That is my jam!

Building a Better Georgia Tech Map (The Collaborative Way).

2007-04-07T18:28:00.000-05:00

We all know the power of Google Maps. Last year started my journey with their API (I created a map of the ACC basketball teams and how they fared at home/away games).

Well today I saw, via the O'Reilly Radar, that Google has started MyMaps - a way to create mashups without knowing how to program. So when you create a shape or marker and add text to it, that information becomes attached to the geocode and then searchable by Google. Hot. And they made the process very easy.

So the most obvious immediate solution I saw was creating a map of the Georgia Tech campus that's actually usable. Bless those engineers' hearts, but the current one is crap. So I created a map. And the beauty of it is that because it's public, anyone can add to it.

Check it out here, and if you have a minute, add a building or two.

Facebook Exporter for iPhoto.

2007-03-19T11:51:00.000-05:00

Get this if you have a Mac. For all your iPhoto-to-Facebook needs.

I just used it to upload the wedding album. I needed to get the latest version of StuffIt (didn't work with 10.0, worked fine with 11.2), but after that things were pretty straightforward. Just select the images you want in your album and go to Share > Export and click on the Facebook tab. Then you can login so it will let you add to existing albums you have (or create a new one like I did) and tag your friends. Then you have to go onto Facebook and approve your additions (just hit Select All and go!) but I really like how everything is all done in one fell swoop.

New TV shows revisited.

2007-03-18T01:40:00.000-05:00

Back in the summer I gave a preview of new shows on the networks. Most of them never went to air or are now defunct. Let's take a look, shall we? Thanks to the Futon Critic for status updates.

nbc:
looks like their m.o. this season is to gather as many stars as they can.

heroes.
an eclipse messes with some random people and they gain different powers, like teleportation. jess from gilmore girls is the main guy and he figures out he's supposed to save the world or something. i also caught sean from felicity (!) playing a cop, but he may have just been in the preview to help explain some of the backstory. it would rock though if he was in it for real. i mean, it was cool to see him in lost, but he was there for two seconds and then got eaten by the monster. long live sean!
CURRENT STATUS: rockin. 14 million users and part of the eternal debate "Heroes or 24?"

studio 60 on the sunset strip.
let's have matthew perry and the evil dude from billy madison (okay, after imdb i guess i should say "the guy from the west wing") play rebel t.v. producers who get another chance. they look freakin old.
CURRENT STATUS: "placed on hiatus after its 2/19/07 airing; no return date has been set." I watched this some because of its timeslot, but it wasn't all that impressive.

twenty good years.
john lithgow and some other old dude (haha, sorry. it's another famous guy but i don't remember who) are lifelong friends who have become bachelors again. this one looks pretty funny.
CURRENT STATUS: "on hiatus or fate to be determined." Taken off the schedule in November. I never watched it.

friday night lights.
you're kidding me, right? as i was watching this i kept thinking, "man, how is this going to last a whole season? it should be a movie.." lo and behold, they freakin made it from a movie. bad call. oh, the dude from early edition is the coach.
CURRENT STATUS: "currently airing." 5 million viewers vs. American Idol isn't too shabby.

30 rock.
despite this reunion of snl actors that could potentially be painful, this looks pretty good. tina fey is the producer of a show and alec baldwin comes in and takes over. tracy morgan and rachel dratch are also in it. i think tina and tracy will steal the show.
CURRENT STATUS: "currently airing." I like it. Makes me laugh out loud. Tina Fey and Tracy Morgan are money.

kidnapped.
some rich couple's kid gets kidnapped. the fbi takes the case on but some jack bauer type says they'll f it up and gets the couple to hire him or something. i say jack bauer type but i've never seen 24. so i'll just say this reminded me of it.
CURRENT STATUS: "confirmed as canceled on 10/31/06." pulled the plug in October.

