Well, my presentation didn't go so bad (see slides on the right). Now I get to do a homework and a lab for Professor Sanchis! W0o0O0t! So let's outline the situation:

• It's the last day of classes
• Two assignments.

Oh well... Guess I'll get going soon and be grateful my other professors didn't give me 2 assignments each Time to get at it... cheers! See y'all in 9.5 days

Well, we're officially back, having experienced somewhat of a downer after an otherwise awesome weekend. Needless to say we'll be trying again at some point. While Kaleena was interviewing, I was walking through DC looking for Murky Coffee. Failing that, and finding the Library of Congress still closed, I finally ended up at the cyberSTOP cafe, halfway across town near Dupont Circle. It's a nice place, although I really wish they'd make it non smoking. My clothes really stank when I came out of that place.

After Kaleena was done we grabbed some dinner (or really a late lunch for the both of us) and stopped by the White House for a picture. Ignore the truck. As you can see the architecture is a little bit different from some of the other houses. The houses in DC remind me a little bit of home, mainly because they use a lot of brick (much more than in Upstate New York anyway).

Here at Colgate, it's colder, wetter and generally less cool than in Washington. On top of that we have to do work, too!

I probably won't be able to post to this site from Washington, so everyone please have a great weekend. On the bright side, I will hopefully be taking plenty of pictures to post sometime next week.

Unfortunately my week's going to be ridiculously busy after I get back, so I can't guarantee I'll be able to post when I get back on Tuesday either. Oh well. In the meantime, here's a shot of Kaleena wearing her new multi-colored footglove. Bet you weren't expecting *that*

Good news -- Kaleena finally got her digital camera today. Guess she's all set for her trip to Korea now. The top picture is the main result so far. Joepie says 'Haai!'

Colgate Book Exchange

Thankgiving break seems like a long time ago now. I've thrown myself at a little project the last couple of days: improving the Colgate Book Exchange. Have a look at the screenshots; this is what the site looks like now. The basic concept is still the same: the site lets you keep track of a 'Books to Sell' and a 'Books to Buy' list.

I didn't just change the layout and the graphics, though. The most important new 'feature' is integration with Amazon.com. For every search result, a little Amazon icon indicates whether that book is available. The search result detail also includes the lowest offered price at Amazon. Clicking on the icon takes you straight to that book's page on Amazon.

The most obvious advantage is that if you can't get a certain book from another Colgate student, you can easily pick it up on Amazon. This makes it more useful to keep track of your 'Books to Buy' list on the site. It also forces the students who are selling books to price their books competitively. On top of that, the integration script I wrote to fetch this information from Amazon was a very cool little excercise in web services programming, and the little icons have a very important geekness factor.

By the way, note that books listed on the Colgate Book Exchange are *not* automatically cross-listed on Amazon. I figured that'd be ever so slightly 'beyond the scope' of the Book Exchange (read: although it'd be awesome, it would be way too time consuming to implement).

On that note, I have a couple more things to do. The front page needs some instructions (and some 'terms of service'). After that, I'll be bulk e-mailing and putting up posters like last semester... Oh joy.