Yesterday, we received NAQT’s New College Package, a set of a bajillion good practice questions.

Today, we received our two Anderson buzzer systems, and Nick and I met with Tim, our faculty advisor. We talked about how quizbowl works, and what we want to do with the team.

Soon, we will be holding some small interest meetings, at least on my floor. I live in the central neighborhood’s Honors Residential Community, and a lot of people have played quizbowl at some point, and are interested in at least trying it out. In a few weeks, we should be holding a general callout meeting, and hopefully in the early spring we can hold an intramural tournament.

Between NAQT’s shipment and the Stanford Packet Archive, we have a huge amount of practice fodder, and we have two lockout systems to actually practice on. I’m happy about the progress we’ve made.

Last night, we had a caker in my floor lounge.

Let me explain how that works, for those that don’t know. A caker is a crazy college party at which students (many or all under 21) eat cake out of red Solo cups.

The Central neighborhood’s Honors Residential Community consists of my floor (TB4) and the floor below (TB3). We recently decided to unlock our floor doors to each other, so now, we’ll be able to hang out on each other’s floors, as a community. Many people were uncomfortable with this move, because it essentially doubles the number of people who can wander around our floor. (Previously, only people living on my floor could access the floor.)

To help unify the two floors, I proposed that we hold a caker on Friday night to help people get to know each other. Jaimie brought his large music library and even larger amp (200 watts, anyone?) into our lounge, and I went out with Patrick and Kathryn and bought several cakes with our floor funds.

The caker went pretty well, but it was observed that cake does not lower inhibitions as much as alcohol does. Still, that’s how we roll on TB4: crazy cakers on Friday nights.

From today’s New York Times: “eBay is finally acknowledging that it paid too much for the Internet phone company Skype two years ago.”

In case you’re out of the loop, Skype is an internet telephony program which allows free calls between computers, and very cheap calls out of or into computers from real landlines. Two years ago, eBay acquired Skype for a whopping $2.6 billion, leading me–and everyone else–to ask, “Why would eBay, an internet auction site at heart, pay so much for a rapidly-expanding internet-based telephony service?”

My only answer was that eBay was viewing Skype in much the same way as dot-coms were viewed before the bubble burst: as a high-traffic site which could somehow, in some mysterious way, be able to generate huge revenues. Don’t get me wrong. High-traffic sites with useful services are valuable assets. Google makes its money from being a high-traffic site. But I failed to see the usefulness of Skype in diversifying eBay’s holdings. When eBay purchased PayPal back in the day, the acquisition made perfect sense, and paid in spades. But how could Skype be incorporated into eBay as PayPal was? Or even if they remained entirely separate, how could Skype actually generate revenue for eBay?

The answer is that it couldn’t. In 2007 Q2, Skype earned a paltry $90 million, and yesterday, eBay announced it was making a $1.43 billion payout to Skype in accordance with their prior agreement. According to Aaron Kessler, “a senior Internet analyst,” eBay’s problem was that “‘They saw a great asset with tons of users but no clear monetization path.’” I feel like that’s what I said two years ago.

Perhaps I should add “junior Internet analyst” to my business cards.

• apparent
• necessarily
• ascribe

Or at least, they should be, based on how many times I was tempted to use them while writing this paper. Oh well. An apparent tendency toward certain words cannot necessarily be ascribed to poor stylistic choices.