I have a blender here

...but it's not mine. I know Tommy brought a blender over earlier this summer to make milkshakes, but I thought he got it back. Is anyone missing a blender?

There's some Swedish text on the apple PowerBook and iBook power adapters. "The device should connect to a grounded outlet." I guess Sweden is the only country where all outlets aren't grounded? I was trying to see if, electronically, the power adapters are the same. They aren't.

Moment of Zen?

Facebook vCards II

This Greasemonkey script will place a link in the top left corner under the "Poke Him/Her!" link of a facebook profile page called "Get the vCard". The link will prompt you to save a document (opening with Address Book doesn't work for me). Unfortunately I don't know how to control the file name so you'll have to add the .vcf extension or the address book won't accept it. Also unfortunate is the fact that the address book doesn't recognize URI's for photo values. Supports name, birthday, screenname, phone, mobile, and website. E-mail is notably missing because it's hard to do OCR in JavaScript :) This is sloppy, rough, and contains OS X-only extensions but should be faster than manually adding contacts if you happen to be using Firefox on a Mac.

Another update: script is updated to include photos. Unfortunately, it relies on an external service, and I've been told that photos don't show up in Microsoft Outlook.

And again:

I’m an engineer at facebook and I’m writing to ask if you would be willing to take down the link to your facebook vCards utility (located at http://martindavidsson.blogspot.com/2005/08/facebook-vcards-ii.html). Even if your intended use of such a script is noble, we’re starting to see larger numbers of scrapers who are taking scripts like yours and modifying them to less legitimate goals. In any case, the undertaking you describe on your site is (and has always been) against our terms of service. We'd obviously like to resolve this without getting the lawyers involved if possible, so please let me know as soon as you've taken the script down so that our legal department doesn't get all fired up about this.

One more:
Lately I've been getting at least one random IM/email per day from a person asking about this script. It's getting tedious mailing it out. Facebook, clearly people want this feature. Give it to us. Until then, the rest of you can download the grasemonkey script.

Update IV:
Neil M. sent me an updated version of the script back in April, which I'm just now getting around to uploading. Pretty lousy on my part, but you can find his update at the same link as above.

Facebook vCards

Have any OS X users seen new entries popping up in their address book from thefacebook.com? I have a couple of entries that I know I didn't enter myself, and I know they're from thefacebook because the homepage field of the contact is set to that person's facebook profile page. Not all of "my friends" on the site have entries in my address book though. I can't find any kind of export link on the site. I've even asked support and they haven't gotten back to me. What's the deal?

I haven't been keeping up with people's information so it would be useful to have this kind of functionality. Maybe greasemonkey can help me out.

Conference Calling

Seen over on the MAKE blog:

HOW TO conference call with Google Talk
Open up a copy of google talk on all computers with which you wish to conference. After one copy is opened make a new shortcut for google talk but at the end of it add /nomutex. If you installed it to the default folder then your shortcut should read "C:\Program Files\Google\Google Talk\googletalk.exe" /nomutex. Open 2 instances of the software on every user's computer. After this start a chain: User 1 should connect on one instance to user 2. User 2 will connect on his second instance to user 3. User 3 will connect using his second instance back to user 1. With this chain everyone is connected to everyone. Or install Skype.

Hitting the high notes

At Mojo's, because people have discovered half-off sushi is the thing to do on Tuesday nights:

Adam: You know how they say a thousand monkeys can't create a Shakespeare? Well, there's also a theory that given enough resources, you can randomly generate, say, Hamlet. So a guy tested it. He wrote a program. It wrote Hamlet in four days.

Me: Really? That's incredible. I mean, consider the number of possibilities.

David: Yeah, like: "Look! We got it! Oh wait... That's a 'k'."

atom+safari

If you're publishing an atom feed but Safari only shows the title with a big "No Articles" make sure that you don't have the xmlns attribute in the root <feed> tag, no matter what the specification says :(

Ryan returned from Ireland the other day and retol...

Ryan returned from Ireland the other day and retold some excellent stories, as always. The coolest topic was the game of Hurling. I looked up some movie clips to learn more. I think I've seen it on TV before but didn't know it was called Hurling. The second movie has some cool clips of "free taking." The county of Cork supposedly has one of the better teams in the country--Jordan, you should check it out.

I found one of my sister's books lying around the house: ttyl. I wish it had search-inside-the-book because it's pretty funny. The whole book is a series of IM conversations, and the pages are basically screenshots of chat windows.

Tommy threw another sweet party last night in honor of Arun's birthday/departure. Good bye and good luck Arun. You need to send out a copy of the video Josh put together, unless it's mostly serious people giving sentimental and personal goodbyes.

Hope, cure, future

Anyone interested in seeing the Jimmy V Celebrity Golf Classic with me? Sunday, August 28 in Cary. The list of celebrities isn't stunning but the parents are out of town so we have a couple of tickets that aren't being used.

94305

Stanford is pretty. Silicon Valley was made for biking. The weather is consistent.

And they have teh market.

The next couple of years should be a good time.

Baby Name Voyager

People who read Freakonomics (and people who didn't, I guess) might appreciate the Baby Name Voyager. Just heard about from a recorded conference session so it must be fairly old but perhaps some will find it novel.