So much to say...

What?! He's posting again?!

Sorry I've not been around here for a while. I've been otherwise occupied -- with life!

So let me get a few things out there and then I'll try to get back to regular posting...

One big thing that has happened over the past couple of months involves our home computing environment. My wife and I were both really excited when Google announced their Chromebook beta program. We'd already come to love Google 's Chrome browser and the idea of having a Chromebook (for free!) was simply amazing. It's not quite a notebook and not quite a netbook. It's a laptop that's intended for web surfing. I filled out all of the lottery applications and kept my fingers crossed. I even found a site that was listing (still not sure how) all of the shipments as they went out and to which ZIP code they were shipped. Every time I found one that had been shipped to my ZIP, I'd call my wife and make sure she checked the porch for a delivery. But alas, it was not to be. Or was it...

I got my coworker caught up in the frenzy as well. He submitted his lottery form and waited with me for our present to show up at one our doorsteps. But again, nothing.

AND THEN... his other friend received one! We were geeked just to be able to hold it in our hands (on loan). I must admit to feeling a little bit like the Apple fanboys that I keep making fun of. I get you guys now. My friend was able to use the the CR-48 (the official name of the beta Chromebook) for a while. In fact, he just kinda took common law possession of it after a while. Oh well. I could live vicariously I guess...

THEN... One day, my friend came in to work and said he had something for me in his trunk, but he couldn't bring it inside the office. We had been talking about me taking some of his scrap computers to use for parts to beef up a few old ones I had laying around, so I figured it was an old CPU tower, or a monitor or something. He wouldn't fess up, though, so when it was time for lunch, we walked over to his car and he pulled a small briefcase-sized cardboard box out and handed it to me...?! It still hadn't hit me. Then I glanced at the side of the box and recognized the cartoon-like Rube Goldberg diagram of the CR-48 boxes I had seen in the YouTube unboxing videos! WHAT?! REALLY?! Apparently his friend had snagged another Chromebook! And he was giving it TO ME! WOW!

I snuck it home that night and waited until my wife and kids were asleep before I brought it in the house. I got a couple of hours out of it (configuring, charging, playing, investigating, etc) that night. And I've not seen it since :-( Well, not completely true, but it has definitely become my wife's laptop and not mine. I still use it occasionally, and really like a lot of what it has to offer (including the free built-in Verizon 3G access for 2 years, and the instant, OK, 8-second, boot up from power off, etc), but by allowing my wife to take ownership of it, I've been able to take over the other laptop we got last fall. Now we've both got something to use when needed.

Moving on...

My daughter ran track last spring and plans to run again this coming spring. I think that helped spur my son to join cross country this fall. They planned and raced all summer together. My son is definitely more of an endurance runner and my daughter the sprinter. He had some growing pains in his bones that kept him from fully participating in all of the meets, but I think he had a good time anyway. He's not the fastest runner, but he kept up with it. I can't fault him at all since I didn't even make it to the first meet when I was in track :-( I hope he continues with his plans to join track in the spring with his sister. It will make our lives a little more chaotic (I'm certain that the meets will be at the same time on completely opposite ends of the city), but I'm proud of both of them. My son and I were also planning a 14-ish mile bike trip for just the two of us late this summer, but I fear we may have missed the weather-window. Maybe we'll try again in the spring.

Both of my older kids spent the better part of the summer at my mother-in-law's house in North Carolina. They had a blast and have many great memories. They've both been talking about what to do next summer.

Hmmm... The older two have also had band and choir concerts this year. I'm glad that they've both found something creative that they enjoy. I enjoy hearing them "practice" at home as well. All of them are doing very well in school (as expected) and they have each found that they are smarter than they give themselves credit for (-- right son?! I know you're reading this. No more dumbing down the tests so you don't have to work as hard. They know how smart you are already!).

My wife has three jobs this year so far. Well, three paying jobs, all part-time, in addition to the volunteering she does at all of the schools and keeping the kids and the house in line. Tax time will be fun next year.

Speaking of jobs, I've got a new one too. My new job is pretty familiar territory for me, but for this move, I left a career of 18 years to start at the "bottom" of the totem pole again. It's a little, ok, a lot scary, but I think it was the best move for me right now. I'm excited about the possibilities for the future.

So that's a quick recap to bring me mostly current. Sorry I've been so lax lately, but I promise to try harder to post more often. Thanks for sticking with me.