TOTALS:
3 running
2 on hiatus
1 canceled

abc:
i think their m.o. is adding as many new shows as humanly possible.

six degrees.
lost, meet crash. j.j. abrams is making yet another show that will have people naming all the shows he's produced except felicity. boo. i'm sure it'll be popular. and probably good. i don't remember what happens...i think someone is supposed to kill someone else and they go through how they're connected.
CURRENT STATUS: "set to return on Friday, March 23." Had 9 million viewers back in October (being after LOST must not have hurt). I watched the first couple of episodes but it wasn't too compelling.

let's rob mick jagger.
the dad from grounded for life sees mick jagger on like cribs and decides to team up with his city worker friends and hatch a plan to rob mick jagger. who's actually on the show. meh.
CURRENT STATUS: "placed on hiatus after its 2/28/07 airing; no return date has been set." Turned into "The Knights of Prosperity"...sounded pretty lame to begin with.

the nine.
well, i guess scott wolf saw how popular matthew fox got after lost and decided to make a return of his own. nine people are held hostage in a bank for a couple days. i think he plays a cop.
CURRENT STATUS: "placed on hiatus after its 11/22/06 airing." This one I also watched for a couple of episodes. Oh well.

brothers and sisters. ally mcbeal is back! calista flockhart plays--you guessed it--a sister. they all have to deal with their dad dying.
CURRENT STATUS: "currently airing." I watch this one for inexplicable reasons.

in case of emergency.
david arquette, lori loughlin, and jonathan silverman (who looked more and more like will from will and grace as the reel went on). i really don't remember what this is about, except some cheesy line like "i never know who to put when it says 'in case of emergency, contact:' on a form."
CURRENT STATUS: "currently airing." On just before LOST. It just peaked at 6 million viewers. Hmm.

traveler.
some dude frames his roommates as bank robbers as he takes all the money. and they realize he's been lying to them the whole time. so they try to figure out who he really is and where he might be.
CURRENT STATUS: "new this summer (yet to premiere)." I guess we'll see about this.

help me help you.
ted danson. playing a psychologist. ted, ted, ted...did you learn nothing from becker?
CURRENT STATUS: "placed on hiatus after its 12/12/06 airing." Lame.

day break.
taye diggs is in this one. groundhog day. except taye diggs has to relive the day while he de-frames himself for murder.
CURRENT STATUS: "confirmed as canceled on 12/15/06." Canceled in December.

big day.
this looks bad. the trials and tribulations of a wedding day.
CURRENT STATUS: "completed airing its first season on 1/30/07; has yet to be renewed for a second season." Yeah, I didn't watch this one.

betty the ugly.
the girl from sisterhood of the traveling pants (!) and si se puede and a host of spanish-american movies/shows plays an awkward girl with a job in the fashion/modeling industry. i guess it's like the devil wears prada, only dealing with ethnicity. i like her but oh man, why would you willingly sign on to a show with that name? i bet they changed it on her at the last minute.

oops, i take it back. this is an image from the original columbian telenovela betty la fea. apparently she was ugly the whole time, moving her way up the ladder with her smarts, and somehow transforms into a beauty, much to the chagrin of her columbian viewers. the feminist show apparently became anti-feminist real fast. we'll see what happens in america!
CURRENT STATUS: "currently airing." Turned into "Ugly Betty"...I dug it but stopped watching it/Grey's when I started watching NBC on Thursday nights. It is online though so I may get back to watching it there. Good to see it's gotten some respect.

and then there's men in trees and under belly...neither of which i have any recollection of.
CURRENT STATUS: "placed on hiatus after its 3/8/07 airing; no return date has been set" for men in trees, and I couldn't find an entry for under belly. I actually watched a couple of men in trees eps. I dug the small towniness.

TOTALS:
4 running
5 on hiatus
1 canceled
1 to air
1 ?

cw: phew, at least this one won't take me 14 hours to write about. i finally learned what cw stands for. c for cbs (which owns upn) and w for warner brothers (wb, duh). i thought it was pretty funny how they didn't bother to highlight any of the wb's shows they're bringing over to cw, but they treated everybody hates chris like it was a brand new show.

runaway.
donnie wahlberg is old! so some girl accidentally dies in his house and he gets charged with murder. but he convinces his family to go on the run with him so he can be free. his son has a gf though and he eventually goes back to her. and apparently takes the cops with him back to his dad.
CURRENT STATUS: "confirmed as canceled on 10/18/06." I think I watched the first episode of this. Meh.

the game.
the untold story of the girlfriends of football players on an nfl team. starring one--not both--of the girls from sister sister. ouch.
CURRENT STATUS: "currently airing." Haha, I still think it's funny that just one of the twins made it on this show. What a dis.

hidden palms.
kevin williamson tries to relieve his glory days of dawson's creek. it's like, i don't know, the o.c. yawn.
CURRENT STATUS: "new this spring (yet to premiere)." Eh.

