If any fellow coffee addicts are looking for some free coffee, Starbucks is giving away a free tall(12 oz) cup next week. It’s only available from 10 AM to 12 PM so there’ll probably be horrible lines but it is free afterall.
P.S. Pete’s is way better =]
I just got my first letter back from a college - accepted to Cal Poly! It’s not my first choice but it’s such a relief to know that I got into at least one of the colleges I wanted to go to.
I’m really hoping for Berkeley, they have a great comp sci/business program and they’re close to homebut not too close (like Stanford). We don’t find out about most of the UCs until March 15th though, 9 days left!
Congratulations to everyone else who’s gotten acceptance letters!
I just got an update from Doug: the copies of Vista should arrive in about a week and we’ll have them shipped out asap. I can’t wait!
If anyone’s interested in a great leadership class check out Mr. Lynch’s class at De Anza college. I took the class in fall quarter right before I started planning the Vista Party and everything I learned there was directly applicable to the Vista Party. It’s a fun class, the tests are easy, the teacher is great and knows what he’s teaching well, and there’s no homework aside from reading. Also, it’s from 6-8 PM so there’s a large variety of students there which makes it even more interesting.
Microsoft just announced that it will donate a portion of its advertising revenue to charity for every instant message you send. Very cool, you can even choose the charity you donate too. I haven’t used msn messenger for ages but this is definitely incentive to switch back.
From a business standpoint this is a brilliant move from Microsoft, there are hundreds of people like me who’ll switch back(or to) Windows Messenger and they can’t lose money since it’s % of revenue rather than a fixed number. And they’re doing a great thing for humanity =]
The Browser War event yesterday was an incredible amount of fun. They flew the CTO of Opera, Hakon Wium Lie, down from Norway, Chris Wilson, group program manager of the IE platform, down from Washington and Mike Shaver from Mozilla (all the way from Mountain View). I felt really bad for Hakon, there were some delays in his flight and he had to give a speech right after a 22 hour flight, very good speech though, I was impressed.
Sadly there were no wars between the browsers, I personally was hoping for a gladiator style fight but they ended up agreeing with each other on just about everything. Overall it was great, the questions were interesting, the presenters were hilarious and kept everyone interested for 2 hours, and the overall atmosphere was just really friendly and welcoming. I kind of wish they had more seats though since people ended up having to stand and sit in the ground, still worth it! They’re having a similar event on March 28th which I would recommend for everyone, I’ll post the link when I find it.
I recently found out about this really cool T9 feature in my cellphone. It makes text messaging a LOT easier, you just push one key for each letter you want to type and it figures out what you’re trying to type. So, for example, lets say you’re trying to type in “hello” instead of typing in “4433555555666″ you’d just type in “43556″. It’s suprisingly good at figuring out what you mean, and if there’re multiple words you can choose the one you want from a list (or by hitting next on some phones). http://www.t9.com/ has some more information on it, and the feature is built into most (all?) phones so no need to download anything.
Kind of off-topic but if anyone is looking for a new Sprint phone I’d definitely recommend getting a fusic. I got one about a month ago after losing my old cellphone in Tahoe and it’s been great. Everything I wanted to change in my old phone is fixed: you can go into notepad while talking to someone, there’re more bars to indicate battery life, text messaging has a “choose from contacts” option(frustrated me to no end on my last phone), has an easily accesible “favorites” list that you can modify and tons of other little things that make it super convinient. Also getting an extra gig of memory is only like $25 and the music quality is excellent. It gets a bit weird when you play it at max volume on speaker phone but through headphones I’d say it’s as good as any other mp3 player. The only thing I’d change is not being able to set an mp3 song as your ringtone, but I keep it on vibrate anyway so not too much of a problem.
If anyone’s free tomorrow(Wednesday) at 6, Yahoo is hosting an “Attack of the DOMs” event, looks like fun.
I just sent the list of the people who won a copy of Vista to Microsoft, hopefully they’ll be able to ship them out soon. Congratulations again to everyone who won a copy!
If anyone’s interested in helping out at the next event(probably something similar to this) feel free to send me an e-mail at giraffeh@gmail.com I look forward to seeing everyone again!
If you weren’t able to get a copy of Vista from the party, Foothill College is part of the MSDN Academic Alliance program which means you can get a basically free ($5 for administration costs) copy of Vista if you take any one of their CTIS classes.
The CTIS classes at Foothill are amazing, I’d recommend taking one of Mike Murphy’s classes. He was my first computer science teacher and makes even the most tedious topics seem fun and exciting. The CCNA 1 class in particular is great for anyone who wants to get an overview of networking; you cover an incredible amount of material, the labs are fun and extremely fitting to the curriculum, and overall it’s just a great class. There’s, also, a variety of classes relating to administration (of both Microsoft and Linux servers), programming languages, and security. The spring quarter doesn’t start until April 9th so there’s still plenty of time.
Thank you everybody who showed up! I had an incredible amount of fun at the event and I hope everyone else did too. Luckily it didn’t rain and everything went pretty smoothly.
I’d just like to say thanks again to Doug Free and Nima Dilmaghani for sponsoring this event and to Mike Murphy and Chuck Lindauer from Foothill for letting us use their classrooms. Also, a huge thanks to my wonderful team of presenters and the volunteers who helped out.
I was thrilled to see that we got into the Mercury news, we were even on the frontpage of the Technology section!
