Next, understand your dorm room is going to be dark, dingy, and boring. There is no reason to live this way though, so shop for brightly colored room décor that will help you feel at home. This is a chance to create a space that is totally yours and if you have a roommate, the two of you can put your heads together and create a stylish, fabulous room. Consider purchasing colorful bedding and curtains, rugs to cover the cold, dingy flooring, and desk supplies that will leave you feeling prepared to study.

When decorating your room, do your best to bring a feeling of home to the space. Photos of family and high school friends will go a long way in preventing homesickness. However, you will want to make sure you are not avoiding your new life by focusing too much on the old one. It may be tough to be social and assertive, but it will be worth it. Relax and make yourself open to new experiences.

Parents should provide an emergency fund in case there is a problem. While you may not want to open a credit card account and give your kid free reign, there should be an emergency plan. If you are concerned you can put some money on a prepaid card they can use in an emergency. Online payment services also give you the ability to transfer money to your kid.

Remember it is easy for freshman to lose track of what they are eating when their schedules change so drastically. Students may shy away from the campus cafeteria and it is easy to order a pizza with friends during an all night study sessions. Keep your dorm room stocked with healthy snacks to avoid the dreaded “freshman fifteen” weight gain.

Another nightmare to prepare for is living with someone you do not like. It is important to give everyone a chance, but sometimes there is just no getting around being incompatible with people. Do your best to scope out your roommate in advance so you can get to know them, but if this is not possible, you can speak to someone about a reassignment.

Many people gain weight during their first few months in college. This is because you have unlimited access to the school’s cafeteria and late night study sessions may leave you prone to snacking. You may also be tempted to grab quick options like unhealthy fast food if you are busy with school work and social activities. Do your best to focus on eating healthy as often as possible.

Some students feel homesick during their first few months at school. It is healthy to miss your friends and family once in awhile, but if you feel you are missing out on new experiences, you may need help. If this sounds familiar, there area a few tricks you can try. Create a safe zone in your dorm room with pictures of friends and family. Schedule time each week visiting or talking with friends and family. Most importantly, take the opportunity to be socially active in your new environment. The best cure for missing old friends is making new ones.

Finally, new college students may find it touch to be self-disciplined, leaving them struggling to keep up with schoolwork. When your time is not as structured as it was in high school, you may have a tendency to goof off and procrastinate. To avoid this, make yourself a schedule and plan to have some fun times so you are not tempted to blow off schoolwork when the opportunity arises.

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Click on the picture for the rest of the photos from Derrick's 404 trip. Thanks, buddy!

(Credit:

Derrick Chen/The 404)

If you didn’t see Shaun White destroying the competition at the Men’s Olympic Halfpipe Finals in Vancouver last night, check out the video and prepare for a face melt, and don’t forget to watch our interview with the man himself! And there’s even more good news: it’s Thursday, which means Natali Del Conte is on today’s show! We start off the show with a quick news recap from the Olympic games, then NDC tells us about last night’s interview with Justin Timberlake.

The first story of the day is about PleaseRobMe.com, a new Web site that uses geolocation check-ins from Gowalla, Brightkite, or Foursquare to exploit folks broadcasting their unprotected abodes. The vulnerability assumes that you don’t have a roommate, and, of course, it doesn’t say where your houses actually is, but it certainly highlights the continued lack of privacy surrounding this latest batch of social networks.

The Barbie poll results are in. Over a half million votes were cast, and the public chose her next career: Computer Engineer! The new doll will hit shelves this fall and will feature a binary code patterned shirt, a pink laptop, a teched-out watch, and a Bluetooth headset. We all agree that Barbie isn’t the best toy for young girls, but we can still appreciate the cultural relevance, even if everything she owns is blasted in bright pink. Besides, it could be worse: auto-tune Barbie with talk-box accessory, anyone?

EPISODE 521

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Originally posted at The 404 Podcast

By Evan Ackerman

There are two places where bomb-proof wallpaper would come in really, really handy: war zones, and college. I guess college is less deadly most of the time, but you also don’t have the US Government offering to step in and pay for replacement drywall after your roommate decides that it would be fun to try and kick his way through to the adjoining room by swinging from your bunk bed. Thanks, Logan.

X-Flex wallpaper is made from a “Kevlar-like material” (Kevlar itself being a trademark of DuPont, in case you were wondering) sandwiched between an elastic polymer wrap. It’s lightweight, portable, and a cinch to install relative to the protection it offers: you just peel off the back, stick it to the wall, and bolt it to the ceiling and floor and you’re done. You can even wallpaper or paint over it if you don’t like the color. Popular Science put X-Flex to the test with a wrecking ball as you’ll see in the video below, but to forestall any objections, you can also see X-Flex withstanding an actual bomb blast on their website.

For those of you who are especially paranoid, it’s certainly worth mentioning that X-Flex is not actually intended to protect against ballistics, like bullets or shrapnel, just blasts and blunt impacts like bombs and drunken roommates. A commercial version of the military grade wallpaper is due out next year.

[ X-Flex ] and [ PopSci ] VIA [ DVICE ]

By Chris Scott Barr

Living with a roommate can be an interesting experience. Splitting the rent and having someone to hang out with all the time can be fun, but fighting over food in the fridge isn’t. Nothing is worse than going into the kitchen, only to find that they’ve taken your last slice of leftover pizza or swiped the last beer. Sure, you’ll talk to them about it, and they’ll claim not to do it again (or that they never did in the first place) but some people never learn. That’s why someone created the Fridge Locker.

