Google Bag

Every quarter tons of companies, like Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft come to give recruiting talks. During every talk, there's free food and a drawing for some prize. In all of my years in the computer science and engineering department, I've never won.

During today's Google talk, I entered my name into the raffle by filling out a row on an attendee information sheet: name, major, email etc. I also entered Andy's info.

Then the raffle began. There were four prizes, a chair, a lava lamp, a black laptop bag, and a red laptop bag. I really wanted that red laptop bag.

The first winner took the chair.
The second winner took the lava lamp.
The third winner took the black laptop bag.

When it was time to announce the fourth winner, I was desperately trying to mentally communicate my row number to Jing Jing, who was guessing numbers in the range of 1 to 80 or so.

Unfortunately, I had no idea what number I was.

Jing Jing plucked "40" out of thin air, and April Yu read the entry in disbelief.

"Kevin"

Andy exclaimed "Whoa, no way!" and someone in the audience asked, "Which Kevin?"

"Kevin Chiu"



Woot!

Gmail - picture spam levels down

Thank you Gmail team, for making it so picture spam doesn't get through to my inbox so easily. I don't know what you did, but it was a step in the right direction.

Unsend

Webmail needs an unsend feature.

*cough* Gmail *cough*

Have an option to have outgoing emails delayed by a user-defined amount of time. Any email sent less than x seconds ago will be available for unsending.

A game with a new perspective

Siggraph Submissions Complete!

Our lab's SIGGRAPH submissions have been successfully submitted. Yay!

In a few weeks, we'll find out if we get to present at SIGGRAPH.

Feature or bug?

In Firefox, hold down shift and double click on any element in any web page. It disappears.

I was composing a mail in Gmail just a few minutes ago until I accidentally double clicked it out of existence.

Japanese Treats

Thank you Colin Zheng!

Overheard in the Lab: Upgrading

Kevin: Your laptop makes funny sounds at night. *whhrrrrgggg... whhrrrggg* It sounds like it's dying.

Gary: Yeah, that's the wireless card making sounds through the speakers.

(Talk continues until the topic of getting a new computer comes up.)

Gary: I could get a new computer, but I would have to copy all my crap to the new hard drive. It takes about three days to reinstall everything and set up everything just the way I like it.

Kevin: On a Mac you can just use Firewire HD copy to transfer all of your programs and settings to your new Mac...

Andy: ...and copy all of your viruses too!

Kevin + Dan: What viruses?

Kevin + Dan: *high five*

Dan: That was just too easy.

All: *laughter*

Dusting Off My Ruby Skills

I just finished writing my first non-trivial Ruby script.

It searches a website (more than a page) for pictures that match given search criteria and downloads the pictures along with meta data.

It's only 61 lines long, and there are a bunch of comments and blank lines. It's not complete yet, but the final version should be less than 100 lines long.

Our Railpad server was up for 288 days before I shut it down yesterday. I haven't coded any significant Ruby code since I worked on Railpad, so this picture grabbing script was a much-needed refresher.

Why did this happen?

This is the French version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?"

The question is "What orbits the Earth?"

A. The Moon
B. The Sun
C. Mars
D. Venus

The guy uses a "poll the audience" lifeline, which is, in itself, surprising. However, the really incredible bit comes when the polls show that the audience's top choice is B. The Sun!

Optimal Ad Placement

Many sites that rely on ads as a source of revenue place them in locations that can trick a visitor in to thinking the ad is part of a website intra-link or, in other words, a link to another part of the same site. The thin horizontal Google Ad strip that looks like a navigation bar is particular suited to this strategy for this. The AdBrite ads are possibly the best, most annoying version of these stealth ads - they replace several words in the page with links to advertisers' pages.

However, you may notice that I host no such deceptive ads. That's because I know what it feels like to click an add thinking that I'll be brought to a page that was intentionally linked to by the author. I get frustrated with the page author for placing such a deceptive ad.

On the other hand, I am aware that certain individuals enjoy rewarding bloggers for a good article by clicking ads on the authors site, so I actually do leave one up, it's just somewhere that isn't irritating or deceptive.

In the entire lifetime of this blog, I have made 31 cents. As you can see, I'm not exactly in it for the money. I just want those few people looking to support quality blogging a chance to do so.

The problem with search

You have to vaguely know what you need.

Once you're near the answer you don't know you need, search relies on serendipity for suggestions.

What it really needs is empathy.

The New Blogger - A Trap?

I just noticed that I have no escape route from Blogger at the moment. Previously, I could import posts using a Wordpress tool, but now that tool is no longer compatible with Blogger, and Blogger has no export functionality.

New Year's Resolutions

1. Maintain a sleep schedule
2. Catch up with friends
3. Learn Django
4. Improve Ruby skills
5. _______?