Jacob’s Blog

A couple of weeks ago, I had an interview on campus with a recruiter for HP. The interview went ok I guess, and I was encouraged to apply for positions on their website. Just a couple of days ago, I received an email from “HP Human Resources” which started off:

Thank you for participating in the interviews we recently conducted on campus. Our recruiter was very impressed with your knowledge and abilities and we are actively reviewing your skills and interests against openings within HP.

My question is, how form letter-ish is this? Is this a generic email that they send to everyone they interview? Or does the recruiter actually have to be impressed for this form letter email to be sent?

Brigham Young University’s Internet filters continue to block the popular video sharing website, YouTube. BYU blocks the site completely “because it allows inappropriate sexual media throughout its URLs,” according to an article in the student newspaper. I appreciate that BYU wants to block inappropriate content, but YouTube contains so many videos that it is unreasonable to block all of YouTube content because there might be a few bad videos. Likewise you could argue, that BYU should block the whole Internet because there are a few bad sites.

By blocking YouTube, BYU is prohibiting students from accessing great video content. For example, recently The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the sponsoring organization for BYU, has published public affairs videos on YouTube that show Church Leader Elder Ballard explaining church beliefs. Students trying to access this content from BYU campus Internet are blocked from the site.

Other educational materials are also on YouTube. Recently, UC Berkeley started posting full lecture videos online. So far, they’ve posted over 300 hours of video taped lectures online for free access to the public. These lectures could help BYU students supplement their own studies, except that BYU blocks the UC Berkeley’s YouTube site.

BYU’s efforts to block video content come in addition to Google’s own safe-search program anyway, which limits access to inappropriate “adult” material. Why does BYU feel they need to be extra restrictive about YouTube? When does blocking bad content at the consequence of blocking good content go too far?

I’m excited to share that Google Maps has expanded its street views to include Portland, Oregon. Google announced the addition recently on its LatLong blog. Portland is such an interesting city, I’m excited that people can explore all the many many miles of street view photos available. You can see the Portland LDS Institute Building, where I took classes last fall, or the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.

Please have lots of fun exploring Portland, Oregon.

I got a friend request on Facebook today from someone I haven’t really talked to since the 4th grade. All I could say is “Woah.” I guess it just surprised me that someone remembered after all those years.