TOTALS:
1 running
1 canceled
1 to air

cbs:
the #1 network isn't adding too much.

the class.
so this couple met in third grade and for the 20-year anniversary of when they met, the guy decides to have a reunion. pretty funny concept...i mean, who has a third grade reunion? all i remember from third grade is writing "love, annie" on the valentine to my crush instead of "from annie" like i did for everyone else in class (and getting called out on it by my table) and being confused by two things my teacher said in one sentence. we were divying up duties for our charlotte's web class project and my teacher said "annie, do you not want to etch the door poster?" first of all, i didn't know what etch meant, and second, i didn't know how to answer since she stuck "not" in there. the first time i'd ever heard that. welcome to north carolina! okay, back on track. oh yeah, so at the party the gf runs out. and of course people get together.
CURRENT STATUS: "completed airing its first season on 3/5/07; has yet to be renewed for a second season." This was cute I guess. I watched an episode but that's it.

jericho.
skeet ulrich comes back to his hometown in bfe. and some nuclear bomb goes off or something. and he becomes the hero.
CURRENT STATUS: "currently airing." This one looked good but I haven't watched it.

smith.
ray liotta. that's all i remember.
CURRENT STATUS: "confirmed as canceled on 10/6/06."

shark.
james woods plays a defense lawyer turned prosecutor who takes young guns under his wing.
CURRENT STATUS: "currently airing."

TOTALS:
3 running
1 canceled

fox:
also not a lot new.

'til death.
brad garrett gets the lead this time. he and his wife are basically ray and debra. but i guess they don't have kids. and the dude who gets with stifler's mom and his new wife are newlyweds who move in next door. oh and the guys will both work at the same school. it looks okay.
CURRENT STATUS: "currently airing." This was okay the one time I saw it I guess.

justice.
jack from dawson's creek is on it. it's a lawyer show. all about shady jury-rigging and such.
CURRENT STATUS: "confirmed as canceled on 11/10/06." Aww, Jack.

happy hour, vanished, standoff...i've got nothing.
CURRENT STATUS: canceled, canceled, and on break until April. Hot.

TOTALS:
1 running
1 on hiatus
3 canceled

I guess that's it. Why I did this I don't really know. 12 running, 8 on hiatus, 7 canceled, 2 to air, and 1 question mark. Oh but I did learn from that site that Shonda Rhimes is making a Grey's Anatomy spinoff featuring Addison.

Joost.

2007-03-08T21:24:00.000-05:00

So Joost is the hottest new thing out there in terms of web TV. The other day I saw the report that MTV Networks is planning to create thousands of websites to showcase their content and let viewers repurpose it. And they're using this platform Joost to help develop this idea. I took a look at the Joost website and realized I had been a member of their mailing list since they were known as the Venice Project. And it turns out I got an email describing the partnership a few weeks ago:

Great news from the Joost Content Team. Today we're announcing a major partnership with Viacom. Which will bring programming and lots of channels from Viacom's key brands and properties available on Joost on our imminent launch.

MTV will offer popular shows, both past and present, including Laguna Beach, Beavis & Butthead, Real World, Punk'd and My Super Sweet Sixteen, while COMEDY CENTRAL will feature episodes from Stella, CCP's and Freak Show. Nickelodeon, CMT: Country Music Television, MTV2, Logo, Spike TV, mtvU, and Gametrailers.com will also provide content. VH1's offerings will include episodes of Flavor of Love, Surreal Life, and I Love New York. BET's Networks' offerings will include some of its biggest shows, including Beef, DMX: Soul of a Man, Comic View and recent smash hit American Gangster. Also, Paramount Pictures, Paramount Vantage and Paramount Classics will be providing full-length feature films from its catalog of classics and recent releases.

