CMU bookmarks

Since college started a few weeks ago, my bookmarks bar has drastically changed. The link to the online studies at the University of Tromsø is of course removed, and many others with it; instead, I now have links to different online services provided by Carnegie Mellon, which are frequently visited.

Blackboard is the most important one. On Blackboard, I find all my homework, all the course documents, syllabuses and calendars (except the physics homework, which inconveniently enough have it’s own web page). Though Blackboard isn’t especially intuitively navigated, it does a decent job, and you can probably make it do anything within the area of administrative communication. I visit Blackboard several times a day.

My CMU is a web portal that tries to gather information from as many different services as possible on one place. I don’t use My CMU much, though, as I either find the services boring, useless or inefficient; it shows my web mail, but I get my e-mail to my e-mail client; It has a CMU news feed, but I get the most important news as e-mail; the blackboard links are less efficient than going directly to blackboard, I already have the Pittsburgh weather forecast on my dashboard and I find the emergency alert service to be intrusive enough already before I sign up for further paranoia. The primary use I have of My CMU, is the meal plan overview (how many meals I have left and such).

ScheduleMan is a powerful tool when creating the schedule; however, it also serves as a handy reminder of when I should attend classes in which classroom. My SceduleMan –page is always up on my iPod, in case I want to reassure myself that I still have an hour before class.

One of the most amusing services is the Henderson Laundry page; it shows how many washers and dryers that are available at any given moment, or how far they have come in their cycle. It also sends you an email whenever your laundry is finished.

The Bandwidth Monitor is helpful in keeping track your bandwidth usage; we have a maximum bandwidth limit of 10 GB for every five days, and 3 GB every day. Because of the bandwidth monitor, I know that I’ve never even been close to 100 MB, despite a few Skype calls. Local traffic isn’t measured, so the hours of listening to music shared on the CMU network aren’t reflected.

See more:
My schedule: ScheduleMan
Henderson Laundry: eSuds