I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm

Here at Harvard, we love to complain about our barren dating-scene. The hopeless plight of the single, we hear again and again, is to suffer mortifying awkwardness or to remain forever alone. We are all familiar with the “is-this-a-date?” dinner at Border Café, and we can at least sympathize with those desperate folks in FM, caught mid-hookup with someone they probably did not know and wish they did not remember.

But without heat in many dorms until just days ago, there was to be a new glimmer of hope on the dating horizon. With breath freezing on my monitor and my once-bald arms sprouting like over-watered Chia-pets, I wondered how many potential romantics, at that very moment, might have inched a little bit closer together in search of warmth. I wondered how many more might have put down their kinetics problem sets altogether and made some, ahem, kinetics of their own.

I may be hopelessly optimistic in this thinking. But at the same time, frigid temperatures may have provided just the push needed to get would-be couples past their gripping fear of contact. Harvard singles have a tough lot, and for their sake, I would gladly suffer a few more days of cold.

—BLAKE JENNELLE

Teaching Telnet to the Non-Believers

Webmail is slowly taking over Harvard’s campus, transforming “checking e-mail” into a tedious ordeal. Instead of learning the quick, bland and easy telnet, first-years got their e-mail address over the summer and, alas, have started using webmail right away, not knowing the joys of SecureCRT or Nifty Telnet.

And webmail also brings with it the tragic extinction of so many of telnet’s tricks, from stalking people with the finger command, the fortune and weather options as well as the ubiquitous “ph.” Also facing nearly certain death is the antiquated—but amusing—telnet “talk,” which, despite instant messaging, has survived intact to annoy anyone who is logged in for too long and makes it easy to send obnoxious banners to those folks worth disturbing. Webmail, meanwhile, leaves no user trail—which might be safer, but is surely a lot less fun.

Harvard’s computer services have plotted a telnet-killing conspiracy, first stealing away access on any non-Harvard computer, then cutting e-mail quotas and now brainwashing first years to use a tedious and slow system that runs off an already overburdened Harvard server. Telnet may yet be saved—but only if those who have come to know and love the little unix system preach its values to non-believers and would-be stalkers.

—NICOLE B. USHER