September 2006 Archives

The last time I participated in a programming contest was way back when I was in high school. When Mike told me about Yahoo's first open Hack Day, I was intrigued. Mike participated in and won a prize at the last employee Hack Day for his brilliant Google + Yahoo mashup. It sounded like a lot of fun.

Open hack day promised to be even more fun, and it was! Web developers from all over the world were invited to camp out on Yahoo's campus overnight. Food and caffeine was available pretty much around the clock, and we even got to enjoy a free Beck concert.

When I arrived on Friday morning, the place was milling with journalists. Most of them had difficulty understanding the difference between hackers and crackers. Their news stories went along the lines of, "OMG! Yahoo is opening its doors to hackers! Isn't this a security risk?"

I was interviewed by ABC 7 News and a journalist from Germany. (Translation here.)

I worked on 2 hacks. The first was Geolicious News Explorer (0.0.2 Alpha). The idea was to plot Yahoo! News stories on Yahoo! Maps so people can find news that is local to them. It was a team effort between me, Mike and his co-workers, Mike and Dave. We stayed up until 4 AM working on it, and woke up at 9 AM to finish it up.

My second hack was a tongue-in-cheek mashup of Yahoo! 360 and Myspace (a.k.a. Y! Space,) which aimed to solve the problem described by Ernie's T-shirt. I whipped up my second hack (which consisted of the abuse of the <blink> tag and the liberal use of images) in a couple of hours and it went on to win the award for "Best Social Commentary".

I haven't had so much fun nerding it out in so long. Maybe I'll go to barcamp next year.

OMG, this is so cool. Moo is a service that will take up to 100 photos from your flickr account and print half-sized business cards with a different photo on the back of each card. The cards are printed on a heavy card stock and have a satin laminate finish. Flickr Pro account holders can get a sample of 10 cards printed for free. I am going to order some tonight!

How to Talk like a Pirate educational video.

I picked up the Tokidoki Cucciolo in Citta print at Bloomingdale's for $80 off. It's supposed to be a diaper bag. It comes with a baby changing pad that can be repurposed as a laptop sleeve.

Even though there is plenty of material to envelop my entire laptop, the default velcro configuration can only accommodate an ultraportable laptop like Sony's T-series notebooks.

So I added a strip of black adhesive velcro closer to the edge of the diaper changing pad.

Now the diaper changing pad can be used as a laptop sleeve for a computer that is up to 1.5" x 13" x 9.5" (H x W x D)

From Min Jung:

Meet Jane Kim (SF/Greenparty/SchoolboardCandidate/Blogger/Kickass)

She's a smart, dedicated, and passionate individual who's keen on making changes within the SF School District.

And yup. She blogs. And better yet, she wants to meet bloggers in SF who want to learn more about what's going on with the schoolboard.

Please come on out and pass the word along!

Meet janekim.org: Bloggers 4 Jane
Tuesday, September 12th
9pm at G3
3910 Geary Boulevard at 3rd Avenue

For all you nightcrawlers and writers out there. Come to mingle, karoake and geek out. Wifi available. BYOL! (Bring Your Own Laptop)

Co-Hosted by www.minjungkim.com and www.jacksonwest.com

Visit upcoming.org for details.

FUNdraising efforts will include Karaoke. Don’t freak out. You can always get out of singing.

Karaoke Car Crash

Want to sing? $1
Want to make someone else sing? $2 +
Want to get out of being forced to sing? $4 +

Blog about the event before you come to bring out more bloggers if you can. Definitely blog about the candidate.

Fundraising goal for the evening: $1000

MJ will start a collection of $200 to make Jane sing I believe the Children are Our Future.

(via NinjaBoy)

Remember that annoying email hoax about Microsoft giving away money to those who keep the chain letter going? Well, it turns out that Microsoft isn't interested in tracking who you're forwarding your email to, but they are indeed giving away free money. Set the Flutters Free is a rewards program where monetary rewards are randomly sprinkled throughout ninemsn.com.au. If you're lucky, you can get money deposited into your Bitpass account.

It'll be interesting to see if this twist on an idea concocted by some email prankster will prove to be an effective marketing tactic.

While passing through Nordstrom on my way out to the mall parking lot, I noticed the just-released Fall 2006 Tokidoki bag collection for sale. They feature a cute metropolis print with little smiling aircraft, automobiles and cityscapes. The smiling Space-Needle-like tower (bottom left pocket) reminded me of the CN tower so I wanted one.

However, I already bought the bag shown below in the spring, so I decided to hold off on getting a second similar bag.

I ended up getting this nylon ripstop kite on super end-of-season sale at a drugstore for $2.00 (1/65 the cost of the bag.) Funny how it's made of the exact same material as the Tokidoki bag, yet it makes me more than 65 times as happy as I would have been had I bought the bag. (I'm so easily amused!)

I might still buy the bag, though. Who could resist a smiling CN tower?