This content isn't available yet. We're working hard on shipping, transcoding and feeding the P2P network (and no, despite malicious gossip to the contrary - engineering is not giving Star Trek or Ren&Stimpy top priority) it will all be there for our launch.

So on the website are a couple of screenshots of the beta.

So, I don't see any tagging, but it still would be very relevant and awesome to take a look at.

I didn't really anticipate this, but apparently Joost's invite-only method of distributing their beta, combined with its buzz, has caused it to be a hot commodity. Brent Roos' Window to the Universe describes it and is offering a coveted invite. His post was written a while ago, but you never know if he still has some invites left. :)

He also has a post about TweakVista which I'm sure will come in handy if/when I download my free version courtesy of GT :) I guess that would involve getting a PC though.

P.S. If you're not in your last semester of grad school, congratulations on not having to work on a thesis. If you are, I feel your pain.

Puzzles and Pools

2007-03-02T21:46:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure how long this has been going on, but Facebook's presenting its users with programming puzzles. Like the development platform they established last summer, these puzzles help Facebook with things like application ideas or optimization enhancements as well as help find good programmers to hire.

No matter their motives, there's something kind of warm and fuzzy about the fact that Facebook is "reaching out" to its members and trusting their abilities. I know plenty of other companies do this (e.g. the NetFlix search optimization problem), but what seems a little different to me is that they're placing their trust in essentially a bunch of college kids, not professionals. Heck, I was intrigued enough to click on the sponsored link even though I knew it would be too much PHP for me to handle.

Also, the March Madness pools came out yesterday. Nice to see this - it has the potential to be really successful. It's leveraging the obvious collegiate ties and the fact that people who would want to join a pool together are already on Facebook.

Now, it's time to get off Facebook's jock and back on some of my own work!

Plenty of Little Things.

2007-02-27T03:58:00.000-05:00

FMenu. A Facebook notification for your menu bar/desktop in Mac (uses Growl).

Still weighing it against the Firefox Facebook Toolbar.

The Facebook Query Language for Facebook developers. I wanna add FQL to my resume.

CNN Fortune Cookie GreaseMonkey script. Adds "in bed" to CNN headline...you know, like you're supposed to do to fortune cookie messages. From Ironic Sans.

My first CNN fortune cookie was a serious subject but still kind of amusing :)

There's plenty more where that came from...maybe I'll start using this more again :)

iTunes + concerts = iConcertCal

2007-02-15T16:47:00.000-05:00

Dear Dakota,
Thanks again for showing cool stuff to me.
Annie

Here's a nice application for people who are too lazy to look up shows (like me). iConcertCal does the dirty work for you. It's an iTunes visualization that finds concerts of artists you have in your iTunes in your area and displays them as a calendar.

Lego Bands!

2006-11-19T22:27:00.000-05:00

Death Cab for Cutie:

FLAVA FLAV:

Rilo Kiley:

Sonic Youth:

The Beatles:

The Decemberists:

Weezer:

Some fun covers.

2006-10-23T09:20:00.000-05:00

Dakota always finds the coolest covers.

Ben Folds and his crew covering the Postal Service using assorted objects:

The ending is a little kooky but otherwise it's pretty amazing!

Acoustic Hey Ya cover:

I like the clips of the real video interspersed.

I love technology!

MySpace account numbers.

2006-10-20T15:52:00.000-05:00

MySpace just reached 120 million accounts. Accounts, not individual users, mind you. Still, from 5 million two years ago? Crazy.

From Fred Stutzman's blog.

Barnes and Noble is kind of ghetto.

2006-10-03T11:01:00.000-05:00

This weekend I was hard pressed to find an academic book that I had ordered but didn't get to me in time. I went to B&N's website sure I'd be able to find the availability of the book in stores near my zip code. But of course not...why would B&N want to be helpful or relevant? You can only search for stores and see what you can buy online. Borders, on the other hand, has this inventory feature and it's pretty good. Other than just "we have it" or "we don't", there are different categories:

The only thing is you have to pre-select "My Stores" and can't just do the regular old zip-code/radius search.

