Category: Technology

Bacn

My ten-year-old daughter loves visiting the NC State campus. Her favorite spot is Clark Dining Hall. Why, you ask? Two words: Unlimited bacon.

But this Bacn (yes, without the letter “o”) ain’t the same as the tangy, salty, crunchy, chewy manna from heaven (I like bacon, too). Nope, this is the latest techno-hip-buzzword that may or may not make it to mainstream dialogue. But I found it fun nonetheless (cuz…gee…it’s bacon!)

Bacn (first cousin to Spam) is, according to the folks at Bacn2, “email you want, but not right now.” Geeks are posting online their favorite strategies to deal with Bacn, such as creating an  email folder with a label like “Later” or “When I Have Time.”

Want to learn more? Just do a search on “bacn” with “email” in your search window and you will be surprised and likely amused with the results.

I’m laughing now, but will be watching to see if this term truly becomes part of our lexicon. (And by the way, Sausage is next!)

Blogging and Da Chen

Author Da Chen was the speaker at Convocation this past Monday night, and was by all accounts a huge success. He also met  with First Year College students, which was fitting since Chen’s “Colors of the Mountain” was this year’s FYC Summer Reading Assignment.

What I find interesting are all the blog posts by students in response to Chen’s visit on campus. Most (if not all) appear to be on students’ personal blogs and not related to class assignments. I haven’t carefully studied campus culture and attitudes via blog postings, but it was certainly noticable that Da Chen postings dominated the WolfBlog’s “recent posts” list most every day this week. It is great to see students capturing their thoughts in a way that lets the rest of us peek in.

ncstate.edu

After reading this article in the Chronicle about branding and domain names, I decided to see what happened when I went to http://ncstate.edu/ and yep, sure enough, it goes to our university home page. And not just a redirect to http://www.ncsu.edu/ but rather it maintaints “ncstate.edu” in the address field. I can remember in the early or mid-1990’s when there was a specific effort on our campus to move away from “NCSU” and use “NC State” instead. It is good to see we already own the “ncstate.edu” domain. There is a group on campus working on branding and marketing for the campus. I wonder if this was a result of that group’s current work, or just some diligent individual who thought of this on their own awhile back.