Our Path to Quicker Technology

Hello everyone.

As most (or even all?) of you know, the online version of our student bookstore has a "technology" link that you can follow to the journeyed.com store, where you can buy cool stuff (software, computers, flash drives, etc) with varying degrees of student (and faculty!) discount. This is very helpful, and a nice resource...except...

Except that in order to get this discount, you have to provide proof that you are in fact a student/faculty member/staff member at the school. In theory, this shouldn't be such a big deal. There are three ways to verify yourself with the e-store folk, and if you have a lot of lead time, they should all work fine.

One of them is an Email Verification. In order to get verified this way, you go get your Academic Verification from the school, turn it into a PDF, and email it to the JourneyEd people.

The second way is a Fax Verification, which is just like the Email way, except (duh) you fax the verfication to them instead of emailing it.

Like I said, if you have plenty of time to go do all of these things, they ought to work just fine.

But what if you don't? What if you are a Communications Design grad student and you need the InDesign suite RIGHT NOW? Well. Then you have a problem.

In order to get the Express Verify Me Now method, you go to a list of participating schools, click the right one, and send your name, SSN, etc. to the JourneyEd people. They look you up in that school's database, and bam! You're good to go.

Alas, the University of Baltimore is not, as far as I can tell, on the magic list. Many other Balto institutions of higher learning are (all the various Hopkins parts, UMB, Coppin State, etc etc) but not us.

We should be on the list, because sometimes we need faster access, or we need to place an order in the middle of the night while we're actually thinking of it. The other methods are acceptable, barely, but they don't offer the convenience that we often need. UB needs to participate.

(A minor programming note: Next week's post will come to you from Banner Elk, North Carolina. Woo hoo!)