Barnes and Noble, however, wants browser-shoppers, as Kevin Stirtz posts on AllBusiness. Trouble is, we've gotten used to realizing what we want and we want it ASAP - people have become laser-shoppers. As he so adeptly writes,

The more you help your customers get what they want, the better you are SERVING them. And the better you serve them, the more likely they are to continue doing business with you and tell others to do business with you too.

//End of rant
//P.S. I happen to be writing this at a B&N.

If only knitting happened this fast.

2006-09-26T19:47:00.001-05:00

CG knitting!

Hot Tech Stories.

2006-09-24T13:03:00.000-05:00

My tech stories of the day: electronic voting, college online applications, and RSS feeds.

1. The New York Times has an article about the security flaws in the Diebold AccuVote system, which has led the pack as an alternative to paper ballots. Turns out the key to its memory card is generic (the kind used for office furniture, minibars, etc.), and even if you don't have one of those keys you can pick the lock in 10 seconds...so one could swap it out with one that has code to alter the votes. And how were these flaws exposed? By the academic community. Diebold took the "we don't want to expose our system to scrutiny" stance and basically poo-pooed the notion that anyone in the political world would be shifty enough to physically tamper with the system (yeah right). In 2003 researchers found the code for the AccuVote system on one of Diebold's public servers, and the only reason for these latest pick-the-lock findings (plus code that will swing the votes toward a desired candidate) is that Princeton obtained an AccuVote system from a third party. So instead of going on the defense, as Diebold has done, why not work with academia to try to fix problems? I'm sure they'd be able to find a school or two that would jump at the chance to hack into this system, figure out its flaws, and come up with solutions for better security.

2. Wired is reporting on states helping kids and parents out in the college search. They ultimately want to provide information about the colleges and universities in their respective states and streamline the online application process so it takes less work to apply to multiple colleges. Some good stats from the article:

North Carolina's cfnc.org, which launched in 2000, has been credited with helping increase the state's college-enrollment rate from 57 percent to 68 percent of high school graduates.

North Carolina, which spends about $1 million a year to maintain its site, has 1.3 million students and families registered for accounts. After the first year, the site had just 14,000 registered.

Kentucky launched its "Go Higher Kentucky" campaign in 2000, part of which is gohigherky.com, the state's college website. Since then, the number of high school students going on to college has grown from 55 percent to 62 percent.

CSU now only prints 100,000 applications, compared with the several million before the website. Close to 98 percent of the 500,000 applications received are through the site, he said.

This mainly pertains to the state college system, but I think it's a good indication of how much of this process, from school applications to job applications, has migrated to the Internet. When one is filling out the same information over and over again in applications, it only makes sense to automate the process. I think that of the seven schools I applied to for undergrad six years ago, I applied electronically to the University of Richmond and Wake Forest. Wake Forest had to ask for a hard copy because they lost my electronic submission. My two grad school applications were electronic. The article also points out how this trend is growing in the South, where states are trying to revive their traditionally agriculturally-based economies.

"It speaks to a change in economics, moving from agrarian or manufacturing to knowledge based," Dietz said. "Those high-paying agricultural and manufacturing jobs just don't exist any more."

3. And finally, a good explanation of RSS ("the Oprah way").

60 Seconds.

2006-09-18T21:54:00.000-05:00

AdRants points to the blog Ironic Sans, which is filled with a bunch of cool ideas (e.g. pre-pixelated shirts for reality TV, the iZod) and videos by some dude. The video set 60 Seconds is pretty sweet. My favorites are 60 Seconds in the Life of Rafa Nadal's Shadow, 60 Seconds in the Life of a Staircase (or "60 Seconds in the Life of a Guy in a Sweater Vest"), and 60 Seconds in the Life of Escalators.

I also have to mention that the guy likes Jowlers and decided to formalize some jowling. Rawk.

The dupefication of online fan bases.

2006-09-16T16:40:00.000-05:00

It's been a busy week in the outing of social networking phenoms.

Brody Ruckus, of the infamous "If this group reaches 100,000 my girlfriend will have a threesome" Facebook group, is fake.

