Annie May Swift Hall is way more old school than Annenberg.

Get moving, Penn–you’re losing to Northwestern.

I’ve griped about Penn’s long-awaited ditching of the school’s undergraduate e-mail systems, and I’m going to again. Why? Because Northwestern is moving past us.

Smack dab in the middle of the upper Mid-West, Northwestern isn’t exactly the most tech-savvy school in the world. I spent a summer there and while they have some computer labs and high-tech equipment, Wharton’s plasmas in Huntsman would make most NU kids drool.

We do share one thing in common: both schools use e-mail systems called Webmail. And, as a result, both schools have been negotiating with outside providers to outsource e-mail provision. The DP first broke the story about the potential switch on the editorial page way back in April, and the University has been “in negotiations” ever since. All we know is that since that story, three possible providers–Google, Microsoft and Yahoo–have been whittled down to just Google and Microsoft.

Now that’s…um…quite a lot of…um…progress for 11 months.

Northwestern, on the other hand, decided this week to take the plunge: All Northwestern students and faculty will have school e-mail accounts through Google’s Gmail service by June. Its colors may be purple and white, but at NU can do some things right.

Back in April, when the DP learned of the possible switch, the newspaper called it a bold move. Well, it’s getting less bold by the day (because boldness implies actual implementation), and that boldness took a big hit when Northwestern passed us. We could have set an example for other universities to follow, but pretty soon we’ll be playing catch up. (No doubt this guy is happy NU is ahead of the game).

Penn, it’s time to move forward. No more procrastinating. Make a decision–I’d like this great University to have some better e-mail systems before my kids apply here.

PS. We’re all rooting for Gmail over Microsoft.

May she rest in peace.

Journalism in Philadelphia (present company excluded) is going down hill faster than the Street mayoral dynasty.

Alas, the days of quality journalism at the Inquirer have long since passed. And while my love for the Bulletin lives on, the paper sadly does not. Real news is pretty much a foreign concept to NBC10, and the Daily News … well, I don’t even need a link.

But the most recent sad news isn’t in print or on television: It’s online.

While just about anything the Inquirer has done on the Internet has been horrible, there has been one major exception: Dan Rubin’s blog, Blinq.

(Inga Saffron’s Changing Skyline is unquestionably fantastic, but it’s not updated too often and or even hosted on Philly.com.)

For nearly two years, Rubin covered everything from the Phillies’ Sal Fasano to Super Bowl ads.

More important (and relevant to you Spinstas), Rubin was no stranger to Penn or the DP. He was all over Box in a Box, getting one of the first interviews with Wharton soph Melissa Lamb. And not like Stephen Morse needs more coverage (thanks Brosbe — see below), but Blinq also covered Morse’s explosive videos last semester.

Dan’s blog had style, humor and a Web site that, despite living under the Philly.com moniker, didn’t look like something from 1997. By the end, Blinq was getting nearly a quarter million hits each month.

Everything seemed to going smoothly until last week, tragedystruck:

Tie a toe-tag on Blinq. I’m getting ready to start another assignment here at the Inquirer. What I’m moving on to is the metro desk, taking a crack at being a local columnist. Talk about your old media.

Commenters chimed in quickly, with one adding,

the inquirer needs to clone you, so you can do both.

Rubin built a community that will be sorely missed in the Philly blogosphere. I’m sure he’ll be a great columnist, but he was a true Philly blog pioneer. Until Blinq returns (or the Inky comes with something better … which may happen in the next decade), I guess Philebrity will just have to do. Hats off to you Dan.

A pedestrian bridge carries hikers across a Creek in Wissahickon Park in Northwest Philadelphia. Yes, it really is in Philadelphia. (Evan Goldin/DP)

Face it. If you’re a Penn student, chances are you don’t get out much.

Wissahickon Park lies almost directly north of Penn’s campus.

