Update: As of 10/13 17:05 Central Time, I’m out of Google Wave invites.

Please only request an invite from one location. That way there will be more invites to go around. I doubt that accumulating invite requests would get you one any quicker.

Hey guys,

I have 7 Google Wave invites left. Just leave a comment and fill your email in on the email section. I’ll then send you one right away. First seven people that reply. It may take awhile for Google to send you one. Don’t know if this means hours or days…

Here’s the disclaimer that Google gives:
“Google Wave is more fun when you have others to wave with, so please nominate people you would like to add. Keep in mind that this is a preview so it could be a bit rocky at times.

Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.

Happy waving!”

I read about a tweet from a Google Wave engineer who said that invites might take a couple of days to go out. Just so you know.

Scott

PS For you iPhone users out there, this is kind of cool.

Sometimes jargon really is gibberish.

Take the “scientific” papers generated by a computer program and submitted by three MIT computer science students to a scientific conference. One of the papers, “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy,” was accepted by World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics 2005 as a non-reviewed paper. “The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking” was rejected.

Graduate students Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn and Dan Aguayo had doubts about the standards of some conference organizers, who they say “spam people with e-mail.”

“We were tired of getting these e-mails from these conference people, so we thought it would be fun to write software that generates meaningless research papers and submit them,” said Stribling. All three of the students are doing research in the Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems Group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT.

The paper’s acceptance proves their point, Stribling said. Their computer program generates research papers using “context-free grammar” and includes graphs, figures and citations. The program takes real words and places them correctly in sentences, but the words used don’t make sense together…

Source: Prank research paper makes the grade

Here’s the group’s website: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/, including links to the two papers that they submitted to the WMSCI 2005. Their first computer-generated paper, Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy, was actually accepted. Their second submission, The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking, was rejected for some reason. I don’t understand a lot of the titles of the real papers that are presented at these computer science conferences so these seemed to fit right in.

The grad students raised enough money to attend and present their paper at the conference. They were actually going to have their program generate a Powerpoint presentation for their talk. Unfortunately, the conference heard about this plan and rejected the paper. So, they decided to hold their own “technical” session in the very same hotel that the WMSCI used for its conference. The (randomly-generated) title of the session was The 6th Annual North American Symposium on Methodologies, Theory, and Information. The grad students presented three randomly-generated computer science papers using randomly-generated Powerpoint presentations that they had not seen prior to standing up and presenting it. The resulting talks were pretty hilarious and are available to watch as a video called Near Science. The website is a little old, but the first high quality AVI still works.

Here’s a SCIgen created computer science paper that my brother and I “wrote”: NAWL: A Methodology for the Visualization of Consistent Hashing

DISCLAIMER: The following method is what I used on my personal computer and iPhone and found to be successful. I take no responsibility for anything bad that happens to your system. Always backup your data before doing anything. I use a Powerbook G4 – OS X 10.5.8 – with an iPhone 3Gs – OS 3.0.1. (I wish I had Snow Leopard, but, alas, it’s Intel only).

I just got an iPhone and wanted all my calendars to sync together. I had previously set up a 2-way sync between iCal and Google Calendar (gCal) using CalDAV, a free, open-source way to sync calendars. I also wanted to continue to use iCal as a live calendar and not have it function as a “read-only Master Calendar.” (See INSTRUCTIONS: The iPhone-iCal-gCal Sync Setup). Below are the instructions I used to successfully allow a three-way sync without duplicating calendar entries:

1. If you currently use a standalone iCal that you now want to be synced to gCal, then backup your current iCal: To export go to File > Export. And then save to your Desktop. Import this calendar into gCal to save all your current iCal events. If you don’t use iCal currently (or already have it set up to sync with gCal using CalDAV), then go to the next step.

2. Turn on iCal < -> gCal syncing. Follow Google’s directions to set up CalDAV support for Google Calendar in Apple’s iCal. Create an entry to verify that changes made in iCal are reflected in gCal, and vice versa.

3. Turn off calendar syncing in iTunes. Since I only have a single calendar that is shared between my iPhone, iCal and gCal, I unchecked “Sync iCal calendars” under the Info tab in my iPhone device. It is fine to select other calendars that you only want to sync between iCal and your iPhone, but DO NOT select the newly created CalDAV calendar.

