The Spring 2008 semester ended dramatically for me today. I was about an hour into my Organic Chemistry final when the fire alarm went off. My professor had us leave our exam, take our stuff and leave the room. It was pretty obvious that she didn’t have a backup plan for something like this. I don’t know that I would either if I were a professor.

After about 15 minutes, the alarm was still going off. (Kind of suspicious too…I overheard a fellow student saying that the same thing happened during the previous class this morning. Either some students are scheming, or there is a serious malfunction with the fire alarm.)

We were told to go ahead and go home. Since we were all together, there was no way to prevent people from talking and sharing answers, so it wouldn’t be fair to let us continue taking the exam. She said that she would collect all the tests and figure out a way to grade them that would be fair.

I got about 1/2 completed with still an hour left when the alarm went off. We’ll see how it turns out.

One thing is for sure - if anyone out there is currently taking or going to take Organic Chemistry - go download the desktop version of Marvin Sketch. It’s an incredibly useful software package that lets you draw molecules in 2D or 3D. There are tools to see stereochemistry, radicals, and S/R chirality. You can also have the IUPAC name of a molecule displayed after you’ve drawn it. I wrote about this program back at the beginning of the semester, and can now say that I don’t know what I would have done without it.

If you’ve got an iPhone or iPod Touch, you’ll be happy to know you can now take advantage of Google’s mobile interface for your ASU account.

In a post on Thursday, Google made a few exciting announcements:

• Mobile version of Google News is now available for all you news junkies
• Expanded Google for iPhone and iPod Touch to 33 new markets and 16 more languages
• Full mobile integration of Google services with Google Apps accounts

I have a personal Google account in addition to my ASU Google Apps account. I noticed that you can be logged into both at the same time on my iPod Touch. This means I can get my ASU email, and browse my Google Reader account without having to log in/out. Beauty.

Does anyone else use Google on their iPhone or iPod Touch?

If you’re a procrastinator like me, you are probably not thinking much about fall semester. Especially not about the books that you are going to need for your classes. Hopefully this will help motivate you to get off your butt and save yourself some money on your books.

At the beginning of this semester, I wrote passionately about my outrageous text book costs for two of my classes. It sparked some great comments from classmates and professors, and has turned into one of Geek Stew’s most popular posts.

A week after my initial post published, the State Press ran a story about Chegg.com. (The link is to download a PDF copy of the original story.) Chegg.com is a site that allows students to rent text books at a FRACTION of the cost of purchasing. If I had known about Chegg, I could have saved about $300 this semester. Live and learn, right kids?

For your book-renting convenience, there’s a button at the top of Geek Stew that will take you to Chegg.com. I also updated their search tool in the sidebar so you can search for your books by entering in the Author/Title/ISBN number.

Oh - and to give you a warm fuzzy, Chegg.com will plant a tree for every book you rent.

Go get yer books!

I logged into my ASU Google Docs account yesterday morning to a great little surprise. It looks like ASU students now have access to the new offline features of Google Docs.

Google Docs is only the second web application from Google to take advantage of their Gears API (the first was Google Reader back in May). In a nutshell, Gears is “…an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline.” If you haven’t seen it already, here is the video announcement that Google published at the beginning of April.

There are a bunch of sites that take advantage of Gears already. There’s even a feed that features companies who have adopted Gears’ technology.

I just checked out a personal finance site called Buxfer that looks pretty cool. It has all the tools you would expect from a finance application - track spending, sync automatically with your existing accounts, add tags to purchases to see where the money’s going. They even have gadgets that you can drop on your Facebook, Netvibes, or myASU homepage. Take a tour of Buxfer’s features and sign up for a free account if you’re interested. I think I will…

Oh yeah - and remember Zoho? That online suite of insanely useful applications? Zoho has been using Google Gears since November 2007 with their Zoho Writer application. If you don’t have a Zoho account, what are you waiting for?

Have fun off line, kids.

Hopefully this is just a glitch that will be fixed soon, but it looks like IMAP support has disappeared from Gmail.

Techcrunch reported it just moments ago at IMAP Support Disappears from Gmail.

I really hope this isn’t permanent.

UPDATE: An announcement was just posted in the Gmail Help Discussion group. Looks like it’s a temporary error and they’re working on fixing it.

UPDATE #2: Looks like it’s working again. At least in both of my accounts…that was fast.

Related posts:

• POP Goes the Gmail (part 1)
• POP Goes the Gmail (part 2)