You've all seen the transparent desktop pictures. All of you might've seen this as well but I'll post it anyway because it takes the prize.

The academic year is over. What a struggle. Work starts tomorrow.

Lately, I've been getting quite a few emails requesting the Facebook vCard greasemonkey script. Maybe one every 2-3 days. I didn't think there was actual demand for it. I wish Facebook would just change their policy. Of course they don't have to... they get all the traffic they need without having to listen to its users at this point.

Campus eateries. After a year on campus, I only knew about half of these.

I just found out that some kid in Probability took notes using T_EK, every single class, and made it available to everyone. Brilliant. Thank you, Joel G.

kill -9

Some of you liked Monzy's So much drama in the PhD that I put on a mixtape a while back. If that includes you, know that he just released a new single, called Kill Dash Nine, and performed it live last Friday. See his blog for other nerdcore tunes.

JogaTV and Zlatan

vs. Ronaldo
juggling gum

Ironically on YouTube.

In iTunes, why is there not an option when you listen to a [radio] stream to "Buy This Song"? They must know the artist and song since it's being scrolled in the display. I could be one click away from giving them 99c. Instead, it's a couple of clicks and having to copy/paste information. That and I don't have 99 cents to give them for music.

At one of today's BBQs, Paul raved about XGL/Compiz. This demo gives you an idea of what it does. I don't know how long it's been around. He claims the novelty of the effects hasn't worn off after 2 weeks, but he's also an ubergeek. Most of the usuable stuff already exists in OS X I think.

Robert Scoble points to MapCruncher, which looks very similar to what Steve and I put together except its for MSN Virtual Earth instead of Google Maps. Speaking of which, we "went live" last week.

Another funny Valleywag post

I just had a remarkable interaction with a website. I participated in a focus group for SayNow last quarter, and they asked me to try out their beta. So I did. Part of the sign-up process was to register my phone number. The verification step did not involve the usual typing in a text notification code. Instead, it called me up, asked me to speak my name, and that was it. The cool part was that the web page echoed the exact state of the phone call. The box said "dialing" then switched to "began call" as soon as I picked up and then switched to "speak your name" when the voice instructed me to do the same, and finally "thank you" when I hung up. It was fascinating.

Steve and I generated some Google maps for various schools today:
UCLA
Cornell
Washington
Wisconsin

Via Subie: Loose Change

...and since I'm fixing some bad HTML that the Blogger widget always seems to cause...

Via Jawed: Pinkey the cat

There's a guy who works at Meyer Library who looks just like Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us.

In some vending machines you can put in a bunch of nickles/dimes, hit the "never mind button," and get back most of the change in quarters. Didn't know that.

The dude next to me and I are both scouring MySpace. He's twice my age. I hope he's doing it for class too.

Valleyway puts up some pretty funny posts every now and then. This is one of them.

Stanford Campus Map

Stanford prefers MapQuest, that's a good one too.

Google maps is the best, tru dat... double true!

Guessing

I sat in on a class this morning that I might have to take. It's called the Theory of Probability. For fun, the professor had each person in the class guess the number of cocoa puffs in a bowl. The person with the best guess would receive a copy of the textbook.

I had recently read The Wisdom of Crowds, which starts with a story from decades ago where the crowd at a farmers market performed a similar task, except it was guessing the weight of an oxe. The average of all guesses was one pound off the true weight.

The professor may have also read the book because after everyone was done guessing, he brought up the same story. I was one of the last people to announce my guess, so I gave a rough average of all the counts given up to that point thinking maybe this crowd was as wise as the one in the book. But as the professor said, this group of Stanford people did much worse than a bunch of old English country bumpkins. The mean was ~280 and the true count was 522.

Rewards

This is cool. Time to setup that real/virtual currency exchange.

Came across an optical illusions blog and re-discovered people taking pictures of stuff behind their monitor and making it their wallpaper. Hadn't see the hand-holding-calculator one before.

I just spent a couple of days programming Cocoa for OS X. Before that, I completed a team project using Python for S60 Nokia phones. Both made it very easy to create good looking results on a platform I had no prior experience on. I feel spoiled. My webpage has links to screenshots.

Nerf Rifle

Eventually MAKE: will start posting these instead of myself :)

Nerf Rifle

Via Gogglemarks, which links to a higher resolution video.