4. Turn on iPhone < -> gCal syncing. Here you have two options: Option 1, Google Sync (Exchange ActiveSync). Option 2, CalDAV. The thread on the Google Calendar support form compares these two methods. The gist of the comparison is that with ActiveSync your calendar appointments are “pushed” to you. Updates made to a calendar will be reflected instantly on your iPhone or any other device which supports ActiveSync. Currently there can only be a single ActiveSync account on the iPhone, so if you already have one from work, then CalDAV is your only option at this time. Google Sync allows you to sync contacts and calendar. CalDAV can only fetch appointment data on scheduled intervals or manually whenever the iPhone Calendar app is run. It does, however, allow up to 25 calendars with colors matching the gCal scheme.

Both ActiveSync and CalDAV worked great. I chose to stick with CalDAV because I don’t need appointments pushed to me. Running iPhone Calendar and having it quickly refresh is fine with me.

Option 1, Google Sync
Option 2, CalDAV

5. Try it out. Changes made on any of the calendars will now be synced. Let me know if this works for you. Thanks!

References:
Enable Google Calendar in Apple’s iCal
How to configure Google Calendar CalDAV in iPhone 3.0
Which is preferred on iPhone CalDAV or Exchange?
Sharing calendars with Google Calendar, iCal, and the iPhone
CalDAV: CalDAV Calendar Sync
Calendar & Contacts Sync: Set Up Your iPhone or iPod Touch
INSTRUCTIONS: The iPhone-iCal-gCal Sync Setup

A friend just showed me this terrific program that creates a unique slideshow with background music. You can upload your own photos or access galleries already created on Smugmug, Flickr, Picasa, and others. Clips of around 30 seconds are free, but then there is a charge for already videos.

Here’s one of Joe’s recent wedding that I think turned out pretty well:

Believe it or not, but I do have a ton of stuff that I’ll eventually get up on the blog. Sorry for the huge gap in updates. For now, I’ll post some pics and links to a couple of the weddings that I attended this summer:

Justin and Allison’s Wedding and Misc Photos from Atlanta:

Joe and Anne’s Wedding:

Aka funny math with words.

Just found this awesome site called New Math that has some really funny math equations.

Here are just a few of my favorites:
Filing = paper – entropy
Handball = racquetball – racquet
Infomercial = Information + commercial +Wait, there’s more
Pirate = thief + boat + bandana – leg
Easter bunny = Santa Claus – breaking and entering
Backyard = manifest destiny + fences

Check out the site because there’s a bunch more, including an RSS feed that I’m now following in Google Reader.

I occasionally run into the problem of being a few dollars short of qualifying for free shipping when buying products from Amazon. Fortunately, I found a cool site that finds “fillers” to add whatever amount you need to qualify for the free shipping. http://www.superfiller.com/

Basically you end up getting a low priced item for “free.”

I was glancing through the subjects in my spam email folder to make sure nothing good was getting deleted. I was fortunate to do this because I almost missed my good friend Andrew, the Chairman National Audit at Barclays, which according to Wikipedia, is actually true. He has a proposal that I cannot afford to ignore. According to the email header details, he must have sent this from his secondary office in Kiev, Ukraine (I’m thinking he’s on vacation.)

Here’s the email. It was quite an entertaining read and someone really put a lot of thought into it.

Dear Friend,
I am Andrew Likierman, Chairman National Audit at Barclays.I am contacting you concerning a deceased customer William Nathan,and an investment he placed under our banks management.I would respectfully request that you keep the contents of this mail confidential and respect the integrity of the information you come by as a result of this mail.
I contact you independently and no one is informed of this communication.I would like to intimate you with certain facts that I believe would be of interest to you.
In 2005, the subject matter came to our bank to engage in business discussions with our private banking division. He informed us that he had a financial portfolio of 2.35 million British Pounds Sterling, which he wished to have us turn over (invest) on his behalf.I was the officer assigned to his case, I made numerous suggestions in line with my duties as the de-facto chief operations officer of the private banking sector, especially given the volume of funds he wished to put into our bank. Read the rest of this entry »

Here are some funny quotes that I’ve found:

“(of Ronald McDonald) I know he’s a fictional character but if such a man existed, it would be the duty of social services to warn the local parents that he had come to live in the area.” —- Jeremy Hardy

“I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.” — Mark Twain

“It’s fascinating to think that all around us there’s an invisible world we can’t even see. I’m speaking, of course, of the World of the Invisible Scary Skeletons.” — Jack Handy

—-
“I have a bunch more where those came from. I’ll have to put them on here sometime.” — this one is me