Turns out "Brody" and the girls he posted pictures of are models. And the "Ruckus" may ring a bell if you go to Georgia Tech - the masterminds of Ruckus Music (GT's new partner for downloading music) created Brody and the group. Facebook deleted the group and removed the account because it violated the TOS. It's pretty interesting on the heels of the announcement that they're going to open up Facebook to the public. How many Brody Ruckuses will there be in the future that they can't track down? I wonder if they'll have the manpower to monitor these things.

lonelygirl15, the innocent homeschooled girl who became one of the most popular people on YouTube, is fake.

The girl who plays "Bree" is an aspiring actress from New Zealand. Someone uncovered her cached MySpace page and a set of pictures being not so lonely. A lot of people have been claiming for a while that it wasn't real, mainly because of the great editing, the implausibility of Bree's parents letting her friend Daniel hang out in her room all the time, and the domain lonelygirl15 being registered a month before her first video was posted on YouTube. There seems to be a mixture of backlash ("I'm never watching again since you're fake"), disbelief ("the girl in the pictures obviously isn't Bree"), and continued loyalty to lonelygirl ("this is way more entertaining than any show on TV right now"). The creators and actors did an interview with MTV, and the backdrop had the Revver logo, so it seems as if they'll be migrating from YouTube to their own site (lonelygirl15.com) and profiting off of video views. We'll see if this migration is successful - since the YouTube community, video responses and all, was what made the story so successful in the first place.

The shit's about to hit the fan.

2006-09-11T20:45:00.000-05:00

Facebook is about to open up to everyone. EVERYONE. People without .edu addresses will be able to join geographic networks. What a move by Facebook...while it's still recovering from the news feed backlash. Seems like Zucks has his priorities out of whack.

Time to abandon your geographic networks, ladies and gents.

Take ALL the hard work out of stalking!

2006-09-06T19:12:00.000-05:00

Okay, I'll be the first to admit I was kind of stoked to see Facebook's news feed. Because I'm pretty much a stalker. It is information overload though and the profile page looks pretty crowded now..although I do like how you can collapse sections. I can understand why people are pissed about the privacy issueAnd I'm sure that soon you'll be able to turn it off, change your settings, etc. And here comes my rant...

You're kidding me, right? Let's put a sponsored link to a conglomorate news website smack dab in the middle of social network feed.

Take all the hard work out of stalking.

2006-08-29T12:44:00.000-05:00

Have you ever seen a friend has updated his/her profile on Facebook and you scour the page to see what's been changed? Someone came up with the Facebook Stalker, a Firefox extension that highlights what's been changed in someone's profile since the last time you looked at it.

The only real work is predetermining who you want to stalk basically so it can record the page before it's changed. Also on your friends page you can click on "Never Viewed " in the drop-down to see whose pages you haven't looked at since you've added the extension.

I'm all for things that propagate my laziness.

geriatric1927 on YouTube.

2006-08-26T13:56:00.001-05:00

This has been all over the place, but a 79-year-old widower in the UK started posting videos on YouTube on August 5th and the YouTube community has embraced him.

geriatric1927's channel took over Brookers' as the most subscribed of all time, with 23,647 subscriptions to date. His 17 videos, which focus on him telling his life story, have been viewed over 700,000 times and the news media has picked up on him. He's had many requests for interviews with traditional media, but has thus far refused any forms of communication other than YouTube. He cites his complete editorial control over the videos he creates and the site's sense of community as reasons to communicate only via YouTube. I've watched many of his videos so far and can see why people like him. His audience seems to be enthralled by a grandfather figure who braved this youth-dominated digital world to connect with people. His next-to-last video has a "Au Revoir" byline but I hope it's not true! He's even garnered an entry on the reluctant-to-highlight-Internet- memes Wikipedia.

Facebook Applications.