Accidental discovery

Maybe I'm the last to notice this, I'm rarely the first, but tonight I was watching a video on YouTube and had to pause it for a moment. Meaning to scroll the page down to read the comments, I hit the cursor down key. Instead of scrolling down though, the little rotating circle on the video turned into a game of Snake! Hitting left, right, up and down I could steer the snake in an attempt to run over a single flashing dot, somewhere on the video screen. Hit that dot and the snake grows longer. Not sure how long it's been there or if it works on other sites with the same rotation icon while loading videos, but I thought it was a cool little Easter Egg to find tonight.

Did you hear?

A couple of weeks ago, there was an instance reported in the press of thousands of bird deaths all at the same time, all in the same area. Speculation for the deaths at the time ranged from fireworks, to weather phenomenon, to signs from God. It must have been a slow news week, because the media became obsessed with this particular news item. Suddenly, every day brought a new batch of mass deaths of everything from ducks to crabs, to fish, to whatever.

Then the news started reporting that this was a normal occurrence and it happens all the time. Suddenly it was a non-story. Or was it?

Think Google Docs is wimpy cousin to Office?

Think again!

But what if I don't want any cookies?

Google's Chrome browser is a very efficient browser for surfing the web. It's safe, speedy, auto updating and does just about everything I need it to. Or it did...

With the latest update they removed the ability to determine white sites are able to leave cookies. Well, that's not entirely true, but they certainly made it a lot harder to control. When I surf, I generally dislike allowing cookies unless it is required for the functionality of a site that I trust. Until recently Chrome allowed me to set all sites to prompt me for permission to leave a cookie. I'd get the alert and depending on the site, either allow all for that site, or block all for that site. As I was surfing, when I encountered a new site, I'd click a YES or a NO and that was it. It was a small extra step, but something that I felt gave me a little extra control over privacy (or the illusion of).

Now, Google has changed the options to allow all cookies or block all cookies (or "local content" as they're calling it). They allow you to set exceptions for sites as you want, but you have to go into the options menu a couple of steps and add them manually. A bit of a nuisance. Actually, enough of a nuisance that I bet they're counting on people not bothering. That's a pitty. Buzz on the Internet is that people are talking about abandoning Chrome over this one feature. I'm not sure I'm to that point yet, but I must say that this is definitely the first negative thing I've got to say about Chrome.

Google is known for making things better for us, before we even think of it. In this case I think that they over stepped the duty.

I'm hoping that Google will listen to posts like this one and all the others in the help forums, etc and give us back some control.

Looking for something?

When I look for something on the Internet, I usually start with Google. Within a few seconds I can usually find anything I'm looking for. Sometimes that's not fast enough though. Now Google offers Real Time Search. You type in a search term, and it updates automatically for you as it finds new matches. They've had this feature on the main search page as a section of the results when they felt appropriate, but now you can make it the whole results page. No need to refresh the page. The new results just appear out of thin air!

This is not something to use for finding out the name of the bands that played at the original Woodstock, but is better suited for keeping an eye on public opinion about your company, a competitor, breaking news, etc.

Lots more useful features on the site too! Kinda cool.

Expectations are high

Before my sons and I went for a bike/jog last night, my eldest wanted to map out the route on Google Maps to plan the distance; he's "training" for a run at school next week. He used the satellite view and the distance measurement tool. As he was doing this, my younger son asked if we could see our cat (who wanders outside all day) on the satellite view. I had to explain to him that the pictures being shown were taken over a year ago (average age is about 3 years from what I'm hearing) and that it was not real time. He was slightly disappointed, but understood.

As we got to about the half-way point of our travels, he asked how they took the pictures that were shown on-screen earlier. I explained that they used satellites, airplanes, and then even cars with cameras on top for the closer shots. I could tell that he had been thinking about this for a while.

I'm glad he's interested in this kind of stuff. He may one day be in the position to work on real-time satellite images, or at the very least, is likely to be able to experience it in his lifetime. I know that privacy advocates, et al will cringe reading this, and yes they have valid points, but I still think it would be cool technology!

Drinking the Kool-Aid

Google has received a lot of negative press about privacy since it first hit the market. It's mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" implies that it needs to collect all the world's information, or at least to see it. And what is information?

