IT Conversations has a very interesting session posted with Malcolm Gladwell. I’m currently reading his book Blink, but this recording is a great way to see if you’d be interested in the book. Blink deals with the ways we make snap decisions and points out the ways we can be right and the […]
Motorized Couch
I think this is a great idea. You just drive your couch across campus picking up friends on the way. Of course if it rained you might have a problem, so I guess you’d need some sort of moble couch-port to cover it up. Maybe you could put a roof […]
I’ve put up a listing of Linksys equipment that was pulled from Amazon’s web api. It is interesting to see how much information they are opening up to the world. Feel free to buy large expensive items from them through this link. :)
The Time Traveler Convention - May 7, 2005
We need you to help PUBLICIZE the event so that future time travelers will know about the convention and attend. This web page is insufficient; in less than a year it will be taken down when I graduate, and futhermore, the World Wide Web is unlikely to remain […]
Do you know how to make African American’s perform poorly on a test? Just make the first question “What is your race?”
Now I realize that the above statement sounds horrible and it is terribly politically incorrect, but it is the actual results of the experiment below. It suggests that we may be hindering […]
An article
by the guardian talks about how email can become adictive and actually lower your IQ like drugs.
The distractions of constant emails, text and phone messages are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis, according to a survey of befuddled volunteers.
Doziness, lethargy and an increasing inability to focus reached “startling” levels in […]
If you are looking at getting a degree through Harvard’s Extension school make sure you check out the residency requirement for your program. The ALM in IT degree requires you to spend one semester on campus. The summer session counts as a semester and it is only 8 weeks long.
Although some ALM in […]
The United States Census has some interesting facts on the education rates of each state. The chart below shows the percentage of adults over 25 years of age who have at least a bachelors degree. The top position goes to the District of Columbia, but since it is such a small area, it […]
Capella announced that it is going to go public. Capella has always looked like an interesting university. They are a commercial enterprise and based on their requirements it seems that they probably rank a little higher academically than University of Phoenix.
“Capella Education Co. of Minneapolis, one of the few private education firms to […]
There used to be two choices for web hosting. You could get a dedicated server for several hundred dollars each month. This would give you complete control of your machine letting you schedule automatic jobs to run, upgrade packages, etc. Or you could share a server with a bunch of other people. […]
Last year Duke gave iPods to all of it’s incoming freshmen. An article came out today that gives a small overview of the program. It sounds like the iPod program wasn’t really studied. They basically just gave everyone iPods to see what would happen. The article has quotes from teachers saying […]
While I don’t anticipate Amazon selling out to Google anytime soon, much of the work done at Google is being duplicated by Amazon and vice versa. Google’s mission is to organize all of the content in the world and make it easy to find. This basically what Amazon has done for shopping. […]
As an organization grows it must develop processes to deal with the work that needs to be done. Those processes are either created internally or brought in from the outside. While most organizations will have some processes from both sources, they will usually lean toward one source or another. When their value […]
Sometimes you need to trigger events by sending email. For example lets say you want to create an email address that will accept messages and show them on some type of LED display. There are a number of ways to do this, but the simplest is to set the .forward file for the […]
Reflection is a mechanism in java that allows to to get information about a class without needing to know the type of the class. The program below takes a java class name as a command line argument and shows you all of the methods and field names that are in the class.
You […]
When we started looking at finishing the basement at our house, I really wanted to put in a home theater. Eventually we ended up with a 6 seat theater with a 12 foot screen and surround sound. The total cost was less than you might pay for a large screen television […]
Over the past 5 years I have ordered the following items from Amazon.com and received them for free:
Nikon Coolpix 4500
Dyson DC07 Vacuum
InFocus X1 Video Projector
Apple 20 GB iPod
My wife and use a credit card for most of our purchases. The credit card earns points that can be redeemed for merchandise at amazon.com, so […]
If you stare at the block long enough you should eventually be able to make out a giraffe. This is because of the special optical properties of files known as animated GIFs. :)
I sent this to my mom and somehow it got converted from an animated GIF to a static TIFF. She claims […]
While looking through the score of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto’s I ran across an instrument I had never seen before. It was called the violino piccolo and appeared to be written in a key other than C like the rest of the stringed instruments.
Evidently the violins were not very easy to play in […]
I took a train from Grand Rapids to Chicago to pickup a car. This is an actual conversation that took place two seats in front of me on the ride down:
Lady: …. this is my first train experience …
Ticket Man: Well then we will make sure it is a miserable one. Can I […]