But that shouldn’t be the case; Philadelphia has an incredible amount to offer. So in the second installment of my very occasional series, I’m highlighting local attraction you must visit before you graduate.

Last time: Fairmount Waterworks. This time, we’re moving northwest up the Schuylkill River, to Wissahickson Park.

Beautiful, expansive Wissahickon Park lies (very generally) between Roxborough/Manayunk and North Philadelphia (East Falls, to be exact. It’s bucolic, it’s full of nature–pretty much the opposite of everything you’ve come to expect from Philadelphia.

Acquired by the Fairmount Park Commission in 1868, the park is open year round to hikers, bikers and even equestrians. Even in the winter, the park has more than 50 miles of trails. And don’t be scared off by the winter. It really is a great time to visit the park.

Shannon Jensen and her dog, Jackson, play fetch on top of the Wissahickon River. Who said you can’t walk on water? (Evan Goldin/DP)

During my trip this weekend, my friend and I climbed over ice patches, spotted waterfalls frozen in mid-stream and saw entire sections of the Wissahickon River frozen over. I strongly recommend not doing this, but daredevils can try walking out on the river (the ice was pretty thick, at least enough so to support my increasingly rotund figure). True daredevils can even try ice skating on the river–we spotted one ice skater on our trip–at least until the police kick you off.

For a cold-wearing Californian like me, this was the true winter experience I’d always hoped for. After snowball fights and walking on a frozen river, only a snow day is left on my winter to-do list.

It’s a beautiful time of year to visit the park (don’t forget your camera!), but if you’re a cold wimp like me, spring is just around the corner. Come spring, jogging and biking get a whole lot easier, and the park’s rivers and waterfalls will be at full capacity.

So get off your … well … you know, and explore Wissahickon! You won’t believe that’s even a part of Philadelphia. And if you have any suggestions of future locations to explore, leave a comment. I’ll see you out on the trails.

To get there: Follow Google Maps directions to here. Try to avoid I-76. Follow Kitchens Lane to the end, park and hop on the trail across the street. For all those like me without cars, PhillyCarShare is a good option.

Time: Probably no more than 15 minutes if traffic isn’t horrible.

Update (1:15 p.m., 1/14):
Public Transit: The R6 regional rail line (catch it at 30th St.) goes right to the doorstep of the park. Get off at Wissahickon Station, and follow the path next to the river–parallel to Lincoln Drive. After about a mile, the path and the river swing left, away from Lincoln Drive. Follow Forbidden Drive, and your set. Be careful on weekends though, as the R6 only runs once an hour.

I blabbed on (probably for far longer than you wanted to read) about the birth and decline of Penn’s undergraduate e-mail. But now for some good news: the death.

To quickly recap, Penn’s e-mail has been plagued with problems recently. History professor Drew Faust told the DP:

“Yesterday [SAS e-mail] was extremely slow. You would type a character and it would take about five seconds to come up on the screen.”

Whoops, she said that in 1994. Well, it sounds like last semester, except these days, users can’t even log on. At the same time, free services have quickly gained users and rapidly improved features. Google’s Gmail service offers more than two gigabytes of storage space and an integrated online chat system. The new version of Microsoft Hotmail has a reading pane, allowing you to scroll through and read messages without opening any new web pages. SAS Webmail has a clunky interface that does not integrate searching or viewing into a single page and offers only 60 MB of storage (Engineers have a more reasonable 250).

But finally, nearly a year ago, Penn officials promised the ultimate solution. It’s bold, innovative and long ovedue: Abandon Penn’s e-mail system and outsource the service to a third party.

Unfortunately, bad news was of course soon to follow. Officials have continually set deadlines to decide on a provider, and just as continually failed to meet their own deadlines. IT officials recently announced they had put off choosing between Microsoft and Gmail again.

