I love school. There, I said it. I love being in an envi­ron­ment that is geared towards learn­ing; I love being around peo­ple that, for the most part, want to learn as much as I do; I love being able to ques­tion just for the sake of hav­ing a ques­tion, and most often being praised for doing so. Where else will I get all of that in a sin­gle place? (more…)

Photos by Brandon Martinez, Web Editor

Getting together with friends, hurl­ing a ball down the lane and knock­ing over some pins is a pretty com­mon activ­ity for many col­lege stu­dents, but it isn’t always at the bowl­ing alley.

This can all be done in the com­fort of a student’s liv­ing room, play­ing group-oriented games like Wii Sports, Wii Fitness, Mario Kart, and numer­ous other games for the Nintendo Wii. (more…)

2004: the year I entered the blo­gos­phere. I set up my first blog­ger account and started writing.

What did I write about? Nothing that mat­tered; just daily events between my friends and me. Honestly, when I cre­ated the account I didn’t even know what I would use it for. I just thought it was the cool thing to do. And man was I right.

Jump ahead six years: I’ve tried many of the major blog­ging plat­forms, includ­ing LiveJournal, Tumblr, TypePad, Movable Type, and WordPress, and I still con­tinue to write. What do I write about now? Still noth­ing that truly mat­ters, but that’s what’s so great about blog­ging. I can write about almost any­thing. (more…)

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Apple, Inc. has recently approved the first set of porn star apps for the iPod Touch and iPhone App Store.

There’s an app for that! Well, now there are a few to help you fol­low your favorite porn stars, right from the con­ve­nience of your favorite hand­held devices.

The apps, made by GrindhouseMobile, cur­rently fea­ture two porn stars, Sunny Leone and Aria Giovanni. Each star has their own app con­tain­ing their blog, bio, and dif­fer­ent sets of pic­tures (ama­teur, glam­our, fetish, etc). Sunny’s even includes some of her per­sonal videos.

Now, don’t get too excited. Most of the con­tent in these apps could eas­ily be con­sid­ered “soft-core”. The pics are mostly lin­gerie or swim­suit shots, while the videos are of the star just out-and-about doing their nor­mal (non-work related) rou­tines. These apps are meant to make you feel “closer” to the porn star by fol­low­ing their daily lives.

What does the inclu­sion of this soft-core porn star app mean for Apple and the App Store? Apple might be will­ing to open up to a wider range of apps, espe­cially since the iPhone now has bet­ter parental con­trols (these apps are rated 17+, and come with a warn­ing when down­load­ing). However, I don’t think this is a huge sig­nif­i­cance or change in Apple’s policies.

Within Apple’s soft­ware devel­op­ment agree­ment, they specif­i­cally say that porn apps are not allowed, but these apps are no worse than a Sport Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, and as such, I per­son­ally do not think they con­sti­tute as porn.

If you’d like to check out these apps for your­self, open the App Store on your iPod touch and try out the free (lite) ver­sion of Sunny Leone or the paid ver­sions of Sunny Leone or Aria Giovanni. These are rated 17+ for mature audi­ences, so make sure your mom didn’t turn on parental controls.

Palm, Inc.’s lat­est entry-level smart­phone looks to com­pete with Apple’s iPhone 3G

After launch­ing the Pre this past sum­mer to com­pete with Apple’s iPhone and other touch phones, Palm, Inc. is prepar­ing to launch their lat­est device, the Palm Pixi.

The Pixi is designed to be a slimmed-down ver­sion of the Palm Pre: a smaller dis­play with a lower screen res­o­lu­tion (80 pix­els shorter), a less-powerful cam­era (low­ered to 2 megapix­els from 3), and lack of Wifi support.

By reduc­ing these fea­tures, Palm should be able to intro­duce the Pixi at a very rea­son­able price. If they want to remain com­pet­i­tive with Apple, the $99 price point would be most advised, since the iPhone 3G shares a sim­i­lar price and fea­ture set.

How will the Pixi stand against the iPhone 3G? Both fea­ture two of the best mobile oper­at­ing sys­tems; the Pixi will run WebOS, just as the Pre does, and the iPhone runs a vari­ant of Mac OS X. Both phones also have the same amount of mem­ory, sim­i­lar screen size, and cameras.

There are major dif­fer­ences, how­ever. The Pixi has a full QWERTY key­board, while the iPhone only has an onscreen touch key­board. After expe­ri­enc­ing the Pre, I found it dif­fi­cult to type on its small key­board; I can only imag­ine that the Pixi would have a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence. I would much rather use the iPhone’s onscreen key­board, thanks to its abil­ity to rotate, hide, change key sets, and it also has great pre­dic­tive text feature.

Another con­nec­tiv­ity. Both phones are 3G capa­ble, mean­ing they’ll be able to run on the fastest cel­lu­lar net­works in the coun­try; how­ever, the Pixi lacks WiFi sup­port. WiFi can be a very ben­e­fi­cial fea­ture, espe­cially in sit­u­a­tions where you would like to down­load larger amounts of data that would nor­mally take a large amount of time, even over the fastest cel­lu­lar networks.

Will the Pixi gain Palm ground against Apple? Only time will tell. My guess is that it will only make a mar­ginal impact; con­sumers look­ing to renew their Sprint con­tracts may def­i­nitely jump on the chance for a new touch phone, but I don’t see a rea­son to choose the Pixi over the iPhone.

The Pixi is expected to be released this win­ter on the Sprint net­work. For more infor­ma­tion on the Pixi, visit palm​.com/​p​ixi.

A com­par­i­son of the Pixi, Pre, and iPhone 3G Palm Pixi Palm Pre Apple iPhone 3G Style Candy Bar Slider Candy Bar Dimensions 55 x 111 x 11mm 60 x 101 x 17mm 61 x 114 x 12mm Weight 3.51oz 4.76oz 4.1oz U.S. Network Sprint Sprint AT&T Screen 2.63”, 320 x 400px 3.1”, 320 x 480px 3.5”, 320 x 480px Camera 2 Megapixel, LED Flash 3 Megapixel, LED Flash 2 Megapixel, No Flash WiFi None 802.11 b/g 802.11 b/g Input Gesture Area, Full QWERTY Keyboard Gesture Area, Full QWERTY Keyboard, Trackball Keyboard On-Screen Storage 8GB 8GB 8GB Price Unknown $150 $99