Final: New Campus Recreation Center to open 2011

Due to the extreme overcrowding in the Stony Brook SAC Wellness Center and the sports complex, the Department of Campus Recreation has been working on plans to build a new recreation center on the campus. President Shirley Strum Kenny chose this project out of several others that she had to pick from. The 85,000 square foot facility will cost $37.5 million, of which Stony Brook raised $19.5 million, and Senator Kenneth LaValle helped get the last $18 million. The Campus recreation center should be open for the incoming 2011 class.

This new facility will be five times bigger than the existing open recreation facilities that are available to students. Many students leave because they see that the fitness centers are overcrowded. Andrea Reyes, a SAC Wellness Center employee, says that she sees people all the time, “walk in, and walk out when they see it’s too crowded.” The new center will have a three court gym, available for basketball, volleyball, bad mitten, fencing, ping-pong, etc, along with 11,952 square feet of weights and fitness equipment on the 2nd floor, and another 3,574 square feet of weights and fitness on the first and lower levels, and a 1/10 mile track.

Currently, facilities in the sports complex only give 2.4 hours of open recreation time to students, including club and intramural teams. The new Campus Recreation Center will be open from 6am to 12 midnight, allowing for 18 hours a day of free and open recreation time. Non-credit fitness classes will start being offered in the CRC’s higher capacity workout studio rooms, and access will be free to students as are the rest of the recreation facilities on campus.

There is a severe lack of opportunity for recreation, wellness and no room for club teams’ practice, and/or competition on Stony Brook’s campus. All of the fitness areas all over campus are always packed, and students aren’t feeling like they’re getting their money’s worth. Freshman Tess Smith said, “If I’m paying this much for a student activity fee, I don’t want to walk into a gym where there’s no room to work out or do anything.”

This problem was realized back in fall 1999, when Sue DiMonda started working for Stony Brook. “The Office of Student Affairs came to us with this problem and we started working on how to solve it,” DiMonda said. Much work has been done to find the right architects, the right spot on campus, and what exactly the facility needs. The Student Advisory Board for the Campus Recreation Center met with Sasaki Associates in 2006 to figure out what exactly they were going to do with the building. Sasaki Associates has worked on other college recreation centers at MIT, Cornell University, and the University at Albany.

Sasaki and the Board decided to put the CRC between the Sports complex and the Student Union. The entrance will be on the side by the Sports Complex. The ground-breaking ceremony is expected to be held sometime in June 2009.

just some Pics!

Obama is PRESIDENT!

So I drove all the way back to Staten Island yesterday to go vote and go to a union rally for my local 508 lifeguard union. I missed all of my classes. I was so beat from writing a 20 page paper the night before that I didn't bother going to the rally. Oh well.

When I went to go vote, i was expecting to see lines around the corner, like i'd been hearing on the radio the entire hour and a half drive home. I walked in and I was one of 4 people in the park house that I had to go to to vote. 

SoI went home and took a nap. Around 4 I woke up and started watching coverage of the election. I was pretty sure that Obama was going to win the whole night. 

My boyfriend and I drove around to look for a bar full of people watching the coverage, to no avail. So we got some beers and hung out with my mom and watched. 

I thought McCain's defeat speech was very nice. He urged people to support Obama as a president and said that the better candidate won the battle.  

Obama's speech was extremely moving. He really made me feel like he was really committed to changing the country. My favorite part of his speech was when he said that his girls eared the new puppy coming with them to the white house. 

I came back to campus this morning and my roommates said that people on campus were going crazy. People were shooting off fireworks, running around screaming "yes we can!" and "Obama is President!" I kind of wish i was here last night. I heard the live coverage from SB Now was a huge success, which is really cool too. 

election update

election in 6 days!

SNL

The Sara Palin rap on SNL this weekend was really quite entertaining. Palin still holds the title for stupidest VP choice, and her "rap" that I heard she refused to do herself, only reinforced my opinion. she's still "caribou Barbie" to me; Alaskan beauty queen turned pretty GOP puppet. Sure it might show that she has a sense of humor, but idiots laugh when everyone else is laughing at them also.

