How cool am I?

Amazon.com has a 'loaner' segway for employees to play on and a couple days ago somebody on our team signed it out. The story goes that it was accidentally purchased by some SDEs working on the order pipeline because they kept pretending to purchase it in as a test case.

AWS v4 is finally public! For those of you who are new, AWS == Amazon Web Services and the product that just launched is an improved API for programmatic access to Amazon's product data. (I should say AWS4 quasi-launched, because we're still calling it "beta," whatever that means anymore -- everything nowadays is beta)

I had very little to do with this product, but if want a little thrill, you can click here to see the tiny part that I did work on (SimilarityLookup). Clicking the link sends a request to Amazon asking for items "similar" to Joel Spolsky's new book. The difference between the page you'll see and Amazon's regular detail page for this product is that the former is XML which makes it readable by humans AND computers. Most humans will stick with the regular Amazon.com site, but those with great product-data-driven application ideas should look into writing code against AWS!