The Fridge Locker is a small cage that you use for storing your own private food. The metal combination lock keeps your food safe from “Refrig-A Raiders” (poor joke courtesy of the manufacturer). It measures 7.5” wide, 7.5” tall and 11” deep. At $20, it could easily pay for itself with all of the food it keeps safe. Granted, your roommate will not take kindly to seeing this. Purchase and install at your own risk.

[ Perpetual Kid ] VIA [ RGS ]

Back before I started playing World of Warcraft (because of something that was work-related, incidentally), I used to tease my then-roommate about playing it well into the night, every night. I was a freshman at a certain horrendously expensive school, and my gaming started and stopped with my Xbox; I had no time for time-sink PC games. Not my roommate, no sir. The day the game came out—he had also been part of the beta—he plopped into his small, uncomfortable chair, Sunkist in hand (man alive did he love Sunkist for some reason), and quested well into the night away.

That was five years ago, and, correct me if I’m wrong, but no other game has even come close to de-throning Blizzard’s little engine that… still does.

Look at the game’s subscription numbers. The current estimate is that some 13.1 million people subscribe to the game in one shape or fashion. Lump all these people together in the same geographic area, and it would be the third biggest city in the world, after Mumbai and Shanghai. (Or, to put it in American terms, that’s nearly twice the population of New York City proper.) That, and the game is still growing… Wrath of the Lich King isn’t even available in China yet! When that hits, bam! Hello, even more money.

So we’ve established that WoW is big; that’s not exactly breaking news. Its closest competitors, I think, at least in the West, are Warhammer Online and AION. Apparently AION has had some technical issues that has driven players away, and Warhammer Online sorta came and went. And it’s not that these games aren’t good, but that, well, if all my friends play WoW, why would I abandon them?

That’s why WoW is where it is, and why it’s not going anywhere any time soon: too many people are playing for someone to come along and not it off its perch. That’s not to say that another game won’t come along and find a successful niche of its own—my money’s on Star Wars: The Old Republic, whenever that comes out!—but you’re crazy if you think another game is going to “kill” WoW.

And what will kill WoW? WoW 2, provided Blizzard wants to rock the boat, so to speak.

The gist is, WoW seems to be pretty much unbeatable right now. It launched at just the right time, with just the right lore, with just the right number of updates, with just the right fanbase.

If that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know.

If you’ve never experienced the original Serious Sam… you disappoint me. I had more fun playing Serious Sam with my roommate (hi Pat) in college than in almost any other game I can think of — with the possible exception of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Fighting hundreds of enemies at once, bosses hundreds of feet tall, going for items you know are a trap — Serious Sam is a classic of the first order. And now they’re putting it on XBLA with a sweet graphical upgrade. I didn’t enjoy the second Serious Sam nearly as much as the first, but it’s plain fact that the graphics are way better.

Although I’ll always enjoy the original original, newer gamers might find this “HD” version more palatable. And if you’re not convinced, watch this absurd commercial they’ve put together.

[Fixed the video. The player automatically moved on to a new video and changed the embed in the background. Not convenient!]

On today’s show, we’ve got Vienna Teng–singer, pianist, and former computer programmer. But before we get to her music, we have the PS3 Slim in the studio. Afterward, we talk to Vienna about her journey from software engineer at Cisco to touring musician.

(Credit: Vienna Teng)

(Credit: Sony)

At the top of the show, we do a little unboxing of the new PlayStation 3 Slim. While Vienna and Justin may not care too much about the game console, Jeff and Wilson don’t particularly like its new finish. In almost all respects, however, it functions just like the original 80GB model that it replaces, plus it comes with a 120GB hard drive. (No Linux for those homebrew fans out there.)

The star of the show is Vienna, a singer, songwriter, and pianist from the San Francisco Bay Area who graduated from Stanford University. Vienna later took up a job at Cisco as a computer programmer and made the leap to musician during her time there. We end the first half of the show with a track from her first album “Waking Hour,” called “Gravity.” The song is about the ups and downs of her roommate’s relationship.

On the second half of the show, we listen to her song “Radio” from her current album “Inland Territory.” And we talk about how now one in four songs sold in the United States is through iTunes. Finally, we end the show with her song “Augustine.” You can find her music on iTunes, Amazon, MySpace, Last.fm, and her own Web site. (Editor’s note: Last.fm is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET.)

EPISODE 407

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Originally posted at The 404

I guess I lucked out at university since I didn’t have to share a dorm room with anyone, but if you get to school in September and happen to find yourself hilariously mismatched with a sketchy roommate, you can at least ensure your expensive new laptop (or other slim gear) will be safe. The DormVault, available from ThinkGeek for $79.99, is a rugged steel laptop case that’s designed to go nowhere. Instead, you’re supposed to use it to lock up your laptop, up to 17-inches in size, and thanks to an included set of bolts and mounting brackets it can be permanently attached to a large piece of furniture (like a bed) that isn’t going to get pinched while you’re at class. At the least it looks more secure than those useless braided steel security cables.

[ DormVault Laptop Safe ] VIA [ Coolest Gadgets ]