Hint: If possible, attend your first class (or some other way get a heads-up from the professor) before you buy your books. Otherwise you risk hearing something like "You know that $120 specially-published-for-our-school book the bookstore says is required for this class? The one that they have about a hundred copies…

It'd be cool if this could log results over time. Turn it on, clip it to your belt, then do the extreme sport of your choice. Use the accelerometer to track your Gs as well.

If you have Microsoft Sharepoint in your office, surveys are very useful for gathering consensus, especially if you have a whole range of items to get opinions on. Set up rating scales against each item, and include comment boxes as appropriate. You can send a link to the survey before the big teleconference and have…

YouTube want list:

@MyTQuinn: "I only know what my advisors tell me" is a bad situation for a leader to be in. There's a fine line between being advised and being handled. I'd prefer a leader with some level of curiosity.

Here's a question (or two): If the President surfs, should the history be a public or private record i.e. something we could get with a FOIA request? Should he/she be able to surf anonymously?

Hmmmm...It'd be interesting to see how the scratches in the CDs hold up against these puppies. (Wired says it works great.)

@Tamar Weinberg: OK, if you have to do this sort of thing all the time I guess it could be handy. But the point is that if you only erase CDs once in awhile you don't need this tool to get the job done.

This is complete bulldada, particularly for recordable CDs & DVDs. Take the blade of a scissor and drag it back-n-forth across the silver side until the silver flakes off and you can see through to the other side of the disk. A one-inch-square patch oughta do it. Your Average Joe's PC couldn't read it after that, and…

Tip for Outlook users:

You should also keep a roll of gaffer's tape around as well. It's the thinking person's duct tape. Holds like crazy but peels off without leaving residue. Plus it's matte black which beats bright silver aesthetics-wise.

This takes me back to an old electronics magazine project for building your own bike odometer. It used a magnet, a reed switch (a switch that closes in the presence of a magnet), some wire, and a pocket calculator you didn't mind ruining. You can probably guess the details.

From the G.I. Joe episode "Escape from Ruby Ridge!"

Can it core a apple, oh Chef of The Future?

A little OT - this just reminded me of this bit of humor in the New Yorker -

Has anyone tried Diet Coke™ and Mentos™ :-)

- Gosh, mister, that JPG file ya posted is 6 megabytes! It should be way smaller than that. I oughta be able to fix that for ya. You want I should take a look?

If you're hating this new feature, it could be worse. There's a mad-popular video site in Japan (Nico Nico Douga) that allows viewers to slap comments right on the video, with all the creativity, chaos, and annoyance that implies. Check out an article on it here.

Construction Worker: Father, I'm afraid four cinderblocks are missing.

It's a poor type of security that assumes that the people you're up against aren't very bright.