I logged onto class.daytonastate.edu to find this message:
Daytona State College recently was notified that the Southern Association of Colleges (SACS) is planning a site visit. The College believes that we will be able to address any issues or questions and do so without jeopardizing the College’s accreditation.
Michael Vitale
Interim VP of Academic Affairs
Daytona State College
Do you think Daytona State deserves to continue being accredited? Why or why not? Leave your feedback by commenting on this post. I particularly want to hear from people who have withdrawn, dropped out, transferred away from, or decided not to attend Daytona State.
In my opinion, Daytona State has a high market share that does not necessarily reflect upon its high quality, but rather, the fact that people are being paid to go to or to return to college. The IRS Earned Income Tax Credit applies from the ages of 19 to 24 if you are taking 12 credits in at least 5 calendar months of the year (one major semester), which can easily provide over $3000 to your parents from the federal government. The federal government also gives many students $2775 free money per semester for the Pell grant, and many students get the lottery scholarship, Florida BrightFutures, which is $924 per semester. The Daytona State Foundation provides scholarships of $800 per semester to many other students who apply, which are provided by local business magnates. Tuition and books typically cost under $2000 per semester, excluding ignorant students who use the bldg. 200 bookstore instead of ordering online from websites such as Amazon, Half, AbeBooks, and Bookbyte. The college also provides many work-study positions to students at $7.25 or $14.50 an hour which are often undeserved, because no solvent business would provide such jobs. Additionally, the college gets tens of millions of dollars from …
I have just been really slow posting, but I took this nice video at the welcome back two weeks ago. Instead of hosting it on my own server, I’ve decided to put it on YouTube because it’s easier and more people going there. Since posting it on YT 6 days ago, it’s received 2 views… that’s really awful, so please help to increase that and leave me some comments.
As for the DSC in Motion article, check it out on page 5. I wrote “DSC leads e-text initiative” in the Feb. 2011 issue, which the college printed 2000 copies of. It can be found in every major building on every campus. The cover has interim President Dr. Frank Lombardo with text “The search is on!”, because the college is looking for a new president to replace Dr. Kent Sharples. Frank wants to retire because he’s 74, but I think we should remind him that Pope Benedict XIV became pope at 78, so he has plenty of good years left. If he still wants to retire, I think the college should promote the next president from within.
This was a fun event organized by Nikki Sfraga, current president of Phi Theta Kappa, at Daytona State College on Monday, December 6, 2010. From 11 A.M. to 2 P.M. we had free food, music, dancing, and games in and around the clock tower at the Daytona Beach campus.
The free food included hot dogs, popcorn, cotton candy, nachos with cheese, hot chocolate, and bottled water. There was an inflatable basketball hoop and a dance contest. I enjoyed this a lot and hope we do this next year!
Below are 244 photos I took at the event. I installed a new gallery plugin which makes posting photos easier, so this is a different format from most of my posts and because of the large number of photos, I am not making the ten-megapixel high-resolution versions available to download.
You can just browse through the thumbnails and click one to enlarge, or click “View with PicLens” below for an interactive display that you can enlarge to full-screen or browse through with your keyboard’s arrow keys. Please make sure you have JavaScript and Adobe Flash enabled.
I’m introducing a new email forwarding service called Falconmail.me which allows you to share an email address that is 14 characters shorter than Daytona State College’s standard @falconmail.daytonastate.edu student email addresses.
How it works
My email is richard_thripp@falconmail.daytonastate.edu, but if I give out the email address richard_thripp@falconmail.me, email sent to the Falconmail.me address will be directly forwarded to the falconmail.daytonastate.edu by the host.thripp.com mailserver. Then, if you’ve set your Daytona State College email address to forward to your own account (i.e. Gmail or Hotmail), DSC will forward it to you, so the message will be forwarded twice.
I’ve tested this, and it works perfectly for me. I’ve set my server to just forward all email sent to Falconmail.me to falconmail.daytonastate.edu. The only danger is if the Daytona State IT department decides to block Falconmail.me, the forwarding will immediately cease to work. I encourage them not to do this but instead use their own spam filtering, and I may add spam filtering to Falconmail.me in the future. I am also willing to transfer the domain to the college if they will actually use it.
If you are a DSC student, you have an email in the format firstname_lastname@falconmail.daytonastate.edu, so you can immediately begin sharing firstname_lastname@falconmail.me with people to save them some typing. Falconmail.me, DaytonaState.org, and Thripp.com are hosted on a WiredTree Hybrid Dedicated server with over 99.9% uptime, so no emails should be lost.
I will be keeping no records whatsoever of any emails forwarded through Falconmail.me. I set up a domain-level forwarder in cPanel and I have no interest in collecting personal data. I just saw that the Falconmail.me domain was unregistered and I thought it would make a cool service.
.me is a new top-level domain introduced in 2007 for the country of Montenegro, but it is being marketed as a …
Previously, I was trying to sell DaytonaState.org, but now I’ve decided I’m changing my primary email address to thrippr@daytonastate.org. This means I will be keeping DaytonaState.org for the rest of my life, and it is no longer for sale.