2006-08-25T10:18:00.000-05:00

Like I said before, Facebook released their developer's platform a couple weeks ago. Basically right now it's just for members (read: college kids plus whoever wants to join a high school or work network) so it's been a bunch of collegefolk creating stuff they like. It's not like MySpace where you can add an application to a page...they've just released their API so a registered webpage can access the information of the person who signs in. Here are some of my favorites (which may or may not be in the Product Directory):

FacebookRSS: not exactly an RSS feed but a nice app that shows the number of wall posts, messages, and new messages you have, as well as a map of your friends' locations (that's embeddable elsewhere), your photos, and friends' pictures (and a male/female ratio chart). Really nice UI here.
FaceSave: download your own photo albums as zip files. Pretty handy for if you lose your pictures or want to grab them all.
Spin the Bottle: with your friends. You can pick males or females or both. It's cute!
MatchBook: see which of your friends you have the most in common with (musical, cinematic, political, etc. interests). Now if only it wasn't my ex that I had the most in common with!
BookFaced: a Google Map mashup. There are a few of these floating around but this one seems to be popular. This was an obvious application and it's cool to see - I've done some Google Maps API stuff before.
Interesting Friendship Finder: this is a pretty cool app. It finds your friends that are friends with one another but not necessarily what you might think (because they're in different networks). There are some false positives but it showed the ones I was waiting to see - which I had found out by the mutual friends list on Facebook (e.g. someone from my college knowing someone from my high school) - plus it came up with one or two more I didn't know.
lickuacious: See who of your friends is most popular according to the number of wall posts they have. My most popular friend is Big E of Wake Forest Basketball fame. There's an option for you to figure out where you lie on the list, but it would be nice to be able to search for one of your friends. Because if Eric Williams is at the top, I want to know where Chris Paul is...you know, without having to do all that work of getting on Facebook and looking at his page ;)
PhotoMosaic: makes a mosaic of your blown-up Facebook picture...from your friends' Facebook pics. It could be better-executed but it's a hot idea.
FaceFreaks: analyzes the interests of your friends and tells you who's the nerdiest, shallowest, sportiest, and emoist. It's "a somewhat spiteful production"...I like it. Except I'm the emoist of them all.

So yeah, these are some of the cool applications that have popped up in the last two weeks since they released it. People are contributing their own client libraries which Facebook has posted. I still can't get enough of it! People get to create things that are relevant/fun/useful to the community and Facebook gets some good ideas they might be able to implement in the future. And now that someone's made a PHP4 library I might be able to get an app done in the near future :)

Some Hot Diagrams on Index Cards.

2006-08-23T10:57:00.001-05:00

My third post and I'm already diverging.

This is just cool.

Stylish.

2006-08-23T00:08:00.002-05:00

Stylish is a great Firefox extension Dave told me about that lets you easily look at a page's CSS styles...and then change it within your browser! I know GreaseMonkey has been around for a long time, but I just like this CSS-specific add-on.

You get the picture. So now my Google homepage has a Georgia font instead of Arial. It's a start :)

yo.

2006-08-22T23:06:00.000-05:00

Here comes my new blog. Working this summer and being exposed to a bunch of cool things has inspired me to create a blog where I can show off the stuff I like. Oh and I wanted to make this blog the more hip "that's my jam" (a phrase I fully endorsed this summer in describing anything from boys to potato chips) but thatsmyjam.blogspot.com was taken already :(

I guess I'll start off with the kind of stuff I use when it comes to computing. And interested in.

	Ah, Apple. I got a Powerbook last September and haven't looked back. Oh and an iPod. The great 20GB. Rock on. Oh, and I lived through an iTrip for a year but just a couple weeks ago got a good ol' fashioned output-to-fake-cassette-tape thang that was commonly rocked during the portable cd player era, and it's marvelous.
	Firefox. You know you love it. Skins, extensions (one of which in fact prompted me to start this..more to come)...now once they figure out a DRM equivalent we can throw away IE once and for all.
	Facebook. Rocks so much. It's mosdef taken the hold over the college and new alum (and, erm...high school) population. And they just released a developer's platform that the college kids are going crazy for.
	Photoshop. Can't go a day without it!
	Gotta love the Macromedia suite. Director and Dreamweaver baby.
	Adium. My AIM client of choice. I tried iChat, but couldn't really stand not being able to see how long someone had been idle for if they had an away message. Thus came Adium, where I now live in customizable glory.
	del.icio.us is pretty mint. Here's my page (mostly filled with advertising blogs and programming stuff)
	I'd say Google's pretty well embedded in my Internet experience. Search engine, mail, RSS feed, homepage, image search...should I keep going?

I guess that's about it for my tech preferences background, unless I think of some more things :)