Ugh. How long does it take to decide between better and much better? (respectively, of course)

So this week, I gave up the wait. I went ahead and began forwarding my upenn.edu e-mail to Gmail, just as many, many other students, staff and faculty have done. One such switcher, College senior Ruth Stein, gave up on SAS e-mail after repeated crashes during finals last semester.

“I just couldn’t communicate with my professors,” she said. Ironically, “Gmail didn’t solve that, because they still couldn’t receive my emails.”

The advantages of ditching Penn e-mail are endless. Goodbye “inbox is full” messages, hello “labels.” Most important, I don’t feel like I’m back in the late 1990s when I use Gmail.

“The bigger inbox is definitely an advantage because I don’t have to worry about deleting. The search engine is obviously better because it’s Google,” Stein added.

When students are giving up on the school’s own e-mail iN large numbers (and I promise, it’s large numbers–my Gchat buddy list is exploding with Penn kids), it’s time to act. Anything’s better than the crash-prone SAS/SEAS Mail. And either system would be a major upgrade for Whartonites and Nursing students.

It’s for this school to come to a decision. Outsourcing e-mail was a bold move, but not without follow-through. And they better hurry up, before everyone starts forwarding and there are no users left to complain. We won’t hold out forever.

P.S. While you’re at it Penn, could you get rid of the damn “u”?

The last time I’ll ever receive this message, thanks to Gmail.

For more than three and a half years, I’ve struggled with the archaic system that is School of Arts and Sciences e-mail. Clearing out my inbox to meet the size quota is a monthly ritual, especially with the six-megabyte press releases I used to receive.

Slowly, over the past 15 years, our once-high tech e-mail system has become obsolete and outdated — and that’s terribly sad considering our school’s storied history with technology but not surprising considerine our tumultuous history with e-mail.

Arguably, Penn invented the modern computer. Barely 60 years ago, Engineers in the Moore building constructed ENIAC, which reduced some calculations from 12 hours to 30 minutes.

Thirty years later, as e-mail was beginning to explode around the world (actually, mostly in the United States at that point) the University took another step forward. In the early ’90s, Wharton and Engineering students were given upenn.edu e-mail addresses. Even after the establishment of PennNet, which provided e-mail addresses, the idea of e-mail was so new that all DP stories about e-mail at the time included a description of “electronic mail”:

Electronic mail is an electronic communications network which allows its account holders to write to other holders anywhere in the world and read up on current news and other information.

In the fall of 1991, then-Vice Dean for Computing Ben Goldstein told the DP that “every student will be issued an e-mail account by the end of 1992.” It was just the first of many broken promises for Penn’s IT officials.

Fast forward a year and not a single College student had been given a Penn e-mail address. Always the second fiddle to Wharton (and much more so in those days), College students lacked what would soon become an essential (and required) component of college life. And so begins the rocky history.

When e-mail was finally offered to about one-third of College students (first-come, first serve) in 1993, the same year Internet use grew by 341,000 percent, hundreds of students waited in line for hours to sign up. But before long, problems plagued the system. Outages and extreme delays occured often, and even after an upgrade in 1994, the improvement “created as many troubles as it sought to eliminate.” Troubles continued in the mid-1990s, and Wharton and other mail servers weren’t without their flaws either.

Improvements finally took hold in the late ’90s, but with the improvements and more dependable service came a lack of innovation. At the school that practically invented the modern computer, the e-mail system remains mostly unchanged since the early part of this decade. The system, far from improving, began to show its age in the last two years, with constant crashes and outages. And saddest of all, free e-mail services eclipsed what Penn could provide (at hundreds of thousands of dollars per year) to its community.

Luckily, drastic changes may finally be in store to again put Penn (and all of its undergraduate schools) at the forefront of technology.

But more on that tomorrow.

Even in its final days, the Philadelphia Bulletin still tried not to hang its head.

By the early 1980s, circulation was falling rapidly (sound familiar?). But for a while, it seemed like the Gray Old Lady of Market Street might just make it.

