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

Tag: technology

  • At Long Last, AMCAS Realizes It’s 2010

    Amusingly, the keyword searches that bring the most traffic to my site (what little there is) have to do with the AMCAS application not working in modern browsers, including anything running on OS X. It looks like they’ve finally decided to update the site for the 2011 application cycle, and this time they’ve added an…

  • Reconstruction

    Now that the social purge is complete, I’ve begun adding people back to my Facebook friends list. In addition to grumbling about Facebook’s cluttered, opaque interface (remember when we all joined it because it was so much simpler and cleaner than MySpace?), I’m placing new friends into category lists as I go along. Because friends…

  • Social Purge

    I have been threatening to clear my Facebook account for a while now, and with the EFF’s latest revelations of how the site attempts to “zucker” private information from its unsuspecting users, today seemed like as good a time as any. And so it is done: zero friends. This has certainly been a long time…

  • iShenanigans

    There’s been quite the foofaraw surrounding the leak of the latest iPhone prototype (Spoiler: one of the employees left it at a bar, a guy found it, Gizmodo bought it from him and posted a teardown). It’s the expected incremental upgrade scheduled for release this summer that continues the process of making the iPhone more…

  • Not Consumers, but Customers

    Last week, Ars Technica and Gawker Media realized that the role played by so-called “consumers” has been changing. The simplistic web advertising models they rely on worked great when visitors had no choice but to consume the advertising “impressions” loaded on every page. As people take back the power to be customers instead, even normally…

  • Thinking About the Cultural Shift

    This article by Mike Masnick is a bit of a long read, but it goes along with some things I’ve said far less eloquently. Yes, the internet, corporations, and globalization make for bigger hits (think Oprah joins twitter), but at the same time it enables powerful subcommunities (Oink.me.uk, game modders). It’s fascinating, especially because as many of us have seen…

  • Silly AMCAS

    Remember how the AMCAS med school application website doesn’t work with any modern browsers? How I can’t upgrade Firefox past 3.0 on my Mac at work because there are no other supported OSX browsers, and at home I can only use IE 8 in compatibility mode? They haven’t fixed it yet.What’s even more frustrating is…

  • AMCAS Fail

    The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has a centralized med school application that everybody fills out, ostensibly to save time for both applicants and admissions committees. Unfortunately, a whole new generation of browsers have arrived seemingly without their notice. It’s a real shame when I can go to a site for future doctors in…