Photos from the Daytona State College 2010 Talent Show at the college theater, bldg. 220, Thu., Oct. 7, 2010, 6-8 PM.
This was the 2nd Annual Daytona State Talent Show and Pageant, held this year at the college theater instead of the News-Journal Center. This year’s show was presented by Student Government instead of Student Success. Read the 2010 Talent Show program here (PDF). Four performers returned from the 2009 Talent Show: Lillian Kinch, Jerred Mason, Farah Shaikh, and LaNae Wright.
Licensing: You can use these photos for any editorial purposes.
Brittany taking photos for DSC in Motion. On the left is Farhana “Farah” Shaikh, who performed a dance later but is uncredited in the program. 6:10 PM.
Photos from the show at the News-Journal Center, Fri., Oct. 2, 8-10 PM. I was act one. I played The Entertainer on the piano with a slideshow of my photography. I got a big applause and I didn’t clam up at all, so I was lucky. It was my first time on stage in over a year and this was my largest audience. After my act I took lots of photos below. My Dad also took videos from the audience, including my performance, later in the post. Read my post yesterday.
Press info: You can use these photos for editorial purposes such as newspapers, newsletters, and websites. None of the people in pictures signed release forms so don’t use any of these images commercially. Click “high-res” to the right of each thumbnail to download the 10 MP version. They’re pretty grainy… I was using ISO1600 a lot on my Canon Rebel XTi. But they should look alright up to 8×10. Please credit me with the line “Photos by Richard X. Thripp.”
Jerred T. Mason reciting an inspirational poem “This is How I Am.” He was act 2 and I was act 1 but I have no photos of my act because I couldn’t take photos while playing the piano. We were both running for Mr. Daytona State. Congratulations to Jerred for winning the Mr. Daytona State title! I got a special consideration certificate. 8:16 PM.
I just played piano at the Daytona State College Talent Show at the News-Journal Center, 221 N. Beach St., Daytona Beach, FL 32114. The show was 8-10pm Fri. Oct. 2 (tonight) and it’s 10:45 now.
We had a full house… there were probably 800 people in the audience. It was great and I actually performed better than in the rehearsal. I was the opening act at 8pm, playing The Entertainer by Scott Joplin on the baby grand piano while a slideshow of 58 of my photos played including all 30 in my portfolio. The Rebel got a laugh from the audience.
I was also running for Mr. Daytona State against Jerred T. Mason, Zach Smith, and Tad Jennings. Jerred won with his monologue on overcoming obstacles in life and reaching your dreams, which is a lot of what I wrote last year in personal development. Michelle Underwood and Shawana Brown were running for Ms. Daytona State, and Michelle won with her improvised comedy act.
The show as very good. It was much better than the rehearsal Mon. and Thu. I told dozens of people about it at Daytona State College all this week and it seemed no one knew about it. I was only expecting a couple hundred people but Dad estimated there were 800-1000 students in the audience.
I took about 300 photos with my DSLR and my Dad filmed my performance. I’ll cull and edit everything by Sunday and post it then. It’s almost 11pm and I need some sleep.
Have a nice weekend everyone! Please leave your comments about the show on this blog post.
Remember last week’s voting event for the new Daytona State College logo? The winner has been announced as the logo with the college seal, but without shadowing. Out of 2718 votes, 1500 students and faculty chose this option:
If you’ve forgotten, these were all the options. The winner is third down:
I wanted the bottom one, with the shadowing, to win. It didn’t look good on the voting page (all blocky because of the way they scaled it). That’s why it lost. The one you all picked would’ve been my second choice, though.
I saw this on the Daytona State College home page when I went there today; an event called Pick Our Logo:
“DAYTONA BEACH, FL (Aug. 25, 2008) – Pick Our Logo is a unique opportunity for Daytona State College students, faculty, staff and the community to have a voice in our new logo.”
The college is allowing students to vote their favorite from one of four prototypes for the new DSC logo.
Click the image above to see a bigger version, or go here on the college’s website to see them all.
The immediate problem on the college’s website is that the images are about 1000 pixels wide, but they’re set to be 500 pixels wide in the HTML source code. Many browsers, including Internet Explorer 7 which I’m using now at the college computer lab, use “nearest neighbor” interpolation to scale images down. It looks nothing short of awful.
That’s exactly what logo 4 looks like on my screen. See all the jagged edges? It shouldn’t look like that. How are students supposed to make an informed vote when they’re seeing bastardized versions of the logos?
I know logo #4 is the best and most appealing choice, so I voted for it. It won’t win though because it looks the worse when scaled with the nearest neighbor algorithm. Hopefully some of the students use the newer Mozilla Firefox 3, which has upgraded to bicubic resampling.
Another problem is that the logos say “Option 1,” “Option 1,” “Option 4,” and “Option 4,” when it should be 1, 2, 3, 4. Everyone makes mistakes, but this is plain sloppy.
Either way, I’m glad that the college is going to its students for this decision. Vote here now; the opportunity ends in 27 hours …
