Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.

Category: Life

Short (and long) reads extracted from my personal life.

  • Turning Music Piracy Into Business: A BitTorrent Tracker Model

    By now everybody has heard of music piracy, a trend that has quickly spread across the world as vast networks of users connect to swap their favorite tracks in the form of digital files. Many attempts have been made to curtail this sensation, from cumbersome “Digital Rights Management” or DRM on purchased content to subscription-based…

  • Pet Peeves: Listproc n00bs

    Here at UMBC we have a whole lot of listprocs. Every organization, committee, and campus department seems to have one of these email mailing lists to mass-message students who opt-in. Conveniently (or not so, depending on your perspective), there is a system through our campus portal, myUMBC, that allows users to manage what listprocs they…

  • Broadening my Intellectual Horizons

    One thing that has been especially wonderful about my experience at UMBC so far has been my exposure to an environment made up of people from so many diverse backgrounds. Each person brings their own perspective and worldview placed a varied distance on the spectrum from my own. This kind of exposure has both allowed…

  • Facebook Importing, Part 2

    Apparently Facebook stops importing notes without telling you if you delete any of the imported ones. So I can either have duplicates or delete all the past, commented and tagged notes. Yay Facebook for such a limited support of this feature.

  • Managing My Web 2.0 Life

    After going through the whole process to create a Flickr account, I realized my URL of choice, /silversteelwolf, was already taken—by me. I had created another account months ago and promptly forgotten both about it and the login information for it. I’ve spent the past several days sending emails back and forth to Yahoo customer…

  • Importing to Facebook

    For a while now I’ve been importing these blog posts as notes into my Facebook account via the handy-dandy RSS feed Blogger provides. However, I recently added the feed to FeedBurner largely because it allows me to track subscribers using the handy little button on the right-hand side—four already since I added the thing, that’s…

  • Things that make me feel dumb: CAPTCHAs

    With the prominence of bots registering account and posting “comments” with the sole purpose of hawking their master’s shady online market, many websites have implemented a step to impede this unwanted behavior: the CAPTCHA, or Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. The purpose of this little image is in effect,…

  • Another Milestone for the Tercel

    Way back when I was still updating my journal (that’s what they called them before “blog” was such a popular buzzword) on deviantART, my ’84 Toyota Tercel hit a pretty significant milestone. On the trip back from Chincoteague, I passed by another one that made me happy enough that I actually wiped the dust off…