Sure, Bottles (the wine/liquor store next to Eastside Marketplace) is close enough to walk – on a nice day, which we’ve probably seen the last of until March (at least). And trying to carry six bottles of wine for your roommate’s 21st birthday party is just a bad idea for everyone involved. Bottles has the solution, though: they have a delivery service that’s completely free if you’re in the Providence area. All you have to do is call and place your order by noon for same-day delivery. They even do engraving! Keepin’ it classy has never been so easy!

Image via.

This is no ordinary water fountain.

If you like carrying around a water bottle, then you probably like hydration stations, or other similar devices that allow you to fill up your bottle without getting your hand wet.

Maybe you thought they were restricted to new and renovated buildings on campus, but some oldies — like the Rock — have them too. See that little button in the upper-right corner of the water fountain? Indeed, that’s an old-school hydration station. There’s no motion sensor or anything fancy like that, but it does the job well.

Needed: a water bottle to fill.

As of my last observation, the ones on the third and fourth floors work. Sadly, the basement one does not. File a Facilities service request?

Sriracha shots, anyone?

A wise friend once told me that hunger is the best sauce. While I can’t disagree, as a college student I’ve discovered that it’s particularly helpful to keep some other sauces handy to spice up our Cup Of Noodles dorm room delicacies. The proper application of sauces is the easiest way to keep our taste buds guessing without breaking the bank, and they also usually last FOREVER (my ketchup expires in 2014, huh?). Whether they’re stashed in a pantry, kitchen, sock drawer, or kept in your backpack always ready for action, check out BlogDH’s own list of the top ten sauces to keep stocked in your dorm room after the jump. [Read more →]

Should I barrel ahead to the Bistro or take my chances on Roots and Shoots? Should I save room for dessert? To POG or not to POG? These are important questions that credit-packing Brown students ponder every day. We try to manage the overwhelming Ratty experience by formulating a plan of attack; any experienced diner will have his/her route mapped before he/she is ushered with a “Hiiiiiiiii” into the rabbit hole. But despite our best efforts, these plans rarely go off without a hitch. There is always some unknown quantity that trips us up as we strive for that unattainable dream: the perfectly efficient Ratty experience.

Today at BlogDH, we are proud to bring you one step closer to the green light. Your days of searching and waiting in line for the one semi-functional lukewarm water dispenser are over. Under the Hi-C label on two of the Ratty’s drink fountains is a small lever that releases gloriously frigid water when pressed. The concept isn’t foreign, but even the most experienced Brown diners seem to ignore our fountains’ inconspicuous godsend. Apparently, some privy BDS employees are offended by its underuse, because they’ve been showing students the way of the tab more and more recently. One employee even told us that the water in there is even better-filtered than the tepid stuff of its dysfunctional counterpart. If the tab wasn’t a game changer already, he closed the case. Keep fighting the good fight, Brown diners.

As yet another school year slowly winds to a close, you most likely have your daily Blue Room routine down to a science. Look for an empty booth, preferably one with an outlet. Put your bag down. Take a lap to find friends. Check to see if your favorite Shanghai sushi roll is still left. Eye the bakery/coffee line and gauge how much time you’ll have to spend waiting on it. Make a decision about what you’ll eat, pay, and hope that you have enough points left so you don’t hold up the line of impatient and hungry people behind you.

Of course, some inevitable external condition is bound take you out of your usual Blue Room rhythm. The 4 p.m. meal credit rush is definitely a game-changer and a royal pain in the ass. There’s only Sabra Red Pepper Hummus left. There are no more ciabatta rolls. The only fresh veggies on the  bottom refrigerated shelf are those monstrous (and weirdly phallic) whole English cucumbers. And where did all the Nime Chow go?! Equilibrium has been disturbed.

If you’re seeking consistency above all else in your Blue Room dining experience, look no further than the Blue Room Salad. No, I’m not talking about those tiny boxes of spinach or field greens that come with a measly side of balsamic vinaigrette. I’m talking customization and options at your fingertips. Tastes and flavors like you’d never believe. Dreamy greens. The only thing that stands in your way is the pesky glass partition of the sandwich line. No more ciabatta rolls? No problem.

[Read more →]

If you’re participating in the Housing Lottery (aka Shelter Games), you’ve got until Wednesday the 11th (numbers 1 through 460) or Tuesday the 17th (461 through 697) to map out your strategy. Which (at least for my freshman and sophomore groups of 11 and 8 people, respectively) meant contingency plans upon contingency plans upon contingency plans. Historically, it has proven a huge pain in the ass to navigate the huge amount of room info, past results, and other pertinent information from the Res Council website: there’s just so much.