• a message received and understood
• knowledge acquired through study or experience or instruction
• data: a collection of facts from which conclusions may be drawn; "statistical data"

In Google's terms, that means, essentially anything it can get it's hands, er um, spiders on. Fromnews articles on CNN, to blog posts on A World Discovered, to videos of funny cats, to Britney Spear's son's birth certificate and other public records and maps (including StreetView imagestaken just tens of feet from your front door). It also includes health information provided by you, your doctors and other medical professionals assisting in your treatments. This also includes anything that it can gather and glean from your searching and usage on it's vast collection of web properties,the contacts that you communicate with through those services, and even your credit information when you use Google Checkout. Google's alliance with the US-National Security Agency does little to squelch fears about invasion of privacy (for Google or the US Government).

Scared yet? I was too. I was really leery about using Google Toolbar when it was first released. I was concerned about the fact that it would scan my entire hard drive in the interest of providing faster and better search results of my local docs as well as my web searches. I was concerned about the information that would pass through Google Mail (Gmail). I was scared about having a Google Health account. I was scared about all of the integration that the Nexus One offers.

I'm scared of dying too. But that too is inevitable.

I'm not saying that there is no risk with using all of Google's services, of providing them with your life and being, but I've come to realize that it's better to live than to fear dying. It's better to take advantage of all of the power that you're provided, than to feign blindness and ignore the elephant in the room. I'm not advocating running naked through the streets with a pair of scissors in each hand in the middle of rush hour, but, with clothes, using a crosswalk, you can still get pummeled.

The older I get, the less I remember. That too is a fact of life. But, an elephant, like Google (and the Internet) never forgets. I can look up phone numbers for people I haven't spoken to in eons (even if I don't know what city they live in). I can search for that cookie recipe that I know I had printed out somewhere but can no longer find. I can get turn-by-turn driving directions (the shortest, or mostscenic) to appointments at places I've never been (including seeing ahead of time what the building actually looks like.) I can find things so quickly from the Web that I have tossed my 1000's of bookmarks I spent so much time collecting and organizing years ago (a large number of them were no longer active anyway). I can get to my mail, and many of my documents from any computer in the world. I no longer need to worry about SPAM in my mailbox (I get one a year that slips through and 2800 a month that are cleansed, and no false positives in over a year). I'm entertained with news and posts that are of interest to me versus having to slog through the full news paper (or more often it's digital equivalent). It has literally changed the way I (and many millions of others) do things. It's freed us up to be more efficient, to worry about more important things and to think freer thoughts instead of having to occupy our brains with remembering and processing more trivial things. It's enriched my mind with more current, useful, entertaining information and knowledge.

There is a chance that Google will be hacked (again). There is a chance that the US Government isspying on it's own citizens. There is a chance that anything can happen (or already has without ourknowledge). We can become activists (that's the subject of an upcoming post), or we can take advantage of what's put before us and move on.

Google is a corporation with a reputation to uphold. If it does not keep it's users happy, there are many, many alternatives that users will flock to. If we all flock to other services, Google makes no money. We're not talking millions of dollars at stake. We're not even talking about hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. Try over 23.6 billion in full year revenue for 2009 -- and they're still growing at 6% a year even in this economy. I don't think that they have any plans to muck with that revenue stream knowing how fast it'd all be wiped out if they ticked us off.

Life's a risk. I chose to live. I choose to drink the Kool-Aid. (OK, that's an oxymoronic comparison I guess, but you get the point.).

BTW...

Had to create a new profile before I could get Chrome loaded. I love a lot of things about it now that I can use it, including the fact that EVERY text box comes with a built in (red-underline, Word-esque) spell checker. I am definitely noticing the speed increases as well.

Getting smarter...

Most people regard computers as really smart. In reality, they are no more smart than the programs, and hence the programmers, that tell them what to do. (Reserve the philosophical debates about Hal for later please).

That being said, even the really, really smart programmers at Google, and countless other prestigious companies and universities have yet to really make a computer as smart as a fifth-grader with regard to certain tasks. According to their own blog, Google says that "we can't write a program to identify objects in a photo or understand a sentence with anywhere near the precision of even a child."

Lest you feel like taking all of your Google stock and funneling it to a company who can program computers better, there is visible progress to report. Google has forever used synonyms to help return the data that you're looking for when searching. It's a fundamental necessity, but a very difficult one to master.

They cite other examples in their post, but here's a snippet showing why it's so difficult to get it right.

Another example is the term "GM." Most people know the most prominent meaning: "General Motors." For the search [gm cars], you can see that Google bolds the phrase "General Motors" in the search results. This is an indication that for that search we thought "General Motors" meant the same thing as "GM." Are there any other meanings? Many people can think of the second meaning, "genetically modified," which is bolded when GM is used in queries about crops and food, like in the search results for [gm wheat]. It turns out that there are more than 20 other possible meanings of the term "GM" that our synonyms system knows something about. GM can mean George Mason in [gm university], gamemaster in [gm screen star wars], Gangadhar Meher in [gm college], general manager in [nba gm] and even gunners mate in [navy gm].

