to limit searches to only courses that have reviews.
• Bottom Line: An imperfect tool for selecting classes, but thanks for trying, guys!