That fall the newspaper was still selling 404,481 copies on the average weekday, a number today’s Philadelphia Inquirer would scream for joy at. And the Bulletin had history on its side, having published continually for 134 years. More important, the newspaper had just secured $5 million in employee contract concessions.

The front page of the Evening Bulletin in 1918, during World War I. The paper would continue to publish until 1982. (cstone.net/~rgamble/users/Newspaper.gif)

So writers and editors continued, optimistically, to pump out editions–every afternoon. See, the Bulletin wasn’t just an essential part of Philadelphia’s daily life, it was one of the great, if not the greatest, evening dailies in the country.

A Philadelphia Magazine article in 1967 “described the Bulletin as ‘a paper that’s willing to spend money to cover news anywhere in the world.’ By contrast, it noted that Walter Annenberg’s Inquirer rarely sent staffers on national or international assignments.”

However, the paper simply couldn’t stave off the rising tide of television news. Evening newspapers were losing readers quickly to television–and they were going extinct even faster.

So 25 years ago yesterday, the Bulletin put out its last issue, and our great city lost a giant (1,743 of them to be exact). The DP also became the largest newspaper based in West Philadelphia.

Other cities lost their dailies as well: There were still 11 evening dailies in cities of 1 million or more in 1980, by 2000 there was one. But the Bulletin, especially in its hayday, was a special paper. It was a newspaper not just for the average Philadelphian, but by the average Philadelphian, as former editor and later columnist Peter Binzen described years later in an essay:

The staffs of metropolitan dailies included many reporters who went to work right out of high school. their blue-collar backgrounds matched those of the subscribers and, as a result, there was an affinity between reporters and readers. Whereas many of today’s college-educated journalists grew up in relative affluence somewhere else and are strangers in the cities they work.

It may seem hard to believe for a paper that folded so early, but the Bulletin was–for decades–Philadelphia’s favorite paper and the largest afternoon daily in the nation. In 1947, the Bulletin reached a circulation of 773,924, its peak readership. In comparison, the Philadelphia Inquirer (now Philly’s largest daily) has a circulation of less than 400,000. But in the middle of the century, when Philadelphia’s star shone brightest, the Bulletin was the city’s darling and any journalist’s heaven.

“If two chairs matched, it was an accident. Beside most desks were spittons for tobacco-chewing reporters. Nearly everybody smoked and stamped out their butts on the floor,” wrote Robert Williams, who started with the newspaper as a receptionist in 1929 and finished as its amusements editor.

The Bulletin, unlike many papers today just out to make a buck, cared about Philadelphia, and it showed in its coverage. The newspaper rarely overreached, often choosing to be prude rather than sensationalistic. The newspaper was so intense in its devotion that it refused to cover the Kinsey Report and often airbrushed scantily-clad cartoon characters.

But its actions weren’t out of a desire for censorship, it was because the Bulletin loved its city. It slowly began to take on a more corporate, clean culture, as the days of everyman journalism began to fade. Reporter and columnist Adrian Lee wrote later,

What fascinated me was the rising tide of noise, the increasing tempo of the typewriters, the sense of urgency that permeated the room. Over the years, typewriters would give way to computers, and the racket would give way to a genteel quietude. Raising your voice in a latter-day newsroom is like shouting in church.

And, as Philadelphia’s fortunes fell and its readers began to flee to the suburbs, so too did the Bulletin’s future begin to descend into bankruptcy. In its last years, it competed furiously with the Inquirer, driving the Inky to win a decade’s worth of Pulitzer prizes. But with the Bulletin only a memory, that spirit has died, and Inquirer reporters are too busy worrying about layoffs to even think about the kind of investigative reporting that made our cities’ newspapers great.

With the Bulletin and its scrappy sense of urgency gone, Philadelphia has been left with two lazy, sterile news sources. And 25 years later, this city is still mourning its Evening Bulletin.

