Google finance kicks butt

It matches news articles with the stock, so you can see how one affects the other. The use of Flash is very cool as well.

Cooking show idea

...where the food cooks itself. Insert ingredients here at time X, turn the universal crank another revolution. Repeat N times for each serving. Optimized for pipelining multiple servings...

I'll call it... Cooking with RISC.

Whew

I got 96/100 on a project I thought I bombed. Close call... I think the graders were just being nice because I finished the hard part before turning it in incomplete. (I got docked on a smaller part for being late.)

World Object

Typically, you think of the Internet as an object on the Earth. Some interesting thoughts pop up if you think of the Earth as an object on the Internet.

Emacs is pretty sweet

I started copying my resume over from .DOC format to .HTML (perhaps with CSS), and Emacs's syntax highlighting has showed itself to be better than anything I've used before. Why? It doesn't just highlight syntax, it uses the syntax to appropriately format the content. It's like a wannabe WYSIWYG editor, but better.

NOOooOOoooOooooo!

I just turned in my first not-fully-functioning homework assignment. I guess I can wave goodbye to this quarter's 4.0. (Perhaps I can make it up on the final?)

Sometimes I think about learning emacs

http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/curves.jpg

I remember that.

"We talked about distributing it as a screen saver and beaming it to a live Jumbotron display in Times Square, because of its high fascination factor, but those ideas were ultimately vetoed by the founders." - Xooglers

I was talking about making the scrolling widget into a screensaver with some people from Google Kirkland during their housewarming party. That was a while ago... I think the idea eventually morphed into a world map that lit up areas where searches originated, although that could have been the evolution of a different idea entirely.

Programming Competition

We had a 30 minute Microsoft-sponsored programming event that revolved around the algorithms section of the Imagine Cup tournament.

I got 3rd place out of about 60 people! I won Age of Empires III, but I ended up giving it to my brother since my video card is a wimpy 32mb shared memory ATI x300.

Why proven theories are awesome

Theory is awesome simply because it lets you save your time for things that have not yet been thought of. Imagine you have to figure out a fast way to sort a random list:

9834765872

If you lack knowledge of theory, your internal dialogue may sound like this, "Hmm, if I keep taking the number on the front end and move it right until it... bah that doesn't work. How about moving from left and right.... argh!"

However, if your background in theory is sound, it may sound more like this, "Hmm, quicksort or multimerge?"

Lesson: Stand on the shoulders of giants.