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I was just on the checkout line at Morton Williams when the guy in front of me greeted a passing woman. She turned around, gave the guy a really surprised look, and exclaimed,

Oh my gosh, you know my name! None of the other guys I had sex with remember my name.

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Free shipping! Only on eBay.

It is now less than an hour until 16:00 UTC, but a couple of Google Wave invitations are already being passed around on Twitter. One of these has found its way onto eBay, where the highest bid was $2000 and rising. What would you do to “be the one of the 1st to sink your teeth into the beta”?

Check here for more Google Wave merchandise, including invitations and fan gear. As for me… I’ll just wait patiently for a few more hours.

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Now’s just three days before Google Wave’s beta launch, or that’s what they say. There has been quite a bit of development going on, with Google polishing the interface and third-party developers pushing out exciting gadgets using the Wave API. I myself have been playing around with a small image editing gadget known as Imagine (link to gadget), though development has slowed substantially due to classes and such. Anyhow, I have a wave embedded into this post after the break, so be sure to interact with it if you have a sandbox account. If you don’t, well, here’s a screenshot.

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As we speed into the 21st century, online social networking is becoming an increasingly popular mode of communication. Since the rise of Twitter three years ago, it has been easier than ever, especially for professionals, to take advantage of this Internet phenomenon. Celebrities and athletes are not the only ones who embrace such technology: healthcare professionals such as doctors and nurses are also beginning to open accounts on services such as Twitter and Facebook. Early this week, for example, a hysterectomy and uterine prolapse surgery was broadcast on Twitter at the Cedar Rapids St. Luke’s Hospital in a series of 126 short updates (from bottom to top):

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I used to rely almost exclusively on SSH for remote administration, but I recently added an OpenVPN server to my toolkit. I was interested in the performance of OpenVPN compared to OpenSSH, so I ran several tests using iperf:

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Early this month I heard about the ECCERobot, or Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot. While standard humanoid robots mimic humans in appearance, ECCE copies the internal structures and mechanisms. The anthropomimetic design incorporates such elements as bones, joints, muscles, and tendons, allowing for the potential for human-like activity. ECCE’s drive system of elastic cables and drill motors may be complicated and inefficient, but it provides insight into our own design.

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Recently, I rewrote from scratch a two-year-old project of mine. Imagine, a browser-based image editor, had been sitting around collecting dust, so I figured I’d delete all the legacy code (almost all of it) and create something better. I’ve also been evaluating the possibility of integrating Imagine into Google Wave.

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I used the Kde4 + Firefox3 theme before I upgraded to Firefox 3.5. When I upgraded, I noticed how incredibly ugly Firefox looked because the theme was not compatible with this new version. After a few days, I set out to search for a slightly more compatible theme.

As it turns out, the author of the original theme also has a Firefox 3.5 compatible one called KFirefox. I think it looks a little better than the original, even. Here it is.

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Having unpacked much of my stuff at my new house, I found a neglected helium-neon laser. I’m surprised that I still have one of these things, since solid state lasers seem to be all the rage these days. Anyway, the design makes it quite suitable for experimentation. I dusted it off and decided to have some fun with one of my storm windows…

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I had always wanted a small distiller that I could use to purify some of the substances that I have been collecting, but it was just hours ago that I came up with a simple working design. The distiller is pictured below. As you can see, it is simply a small plastic tube punched through a large plastic tube (poke a snug hole through the large cap), with a glass tube connected to the large plastic tube by a bent needle. Here’s what each part does.

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