One of the fun things about school is that after Christmas you get to observe the trends. This year, the gift of the year seems to be the Ipod Nano 2Gigabyte. There are also a bunch of PSPs floating around the school now. (I can't believe the office doesn't have a huge pile of Ipods and PSPs from annoyed teachers). My 4 person programming class this morning had 2 people come in (and continue) listening to new Ipod Nanos (Which aren't allowed). Even more amusing are the PSP people, who are trying to figure out how to browse the web during school, particularly to look at blocked sites. This is in theory possible as one of the science teachers does have an AP on the school network. The problem with all this is that the school uses a Proxy Server for filtering, and firewalls anything not routed through the proxy. For those not familiar with proxies, A proxy server is a server which you redirect your internet traffic through either to share it among computers or to filter it. Nobody seems to realize this so the speculation never fails to amuse me (as does the fact that the access point is completely open and unencrypted). Last year this same sort of fad gift giving occurred in cell phones (and people still SMS each other during class). Why doesn't anyone control this madness?
Anyway, Enough venting about school. In other news, Lifehacker posted a nifty link to a site that searches flikr based on a sketch you draw in a small box on the website. I am on my pocket PC right now, so I will fix the links later but for now you can check it out here (if the server isn't to busy):http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/
The original Lifehacker post can be found at: http://www.lifehacker.com/software/flickr/retrievr-search-flickr-by-sketching-146191.php
In the land of consoles: I posted awhile ago about the chronic overheating of the new Xboxes (PC only my self). Slashdot has links to the solution today: Water cooling (http://games.slashdot.org/games/06/01/03/2135238.shtml?tid=211&tid=137)
Wouldn't it just be easier for everyone if they invested their money in new (upgradable) PC hardware. Its more flexible, cheaper (if you know what you are doing anyway) and faster (except right after the console's release). So wouldn't it just be easier if everyone got computers and dedicated them to gaming to deal with the typical virus problems (though they are bound to spread to consoles sooner or later).
Anyhow, Sorry about the venting tonight, hopefully you get something out of it ;-)
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