Fortunately, some students created a tool to make the process at least 10,000 times easier (actual mathematical figure). Nathan Malkin ’13 and Sumner Warren ’13 have developed Cella over the past semester as a successor to their CS32 project Domus, a desktop app with similar functionality created with Miya Schneider ’13. This tool is incredibly versatile as well as informative. It uses a database of rooms and your preferences (only want to live on Main Campus? Want to live anywhere but Pembroke? Know what dorm you want to be in?) to provide you with tons of options for a group of a specified size, also taking into account your lottery number in comparison with past results in order to rank the probability of each room. It also provides links to floor plans and other info specific to each dorm (gender neutrality, apartment rate, etc.). If you want to play around with different breakdowns of a large group, create as many separate searches in separate tabs as you want. Check out their About page to see what else the tool can do, or better yet, go forth and experiment. The design is incredibly intuitive and easy to use.

May the odds be ever in your favor.

In response to our and others’ criticisms of Brown Menu last fall, the site’s owners have implemented a complete revamp. It now looks sleeker and, more importantly, lets you to sign up to receive text and/or email notifications when BuDS is serving your favorite items. Just register for the site and start favorite-ing menu options by clicking the mouse-over heart icon that appears next to each item. The site also now has a tight favicon.

With God as my witness, I will never again miss another Gnocchi alla Sorentina dinner. In this blogger’s eyes, BrownMenu.com has officially moved up from FlogDailyHerald to (Campus)Lifehacker status.

Unless you have an exciting date (and the Ratty doesn’t count), the best part of Valentine’s Day is when an a cappella group disrupts your class to serenade an unsuspecting fellow classmate. I’m not sure which scenario is more awkward: the crowded lecture hall where 100+ students witness your embarrassment or the intimate seminar where everyone has a great view of your face as it grows redder than a Solo cup.

Even professors excitedly await the spectacle. Last spring, my professor in a relatively small class remarked that she hoped someone would come to serenade a student. Luckily for her and the other amused students, the Ursa Minors walked in during the last few minutes of class to sing “Only You” to a girl sitting right in the middle of the room. She awkwardly slouched in her seat, nervously whispered to her friend, “Who sent that to me?” and, essentially, did not play it cool. At all.

That girl was me.

Now, one year older and wiser (not really, but I can pretend), I’m offering advice about how to act natural if the Ursas interrupt your class, call your name, and serenade you. And just a heads up, I heard the pirate a(“RRR”) capella group is doing valentines this year too, so be prepared. [Read more →]

Admit it — classroom matters.

You really want to take a class in the new Metcalf Auditorium, especially if you had a class in the old one, but you have no interest in CLPS. Or perhaps you have been trying to find an excuse to spend time in the Granoff Center. Or maybe you just really like Smitty B 106.

Whatever the case, you may have been frustrated that Banner will not let you search for classes by room. But it’s cool, we’ve got a solution for you!

All you have to do is check out this wonderful page on the Registrar’s website. It lists the classrooms for every course this semester. Then use the “find” feature on your web browser to find the classroom you’re looking for, and that will give you all the results. For example, searching for “Metcalf Chemical Laboratory AUD” — their name for Metcalf Auditorium — will show you that if CLPS just isn’t your thing, you can always take Bio 50 (Cell and Molecular Biology), Applied Math 65 (Essential Statistics), Soc 17 (The Family), or Soc 162 (Globalization and Social Conflict).

It’s a mystery why Banner doesn’t do this, but then again, Banner doesn’t do lots of things…

Were you planning on visiting a friend at another school during our irrationally fantastically long winter break?  If so, you may be able to bypass the mild inconvenience of accessing their school’s wireless network!

According to a submission in this morning’s depressingly sparse Morning Mail, Brown has joined a new service cleverly called eduroam (education roaming — ohhhhh), which allows students of participating universities to get internet access across a number of schools in the US and abroad.  For more information on the service, you can consult their website, which has a map of participating schools, or watch the terrible promotional cartoon above, which has a joke about the difficulty of nailing jelly to a tree (?) and is narrated by someone who appears to be (poorly) imitating Mark Blyth.

If RISD decides to opt in to this service, it would solve the only problem with studying at the RISD Library — the terrible service provided by the dreaded “RISD-Guest” network.