It’s hard to have a bad trip to California. Mild weather, cable cars, great views at every turn–my homeland, Northern California, has got it all.

For a few Yalies, though, winter break in San Francisco didn’t prove to be such an enjoyable experience.

The Baker’s Dozen, an all-male a capella group from Yale, took an ill-fated West Coast tour in over winter break. While in San Francisco, the group of renowned singers decided to make a New Years Eve stop at a house in the Richmond district.

Bad move.

One of the Baker’s Dozen after the incident. (Courtesy of Ivy Gate)

See, California is more than just another state 3,000 miles away from lovely
New Haven. You see, on the West Coast, people don’t do a capella–which caused a lot of confusion when I got to Penn.

Freshman year, when I looked around and saw the masses of people heading off to a capella tryouts, I was miffed. Even more baffling, Penn students–a vast number of them–even attend a capella shows. Sure, people sing in California. But, as Josh Pollick wrote last year, a capella “takes an art form and makes it worse.” And in California, that just isn’t cool.

And that’s fine. I do plenty of things that aren’t cool. I play golf (badly), and I taught myself how to make a Web site (that, however, does probably make you cool in California).

However, I don’t do those things when I’m out–and Californians certainly don’t bust into a capella performances at parties, because if they did, they’d “either get their asses kicked or everyone would be so drunk they’d think it was hilarious,” explained Bay Area native Durell Williams, who now studies at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Unfortunately, Williams didn’t get the chance to explain this to the
Baker’s Dozen before New Years.

The boys, after arriving at the Richmond party, soon began to unleash a
(high-pitched, I’m sure) rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” And,
in return, some members of the crowd began to unleash a bevy of
insults. Soon after, when the Baker’s Dozen left, the were jumped by a
group of guys at least “20 deep,” badly injuring the Bakers and sending
one member back to New York for surgery.

Amazingly, the Yale Daily News reported,

Dan Toubolets ’08, the Baker’s
Dozen winter tour manager, said the group will continue its tour of
California and is scheduled to return to New Haven on Jan. 14.

Can’t imagine the next concert had the usual gusto.

Back to the point though. This whole frackus didn’t start because of href="http://www.towleroad.com/2007/01/yale_singing_gr.html"
target="_blank">homophobia (it’s San Francisco,
after
all) or href="http://seaspook.blogspot.com/2007/01/so-liberals-arent-anti-american.html"
target="_blank">anti-Americanism (though I can’t
imagine Nancy Pelosi’s happy
about people singing the national anthem getting beat up in her
hometown). It started because the Baker’s Dozen crossed the line of
acceptable party etiquette. A bunch of guys singing, sans instruments,
at a party in California will never end well.

Californians don’t hate singing or art; Williams even noted that enjoys
the “Folgers a capella song.” He just wouldn’t sing it in public.

Are there two things more synonymous with college than politics and drinking?

Vice President Dick Cheney, left, and former House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Ill., right, applaud during President Bush’s State of the Union last year. (Charles Dharapak/AP)

Politics, well, maybe. But drinking–certainly not.

Tonight, it’s your chance to unify those two passions. Our president (at least for the next 727 days, not that i’m counting), will be addressing the nation and a newly Democratic (big “d”) Congress tonight in his annual State of the Union address.

President Bush has quite the penchant for certain phrases–think “war on terrahhh” or “break our resolve”–so much so that he has been honored with his very own State of the Union drinking game. The site provides a list of actions/phrases to cue the toasting of the commander in chief.

One such game, found at drinkinggame.us, is very tasteful (read: They make fun of the clowns on both sides of the aisle). For example, if Bush admits to making a mistake, you must “pinch yourself, take shot to ease the confusion and disbelief.” If his speech mentions John Kerry, players should:

Pour yourself a shot and drink it, unless, because of your lack of education, you “might get stuck in [the bottle].”

