• Russel Davies painted his laptop to work as a blackboard. I think the acrylic casing for the iBook makes an excellent whiteboard too.
• Friend and mentor Cong Yu just got an honorable mention in the SIGMOD Dissertation Award:
  

  ...Two other nominees receive Honorable Mention recognizing their outstanding work on theoretical foundations and development of algorithms with great impact on important practical problems: Cong Yu, for his dissertation on “Managing Complex Databases in a Schema Management Framework” at the University of Michigan, and, Nilesh Dalvi, for his dissertation on “Managing Uncertainty Using Probabilistic Databases” at the University of Washington.

  It’s interesting to see the hiring trends : the Award was won by now-MSR researcher Ariel Fuxman. Nilesh and Cong are both Yahoo! Researchers.

• Natalie Du Toit’s “wonderful story of courage, determination, discipline, hopes and dreams”, becoming the first amputee to qualify for the Olympics.
• It’s not every day that the White House asks you to become a Vampire Slayer.

• Look, I’m on the department homepage. (permalink)
• A rather nice regular expression wizard.
• Mountain View / Delhi startup Slideshare (where my friend Kapil is Tech Lead) just received 3 million dollars of venture funding!
• Chrysler offers a $2.99 gas card-- with their new cars. Is this really the future of American vehicular innovation?
• Javascript czar Mihai Parparita released Mail Trends that let you visualize and analyse your email.

Links today brought to you by Red Bull™, my abusive friend in a can pushing me through a rather crazy day.

• Lego Schoolbag : If I was a 10 year old girl, I would give away my younger brother for this one.
• Every expression in this picture is priceless. I like how our hero has resigned to prayer.
• A hilarious sketch from Snuff Box, starring Matt Berry, who also stars in the hilarious britcom The IT Crowd.
• Adobe is opening up the SWF and FLV formats with the Open Screen project. (No sir, this is not about Single White Females or Fine Looking Virgins.) Flash has been sort of open for a while, with projects like SWFTools and GNash, but this takes things to a whole new level, with a slew of bigwig corporate backers. Flash and FLV have been in my opinion the critical enablers to the online video revolution; and this is definitely a great step ahead. I’m curious to know what Microsoft’s Silverlight team is thinking, as well as the folks at Sun (who just opened up all of Java). And of course, let’s not to forget the Android folks who have a very pretty stack, but tacking on some Flash magic would definitely be a very big deal. Considering the significant overlap between supporters of the Adobe effort and the Google effort, this is going to be fun to watch.

• Groovin’ Kittens, using a laser pointer.
• The Speedo LZR, a seamless swimsuit so good that it’s causing controversy.
• My buddy Kapil ‘s dotcom SlideShare was hit with DDOS attacks last week.
• Suman discovers the new WUBI option in Ubuntu that allows you to install Ubuntu as a Windows application, without making any partitions.
• Some rather creepy and effective posters against meth use.
• The Museum of Broken Relationships collects intriguing articles from breakups, and is on tour this year.
• The Boston Consulting Group is hosting a 3-day workshop for PhDs graduating in 2009. Tentative Schedule: Day 1: Removal of Nerd Layer. Day 2: Brainwashing and Jargon Coating. Day 3: Dangling of Infinite Money and handing out Armani-stitched uniforms.
• Twitter founder Jack Dorsey wears an interesting nose ring. Here’s what the website looked like on paper.
• jQuery inventor John Ressig talks about Orto, a JVM implementation written in Javascript. Now all I want is for someone to run Rhino on it, and have the universe collapse from under us.