Unnaturally Long Attention Span

http://davidbau.com/archives/2005/07/29/haaarg_world.html

This is a cute post about a dad teaching his son to program a game. I got started in CS by programming my own games, too. This was because, unlike the other cool kids, I didn't have any games on my computer, since my Dad had an Apple. My first CS book was TRS80 Basic Computer Games, which I bought with a quarter while I was out yard sale shopping with my mom. This was an old book, even at that time, and it was not all that useful, since I didn't have a Radio Shack TRS80, so I had to port the code myself. This was back in elementary school, and my Dad quickly figured out that I had an interest in this sort of stuff and got me my first compiler: MS QuickBasic for Apple. The rest, as they say, is history...

How many other coders got their start this way?

I woke up at 7AM this morning, stupefied at my inability to sleep. I had been awaken, not by the humming of the quad-proc rank mounted server under my bed, nor the by the persistent sounds from the street outside, but by an algorithm. I had an idea for a new algorithm in my head that just needed to get out. It had been bothering me for days.

Maybe this is why I can't sleep.

I take a short drive to the office. 3 hours later, I had written 20 pages of code. I grab some drinks and snacks from the break room and scan the daily newspaper. Apparently there's some major event this weekend in downtown San Jose, so I decide to drive down and check it out. The first ever San Jose Grand Prix is Indy 500 meets street racing. They had blocked out several streets in downtown San Jose near Almaden (by the Adobe building) to form one long makeshift racetrack. I saw several Formula 1 racecars, black dudes spinning out on motorcycles, and NASCAR dads grilling burgers. As expected there were plenty of hot dogs, beer vendors, and scantily clad women. I wish Palo Alto was this cool.

Anyways, I was just there for a short while, but here are some photos other people took.

German ornithologists claim that some birds are now singing the songs of cell phone ringtones. Richard Schneider of the NABU bird conservation center near Tuebingen says that jackdaws, starlings, and jays are the best mimics. Still, the birds apparently can't copy more complex polyphonic ringtones. From Deutsche Presse-Agenture:

One reason for the phenomenon was that these birds were increasingly common in the urban environment, even the relatively shy jay, (Schneider) said. "There is food and an increasing amount of green space in modern cities."

The birds were simply adapting to their environment in imitating human sounds in what he termed an "evolutionary playground."
Link

Check out this great collection of Stanford Panoramas.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/madh/22775430/in/photostream/

There is a rare shot of Lake Lagunita with water!