They're getting much better at using synonyms, and now they're showing you where they're used in your search results by bolding the text in the results set. Are they smarter than a fifth-grader yet? I've not done any quantifiable tests, but I'd still rather ask Google than my fifth grader just in case.

If any of you want to funnel your Google stock anywhere, I'd be happy to take the proceeds off your hands. I'm just sayin'

The many faces of Picasa

We use Google's Picasa to manage, edit, and create with our photos at home. The newest version come with a "face recognition" element. Basically, it looks for faces in your photo collection and then asks you to label them with names. As it finds other pictures that look like the face you've labeled as "bob" it suggests that maybe this is "Bob" and you can confirm or deny. Eventually, it will make it easier to find pictures of "Bob" in your collection. You can make interesting stuff with those found pictures of "Bob" as well.

That's the premise anyway.

Google is a powerful and brilliant company that releases [mostly] great products and feature sets. This one is a little hard to get used to though. As I was working through the bucket of faces to apply names to, my wife walked up and said something along the lines of Amy isn't in that picture, that's a picture of Mary. I thought that I had mislabeled the face. Closer inspection proved that I had labeled it correctly. Amy was in that picture -- actually as a small print in a picture on the wall behind Amy in the picture! Picasa had found a picture within a picture. That was a little strange...

Moving on, though, Picasa's ability to find any face in any picture made it a little hard at times. A little comical at others. It actually "found faces" in baby doll faces and in scanned comic strips, and pictures of Lego creations. But, a word to all other Picasa users... beware of taking pictures at parades, public wave pools, or in rooms covered with family photo collages on the wall! :-) It takes FOREVER to get through those pictures...

We have unearthed a few pictures we forgot we had by going through this process though. it's worth it I think, but can be quite tiring at times as well. And it only does it per profile for some reason, so for now, I'm consolidating my naming activities in my wife's profile since that's where we started, but would be nice to have this as a cross-profile feature. Oh well. Still have 14,000 or so faces to name. Better get going.

A little doodling

One of the little "personality" things about Google is their Google Doodles -- changes to their logo on the main Google page that represents a significant event or anniversary. I'd been catching most of them by accident when I saw them. Using bookmarklets as I do, I don't often go to the Google homepage often anymore.

Along comes Doodle Watch. Several sites had collections of the Doodles, including Google itself, but this is the first site that does it all automatically, from different countries, allows rating, searching via tags, guesstimates when the next one will appear, and a lot more. Kinda cool just to browse random Doodles as well.

Quick note: Did you know that clicking on one of these Doodles on Google's home page will automatically take you to more information about that particular topic?

Chrome

My wife had been suffering with IE for a while and so I finally got her set up with Google's Chrome browser. No more unresponsive links. No more crashing the whole browser when one tab flakes out. The great speed claims are holding true for her so far. She said the transition was really easy and no issues. It imported her bookmarks. Saved her default search engine...

Google is apparently really pushing Chrome this holiday season as well. Though I've not seen them anywhere "in the wild" yet, I did come across some really cool ads for Chrome...

Speed:


Tabs:


Themes:


Stability:


Security:


Omnibox:


Incognito:


Full video:


Making of...


Japanese ad

Join me for lunch?

Two quick lunch-time sites for reference today. The first is to help you find a fast food restaurant. I know, I know. Not many people need help with this. Seems like you can't spit into the wind without a little spittle landing in a fast food joint's parking lot (don't ask me where that visual came from). They're everywhere. Well, now they're on the web too -- at Fast Food Maps.

If you can't talk someone into joining you across town for your favorite fast food, how about meeting them halfway using the Mezzoman site. Enter a starting point for you and one for your friend (city will do) and then where you want to meet (Italian, golf course, pizza, a mall, etc) and the site will map (and list) out suggestions for you -- halfway between you and your friend. It'll even give you a link to see the weather at that meeting spot. Pretty cool.

And of course, both of these sites use Google Maps for their interface :-)

Larry's insights

Larry Page, Google's Co-Founder, gave the Commencement Address at the University of Michigan this past weekend. (Watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFb2rvmrahc Read: http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/annc/20090502-page-commencement.html)

There were several quotes from the address that I wanted to share:

"Sometimes it's important to wake up and stop dreaming."

