I know a few people very close and very dear to me who suffer from depression and it is so difficult to communicate and understand what exactly it is that they are going through.

From time to time, I can feel a little down myself, without a specific reason to explain my careless mood. However, for people who are depressed more than ocassionaly and often require medication, it has simply become part of their lifes...so much that it seems that mood simply takes control. I don't undertand how someone can not be in control of themself...and I have learned not to try to understand either...I don't think I would be able to understand anyways, even it were to happen to me.

Here is a very brief article that attempts to explain in a few paragraphs how people feel when they are depressed, why it happens and how you should react.

Read more:  http://psychcentral.com/

Update: site seems to be down...here is Google's cache version. 

"Survival of the fittest is a phrase which is a shorthand for a concept relating to competition for survival or predominance. Originally applied by Herbert Spencer in his Principles of Biology of 1864, Spencer drew parallels to his ideas of economics with Charles Darwin's theories of evolution by what Darwin termed natural selection. [wikipedia]"

Now, we know this well established concept is applied to everyday living organisms. But what about the not so obvious ones...? What about M & M's?

Read more: http://www.laughbreak.com/stories/

Resizing an image is nothing new, and if you maintain the aspect ratio, it will look exactly the same but smaller or larger: smaller, you'll see less of it and larger, you'll distort the image.

But what if you could in some way, intelligently resize an image without distorting the content of it...? What if that intelligent technology could identify the less important background pixels in an image and delete those to shrink the image without touching the main object in the middle?

That sounds crazy, but that is exactly what this technology will offer. (Imagine this technology built into your browser...)

A cup of coffee is just a cup of coffee, like anywhere else, right? I will have to disagree with that statement... I don't know whether  it is just the differences in culture, but the coffee selection in Europe is just not that extensive as it is here in the US.  I live in Seattle, where there is literally a Starbucks on every corner and one can simply not avoid the sometimes ridiculuous combinations that people come up with when ordering a cup of coffee.

If you were ever wondering what all these italian names for different types of coffee really mean when put tugether in a cup, here is a handy illustration that simplifies the mixtures and their exotic european names.

Read more: http://www.lokeshdhakar.com/... 

With less than $5 and it is incredibly simple. I had known about the technology, but thought it involved a more sensitive and expensive equipment. It turns out you can make yourself a simple Laser Microsphone with a $2 laser and the light sensor from a nightlight...

The technology involves around the fact that sounds [of your voice] are simply waves that cause vibrations in the air. The windows in any room will vibrate accordingly when impacted with these vibrations. If you point a laser light at the window and capture the reflected light on a sensor, any vibration on the window will be reflected and captured in your sensor. It is just a matter of translating the vibrations back to sound with software and any laptop with Windows will do that for you.

Read more: [via LifeHacker] http://lifehacker.com/...

Rebooting a Windows computer is a pain in the neck and depending on the OS, hardware or software installed, it can take quite a while for the machine to boot up and be fully responsive. Averages run around one and a half minute. first the BIOS loads, and then eventually Windows.

So, what if you could just restart Windows, without restarting the BIOS?

"Sometimes, you need to reboot Windows (e.g. when installing new software), but there is no need to restart BIOS, too. However, the default is to reboot both. (That’s called doing a “cold boot,” rather than a “warm boot.”) There’s a trick that works on both XP and Vista to get it to do a warm boot instead, thus saving you 30 seconds per cycle"

Read more:  http://www.codejacked.com/

Update: Apparently this trick only worked in older Windows 95/98 machines. Details here.

I read this brief post and was brought back in time when I actually would have thought certain things about the relevance of the class material in front of me with real life. How can this possibly be useful for any career or for life in general? This is just another hypothesis or algorithm exercise that has absolutely no purpose other than that it is needed to pass this course.

I wish I had received the following answer and hopefully I would have paid more attention to all the following "useless" exercises....

Read more: http://www.marcandangel.com/

So, you have  a few minutes left to just surf the web... maybe check reddit.com and you know you'll get stuck there for way longer than that.

Why not take the time and learn something the easy way by just watching a 5 minute video on the subject?

"5min is a place to find short video solutions for practical questions and a place for people to share their knowledge.

The idea behind 5min is very simple: any solution can be visually explained in no more than 5 minutes." 

Read more: http://www.5min.com/

"Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) is the first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers.

The set of web services APIs allows the movement of money between any two entities, humans or computers. It is built on top of Amazon's reliable and scalable payment infrastructure."

It seems very flexible (hence the name, I guess...) and the pricing is surpisingly decent as well.

There are several companies out there doing this this, PayPal being one of them, but I think this will offer some serious competition.

Read more:  http://www.amazon.com/...