Great 80s cover band: Sixteen Candles

I saw the band Sixteen Candles play in Palatine, IL at Durty Nellies this Friday, and they are a goofy bunch. Actually they're just fun to watch on the stage - lots of energy, jumping around, crazy dancing, and an updated sound for all those 80s songs that I thought had lost their cool. They don't dress like they're from the 80s. They don't act like they're from the 80s. In their words: "we only play 80s music, that's all we know".

Intel research breakthrough

Judging by my computers' average five year lifespan, I'll be getting a new one in the near future and then again when these guys come out.

The Facebook scare

Have you ever gotten a phone call from an unknown number only to learn that the person got it from your Facebook profile? How about an unexpected instant message? Welcome to your lifetime membership into the "Facebook generation" - or so say those people who feel like every descriptive age group needs to run around with a catchy generation name.

Facebook has rubbed me the wrong way from the first time I saw it. I didn't need the recent News Feeds controversy to tell me that Facebook was a stalker network. My first exposure was from a girl who would soon join a giddy sorority - she already had hundreds of friends in 2003. I joined the Facebook some months after that only because more and more people suggested doing so. It picked up the popularity of AIM.

After looking around I quickly de-activated my account finding it creepy, materially useless, and analogous to a glorified "away message network". I was already sick of my own compulsions to check away messages instead of do homework and so Facebook didn't seem necessary.

This isn't to say that I hate Facebook and don't have an active account (indeed, I do). If you have a real life, though, the silliness of Facebook is apparent. Imagine a girl checking out a guy in her class and then once she hears his name being called on attendance goes and finds out more about him on Facebook than she probably would on a first date.

Here she unknowingly becomes part of this complicit, concealed culture with an amplified and true sense that we all know more than we're telling. What ever happened to the world of natural human relationships?

You could say that my best friends:

- can be hilarious and appreciate humor when others throw it around,

- understand that Facebook is another big joke in life and shouldn't be really used all that much,

- can hold a conversation no matter what the topic.

- have a tolerance for what "normal" people call "weird".

In closing, people should stop actually using Facebook or else realize that it's all a big showy joke, and keep in mind it's creator, Mark Zuckerberg, rolls in money and has a goofy name.

TED speeches

I recommend watching these free Google Videos on the TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) Conference. Particularly good was a speech on supporting creativity in education made by Sir Ken Robinson.

Helping Google with Image Labeler

In the event that you're bored and have the desire to help corporate research then you can try the Google Image Labeler game where you are paired up with another person with the goal of matching up terms that you associate with a given image. Kind of neat, it's cool to think that the users can be so connected with Google engineers' research. This reminds me of a recent Google blog post that has to do with Neven Vision, an image recognition company Google just acquired.

Blogger Beta review

Since I use Google's Blogger for all of my online work, I wanted to post my reaction to the new beta version. The bottom line is that it's fantastic to finally have a dynamic infrastructure that's more akin to Gmail than a dinosaur web program from 2001. It was almost an embarrassment that Google was allowing the old Blogger to just sit there given its popularity and connection to all their other world-class applications.

There are the obvious bugs that come along with a beta version and the personal wished-for features. For me, I would most like to be able to edit the new templates with my own html raw coding. Also scheduled time-released publishing would be nice in order to pace my posts without me having to pace out my time. It just makes sense for me as a publisher and for readers who would rather have a steady stream throughout the day as opposed to a few massive batches of blog posts.

I'd also like to see an autosave feature with the new blogger beta, as Gmail does. However the other new dynamic features overshadow the absence of this. The new dynamic template editor runs like a polished version of Google Page Creator ( a simple, smart web based WYSIWYG editor) and gives you nice options too. You will notice, however, that I have not switched over to the new templates yet because it eliminates a few back-end modifications that I like to have in place. Other nice additions: post labels, more detailed template customization (fonts, colors, backgrounds, buzzwords), and of course the integration with your Google account (finally).

Ambitions!

One of my general ambitions is to get my feet wet and become familiar with all of the goods and services that Google offers. I feel this necessary because deep down I have a strong sense of the unique role that Google plays in our society as engineers connecting with the lives of people, and that is powerful.

Things I intend to start learning about:
- Google Enterprise solutions (Google Mini and Google Search Appliance GB-1001)
- How it is to be a Google Checkout vendor
- How Google Checkout compares with PayPal
- Froogle
- Google Mobile services (Maps mobile, SMS mobile)
- Google Base (I've only dabbled with it, never integrated it into my life)

Google Checkout update

A whopping 2-3 weeks later...

So as I said in the last post, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to try out Google Checkout and get a free t-shirt with all that cool stuff on it. Well, I went ahead and bought a 40GB LaCie external hard drive from Buy.com costing about $82, and I now use it to help manage my 2001 Dell laptop which runs fine but has been approaching its storage capacity. The 40GB house my music, pictures, movies, all that static type stuff.

As for the t-shirt, well that came about a week later. Google only issued size Large which isn't a problem. They also made the shirt in high-quality 100% combed cotton. On the font it says "Google Checkout" with the shopping cart logo, and on the back it has small print saying "I checked out Google Checkout [line break] August 2006". Pretty nice side benefit to getting a great product from Buy.com.

My experience with Google Checkout proved smooth and exciting. The smart concept of attaching your Google account with your checking account in this way will definitely change the way consumers and vendors approach Internet business. Think about somebody who wants to sell something online but they don't necessarily want to have all the infrastructure that an online store requires. Checkout allows them to sign up with Google and more quickly open up a sort of Internet mom 'n pop shop (at least this is my understanding of the way it works). Though I haven't done the research on it yet, I will report later on how this solves deficiencies in the PayPal format. Perhaps it simply integrates the service with an online presence that people can more readily identify within their lives (the world of Google, that is).

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."