Critique

The NY Times website has a whole bunch of interactive and helpful, web-friendly features. the top has tabbed pages for the regular homepage, My Times, you can view what's in today's paper, you can watch videos and watch the most popular stories and look through the Times' topics. The site also has a menu on the left side with all the different topics in the paper such as the World, US, NY/Region, Business, Technology, Sports, Science, Health, Opinion, Arts, Style, and Travel. There’s also links for job searching, real estate, auto and all classifieds.

In collaboration with Monster.com, the NY Times website has an entire section for people looking for jobs as well as employers looking for workers, and they NY Times has a blog link on this page for Shifting Careers. Also, there are stories having to do with the job market linked on this page as well.

The real estate page has a search for homes, stories about real estate and international real-estate, as well as multimedia features and a Q&A section for all the burning questions there are today about the housing market.

The times topics page had a link to something I’ve been really interested in, the tina fey as sara palin skits. (Hysterical!!!)

The website is very well laid-out and very comprehensive. Things are very easy to find. There's a search field on every page so that you can always have a place to go to find something on the site. The main page has all the major stories on it- usually with up-to-the minute updates. The major stories that are posted have a stamp of when they were updated in red lettering right next to the byline.

The CNN websitealso has tabs on the top of the page for different categories on the site. There are categories fro the World, the US, Politics, Crime, Entertainment, Health, Technology, Travel, Living, Business, and Sports. There’s also, right underthe main topics a “hot topics”link, where it shows the most viewed topics on the site. The main page has photos and a video section as well as popular news that you can go to. There are the most important, newsworthy stories on the mainpage, like updates on the bailout plan and the latest newsas well. The latest news links also have, like on the NY Times site, red text saying how long ago it was updated.

There are also, of course, the most eye-catching stories in some of the different sections of the site. There are also links to blogs and a box for personalizing your local news for your CNN page.

There’s a section for CNN TV where you can see what programs are on CNN and view the schedule, look at the headlining news and listen to CNN TV. There are also updates on the most important things that are coming on the CNN channel, like insight on the Palin vs Biden debate coming up on Thursday. You can also watch CNN live on the website. When I was on the Site, it had live coverage of the OJ Simpson trial, and live video of Michelle Obama in Colorado.

CNN also has the IReport section, where viewers and readers can “take control of the news” and share stories they find with CNN.

The politics section on CNN prides itself on the most current and up to date coverage on the election. There are boxes with the top political stories on CNN, as well as past videos of the first presidential debate and top videos in politics.

There’s a section called “Election Center2008” that has links to the debates, conventions, election tracker, elections 101, issues and the forum on the site. There’s a countdown to the election as well as links to more election news and more political commentary on the candidates. There’s also a box where you can download CNN podcasts and look at the CNN Daily Humor with political cartoons that you can look through as well.

The Perez Hilton Blog is laid out almost like any other blog. There’s his blog fields, where he posts updates of things he finds online. His posts are filled with pictures that he likes to alter himself, as well as videos and his own perez commentary. You can also comment on his posts and forward a post to someone you want to read it.

On the left column of the blog there’s a link to send tips to Perez Hilton, in case you think he should change something about the site, as well as a link for advertisers in case they want to pay perez to put their ad on his site. There’s a “starseeker” search bar, where you can jump to stories about your favorite celebrity, or search for keywords relating to something you’re looking for. You can also search for articles by date, and you can download the Perez Hilton Podcast. Hilton has a link for his online store, where you can buy crazy shirts and accessories from the PerezHilton store.

Perez also has on the right hand column of his blog a window for “PerezTV”, where you can watch videos that Perez posts, like music videos, or vlogs that perez makes himself. Underneath all that is advertising that he sells to make money on the site.

So what did McCain do now...

So, McCain suspended his campaign today and sought to delay the scheduled debate with Obama for thursday. In a NY Times article today, he said it's because he's calling on the president to arrange a meeting with congress including both candidates so that they can "come together and solve this problem."

suure they're coming up with a plan

Obama thinks that a debate is the best thing right now-  "This is exactly the time when people need to hear from the candidates," Obama said.

I think this is irresponsible and shows weakness in McCain's ability to handle several important things at once.

 "Part of the president's job is to deal with more than one thing at once. In my mind it's more important than ever," Obama also said.

I mean, the debate is on friday night at 9pm. Is the senate going to still be in session fighting over what to do?

well this might be Bush's friday night