For all those Amazon fans out there… They just rolled out a whole list of RSS feeds for categories… Check them out at

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/xs/syndicate.html/103-3496998-6955033

(from Robert Scoble)

Could potentially use something like this for some of our high-profile installs. The NEC LCD3000 (30″) is still over $4k.

30″ LCD Sale, Mar 3
Last day. Dell Home has a $400 off coupon good on their 30″ LCD W3000 TV 1280×768, DVI, Code: 5410C872D91E Exp 3/3

$2799 - $400 coupon = $2399 shipped free.

Sorry to miss the meeting tonight, I was hacking away to make the groupsATstanford template as compatible as possible. You can find it here:

GroupsAtStanford prototype layout

Except for a 2-pixel nudge of the menu bar to the right in IE that is driving me crazy (any ideas?). this design is stable across all major browsers I have access to (UPDATE: IE 5 on the Mac doesn’t show the “imagedisplay” featured images). Try it in Mozilla Firefox or Apple’s Safari browser to get the best experience.

Please mess around with it, play with the widgets, roll over the buttons, and comment on what you find and think. Are the categories right? How’s the contextual information on the left? Is it too busy visually? Not busy enough? Boring? Shocking?

Once the main layout is stabilized, I’ll move on to the individual sections’ display and the main index page display (”the dashboard”, I like to call it). Then we can start cramming MovableType into tight spaces to do what we want it to.

Hello ISIS Crew - If anyone, or is ISIS as a group, is interested, please let me or Sharon Spain know directly…

Position Description:
Asian American Art Project
Undergraduate Intern

The Asian American Art Project is looking for an undergraduate student to digitize motion picture film footage (primarily 16mm and 35mm). The five films, which are fragile in nature due to age, vary in length from 30 minutes to two hours, and include a feature length film, and documentation of artists at work. The hope of the project is to both preserve the films from future deterioration as well as have them in a format for future web use. If time permits, beyond the transfer of each complete film into digital format, the student may work with project personnel on the editing of footage for specific use. In addition to the actual digitizing, the student will be responsible for certain administrative duties including corresponding with film lenders, coordinating shipping or pick up/return of film, and securing written permission for use of the digitized images.

Candidates should have knowledge of the procedures involve with digitizing film, and the care and handling of archival footage. We understand there is a facility on campus where such transferring can take place, so would hope that this resource could be utilized.

Asian American Art Project Website

The Digital Signage Showcase, part of the NSCA Systems Integration Expo is happening in Las Vegas from March 19-21. It features behind the scenes tours of Vegas multimedia spectacles, project management and technical tutorials and amrket place session. Register (for free) at http://nscaexpo.org/ with code DS01.

Anybody want to do an ISIS trip to Vegas to kick off spring break?

Business 2.0 has a feature on the rise of Coolsign into an effective advertising tool. It includes some statistics and pricing that should be able to help us determine the value of EventsAtStanford.

A giant Microsoft sponsored video archive of cool tech talks. In case you feel compelled to learn something and happen to be at a computer.

An interesting article at Reuters summarizes Sergey and Larry’s talk at TED about the “Google Top 100″ new ideas; the “high-density clusters” of engineers that sparks innovation; and its group-supporting software and room design.

So, knowing the various intellectual affinities for robotics and web technology be many of the ISIS crew, I was wondering if we might be able to help my friend with developing and/or architecting his live robot design concept.

His name is Ridha Azaiz, a graduating high school senior in Germany and a rising star is robotics (Arthur Fischer Inventors Award). Next week he will be interviewed by the German equivalent of the MIT Technology Review. Sadly, he missed Stanford’s deadline for applications but he did apply to MIT so he’s set.

Attached is a PDF outlining his concept for robot control showing how the various components are linked, including the video processing part and the signal processing part. The missing component is the control page which would be a webpage that would allow a user could push “right” and the number “1″ which would then be processed by a serial interface. The robot will know how to process the signal, which can be either binary, ASCII, or a text string (no matter). However, the signal needs to be at the speed of 9200 baud with no parity.

Here are links to learn more about his Unique Robots and view his Concept Design.

thefacebook.com has now been expanded to include Stanford and Columbia. the Harvard guy somehow got all the information about dorms and classes and integrated it into his system. i’m a little worried about that, because if people start signing up for his system, then we may have a little trouble in differentiating ourselves and stealing away his critical mass. i think we can offer a superior product by offering axess integration among other things, but we’ll need to do this fast. so what do we do now and what steps do we need to take?