So, politicos and apathetics, unite with your common causes, pour a few drinks and enjoy an American tradition. And if you happen to think of a way to solve the Iraq quagmire, write it down, because chances are you won’t remember it in the morning.

UPDATE (Wed., 8 p.m.): Penn alum is behind drinking game!

A reader e-mailed me to inform me that one of the creators of The State of the Union Drinking Game 2007 is a Penn law alum. The creator, Marc Melzer, has (proudly, mind you) confirmed this. Melzer started the site with his senior year roommate at (gasp!) Princeton, Howard Deutsch.

Via e-mail, Melzer told me,

We have always gotten a lot of good feedback–usually a mix of amusement and shock as to how many drinks would be required if you played the game strictly. This year we only did a couple of media interviews, but in the past we’ve gotten a lot of widespread coverage–everything from The Chronicle of Higher Education to BBC4 Radio.

The site’s gotten quite a lot of fans, and nearly 500 people have joined his Facebook group. I should have known it took a [former] Penn student to be this creative. I can’t even imagine the kind of stuff he and Melissa Lamb could come up with.

Melzer also confirmed, thank goodness, that SotUADG will be back for 2008, Bush’s last State of the Union address.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs gestures during his keynote address about Apple’s iPhone at MacWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2007 (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma.)

Clad in his usual black turtleneck and blue jeans, Applevangelist Steve Jobs worked his usual magic last week.

Jobs, Apple’s CEO and media darling (not to mention fellow Palo Altan), has now moved on to the cell phone market, having conquered the music player industry. Speaking before thousands of Mac Maniacs at Macworld, the company’s annual product-release gala, Apple showed off its newest creation: the iPhone.

The futuristic, sleek device — an iPod, phone and computer all in one — offers everything from full mobile Internet to a new “visual voicemail.” And it transforms, with one giant leap, our expectations of what a single device can do.

The announcement also sent Research in Motion (Blackberry’s creator) and Palm executives curling into fetal positions under their desks as their stocks plummeted. Apple’s stock, meanwhile, has surged nearly 15 percent.

Why? Because this time, the country (and Wall Street) has faith that Apple can pull it off. Apple doesn’t just make computers anymore — it’s a full service consumer electronics machine. In recognition of the company’s evolution, Apple Computer, Inc. was rechristened Apple Inc. last week.

In 2001, Apple joined the music-player scene, a market in which it had zero experience. Critics pounded the company, claiming no one but a few Mac fanatics would dish out $499 for portable device (that’s how much the original, clunky 5 gigabyte iPod cost). Apple won that battle — the company will soon to sell its 100 millionth iPod. Apple did it with iPods, and it will do it with the iPhone. At such a Mac-friendly campus like Penn, students are already clamoring for the phones–and not just Mac-o-philes.

“This is so cool that I need to get one, right now!” MBA graduate student Murat Korkmaz said.

Apple has learned its lesson from the days of the Newton, a 1994 PDA that failed because consumers weren’t ready for such a device. But with the winning formula Apple developed with the iPod — create a device that leapfrogs every other product out there — the iPhone is poised for domination. Apple has become an expert on entering a new market with a mix of simplicity, sex appeal (see video below) and great marketing.

Any company that can inspire this kind of sex appeal, joke or not, to its products, knows what it’s doing.

Only Jobs and Co. really know what’s next for Apple Computers, Inc. (televisions that answer the front door, toilets that make phone calls?), but one thing’s for sure: the iPhone will be a hit, expensive or not. I’m counting the days before I see people on Locust Walk watching movies and Googling things on a device the size of an, err, iPod.

Around the Ivies* is a daily roundup of news from Ivy League and other top tier schools.

• [ Harvard Crimson ]
  The Crimson sweats Pres. Clinton, hard
• [ Yale Daily News ]
  Yale devotes entire story to introducing its own columnists
• [ Stanford Daily ]
  School-sponsored partying in Palo Alto
• [ Duke Chronicle ]
  Duke gives media the boot