UofM's Leadershape program's slogan is to: "[have a] healthy disregard for the impossible."

"I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. I know that sounds completely nuts. But, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition."

"What is the one sentence summary of how you change the world? Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!"

"Please keep [your families] close and remember: they are what really matters in life."

The guy's delivering the commencement address at UofM. He co-founded and built one of the most recognizable, and arguably, useful companies in the world. He's worth a bazillion dollars. Seems like a pretty smart fella to me. Maybe we should listen to him.

Site translation bookmarket

I was gonna build my own (see previous post), but I found one that worked while looking at other bookmarklets today!

Simply create a favorite (on your link bar for ease of use) and use the code below as the URL. You'll likely get an alert, but just click OK and proceed.

javascript:location='http://translate.google.com/translate?u='+encodeURIComponent(location);

Then when you visit a page not in English, simply click the bookmarklet (favlet), and the page will re-appear in (machine-translated) English, courtesy of Google!

What did you say?

I learned something new tonight. Actually, it's just another example of how smart Google is, and how powerful their assistance can be... when you know where to fund it.

When I get bored, sometimes I hit the "Next Blog" link at the top of the Blogger site. This takes you to a random blog. Fortunately for Blogger, they're international. That drives more traffic, more eyes, and hence money (at least in someone's business plan, though I'm still not sure how). Unfortunately for me, I don't speak Portuguese, Romanian, Japanese, Spanish, nor many of the other languages of people that post on Blogger. Fortunately for me, I know a little about Google. :-)

I know that Google has a Language Tools link on their home page next to the search box. That page then has a Translate a web page section. If you give Google a URL and tell it to translate from Portuguese to English, for instance, you can generally get a good enough machine translation to get the gist of the site. But what if you don't know the starting language? Us dumb Americans suck at internationalization stuff. Well, a little URL hacking and I found out that Google doesn't really care what the originating site's language is (or more precisely, they can figure it out themselves.) So, by adding http://translate.google.com/translate?u= in front of a site's URL that you need translated, Google will do all of the work!

I'm working on a bookmarklet that will do this automatically, but it's getting late. I'll add that as a follow up post tomorrow.

Auf Wiedersehen. Arrivederci. Tot ziens. Adeus. :-)

Analog Google

OK, we all know that Google is a dominant player in all things digital. I've talked about Goog-411 (800-466-4411) before as an essential number to have on your cell phone, but I was surprised to see it on an analog phone the other day while shopping. Clearly this was the phone manufacturer's attempt to up-play it's otherwise lack-luster run of the mill cheapo phone. "Capitalize on Google's name, sell more product." It appeared to be an official logo (not sure if they paid for it's use or whether it's legal or not). Called out right underneath the LCD display was a button with a Goog-411 logo on it. The obligatory "burst sticker" image was on the outside of the box proclaiming it's compatibility with Goog-411 as well. Well, duh. Can't ANY phone make a toll-free call?

Now Google really DOES know what you're searching for before you ask for it

Well, kinda. Apparently they've kicked another project out of the labs and into the wild. Google Suggest will automatically suggest search terms for you as you type them in to Google. It will also give you a relative indication as to the popularity of the search term. They say it helps reduce spelling errors and speeds typing in the search terms of the users. It doesn't seem to work on iGoogle yet, though.

Another write up on the Google Suggest roll out can be found on arstechnica site.

It's a small world...

Search is pretty much done. So says Google. Sure, they'll continue to get incrementally better, but until it knows what you're searching for and delivers it before you ask for it, it's still gonna be search. All that's left is to deliver the actual results a little differently, provide a little niche that can grab a few users every now and then.

That's what Tag Galaxy is attempting. OK, it's limited to Flickr images, and may be a little slow at times, and not a complete index, but what do you want then you're trying to slog through the millions of images tagged on Flickr? What they do is present the search results (and maybe more importantly, the search refinement process) in a unique way. You start off with an initial tag -- a keyword representing an image you are looking for. It then it finds related tags and presents the whole search process as planets (or satellites) around a central object -- complete with celestial texture overlays on the orbs. The size of the sphere represents the relative quantity of shared tags. You refine your search by clicking on any additional tag you want to add until you have your search terminally defined. When complete, click on the central orb and you'll be presented with your selected images pasted on a 3D sphere like a mirrored disco ball. You can spin the gallery with your mouse and click on an image to enlarge it.

Is this the end of Google? Hardly, but it's another search site worth looking at...once...