Just another day at the office (photo taken by Susan Shackelford Arnold)

I hope your Halloween preparations are going well. Yesterday, the HowStuffWorks.com office celebrated early. Employees with kids brought their little monsters to the office for a round of cubicle-to-cubicle trick or treating. The office was filled with dinosaurs, pirates, faeries, and enough animals to fill up a zoo. I managed to hide in a broom closet for most of it but eventually did emerge to take part in the festivities. Many people told me they liked my costume. I managed to refrain from responding with “What costume?” But on to TechStuff!

On Monday’s TechStuff, we took a look at Google Wave. In case you’ve not heard the buzz, Google Wave is a new communication tool developed by a team of Google employees in Australia. It combines elements from e-mail, instant messaging and collaborative software. It’s also an applications platform — developers will be able to create apps that run on top of Google Wave. At the moment, the tool is in the preview stage. It’s not entirely stable and only a few people have access (around 100,000, which sounds like a lot but really isn’t). Chris and I talk about the tool, its potential and our first impressions. We’re two of the lucky individuals who have Wave accounts. But until Google stabilizes the service and opens it to more people, it’s hard to say if Wave will make a big splash in the tech world. I’m almost ashamed that I made that pun.

On Wednesday, we take a look at two different music identification services: Shazam and Midomi. These two services allow users to identify songs. Shazam requires the original song — you hold a cell phone up to a speaker playing the music you want to know about and send the information to Shazam. Midomi is different: You can actually hum, whistle or sing to Midomi and get matches from its database of songs. That being said, Midomi’s accuracy depends on how well you convey the tune as well as the strength of its user-generated library of songs. I once tried to see if it could identify “Don’t Fear the Reaper” and it came back with “The Girl from Ipanema.” As Chris pointed out in the podcast, I needed more cowbell.

If you would like to hear more about Shazam, I recommend you check out our sister podcast called Stuff From the B-Side. Way back in February, they recorded an episode titled “How can your phone identify a song from a short clip?”

And if you want to learn more about everything else, hop on over to HowStuffWorks.com:

How Google Works
How Cell Phones Work
How Halloween Works