Tempting offer from Google

On the Official Google Blog today there's an attractive offer (attractive for Google nerds like me anyway) for anybody to get a free Google Checkout t-shirt if you spend $20 at an online store using Checkout. I'm pretty sure I'm going to do this given that the shirt just looks irresistible.

What should I buy? I'll keep a record of what happens with this and report here...

How fast can you type?

This is a cool web site to test your typing speed - I got 95.6 wpm.

Yahoo weirdness

Here's an odd thing I noticed on Google Blogoscoped - if you go to Yahoo and type in "google.com", the search results are there but above the first search result they have placed a search bar trying to entice you to search with Yahoo. It's noteable that they don't do this for any other searches or for searches of any other search engines besides Google. Apparently MSN pulls the same tactic.

It's a war out there between the search engines; everyone wants your clicks and eyeballs.

Dusty Baker: "Cubs still in it" ... huh?!

I know he's the manager, and the manager has to have a positive outlook, but I was still just laughably surprised to see this article. One of the things I really like about baseball is some of the psychology you can glean from how people involved in the sport think and work:

"What do you want me to say -- it's over?" Baker said. "I can't say that, because I don't believe that. I can only say what I believe. Even if you don't, you still have to play. You finish as high as you can finish. That's what playing baseball is all about. If nothing else, you have something to build on next year."

Cool, go Cubbies!

AOL defaults on user privacy policy

It's pretty amazing that this hasn't gotten any press from traditional news media sources, but it's all over the blogs. A few days ago AOL published thousands of search queries and profiles of users based on a collection of their searches. In some cases this has made it incredibly easy to learn very private information.

Philipp Lenssen's Google Blogoscoped, has been covering this extensively, most recently with a detail of the kinds of profiles AOL was compiling.

He notes:

"...the database of intentions gives you a deep look into the human psyche. At times, we reveal more to a search box than we’d reveal to our close friends... perhaps knowing that some company processes this data, but never expecting the company to make this data public."

Pathetic Wave

According to the Chicago Tribune, Wrigley Field has sadly been infested with half-fans who did the wave during a recent game against the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Nothing against the wave - plenty of respectable fans do it for other teams in other places. But you have to understand that doing the wave for the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field is like serving Harry Caray a glass of non-alcoholic beer.