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Sometimes I think Twitter steals energy away from blogging. I just did my 1000th tweet a few days ago. I’ll try to write something soon, but it’s been busy for the last few days. At least my cat Emmy has helped me catch up on my newspaper reading:
Written by on December 9th, 2008 with no comments.
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The polls will be closed by this time tomorrow, so don’t forget to vote, everyone.
Written by on November 3rd, 2008 with no comments.
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Every few months I like to give people an update on where I expect to be over the next few months. I apologize in advance if I have to decline other speaking invitations, but I’m genuinely trying to travel less and speak less these days to get a better work/life balance. Here are my tentative plans:
This week: In-laws are visiting, so I will be posting less and slower on email.
August 11-15, 2008: I’m planning to attend SIGGRAPH 2008 down in Los Angeles. I haven’t been in 8-9 years, so I want to see what I’ve missed in the computer graphics field and maybe catch up with a few folks from grad school.
August 18-22, 2008: I’ll be at SES San Jose on a keynote panel about the future of search with Robert Scoble, Danny Sullivan, Tim Westergren of Pandora and others. It should be a lot of fun.
November 11-14, […]
Written by on July 28th, 2008 with no comments.
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[Adding an xkcd cartoon to my last post made me remember that I had this leftover post that I never published.]
I’m ruthless in pruning my work email down to the essentials. In particular, I auto-archive emails about different speakers at Google. So many neat/fun speakers are always visiting Google that if I started going to all those cool lectures, I’d never get my regular work done.
I’m at peace with that choice, but it does mean that sometimes I find out about awesome speakers at Google by reading about them on an outside blog.
I missed Randall Munroe, the guy that draws xkcd, which is a bummer. It’s one of my favorite net comics. Here’s my favorite xkcd:
My second-favorite is this map of the internet, because some real internet cartographers used the idea and made a real map of the internet with the same basic design.
If you like xkcd, Ellen has a […]
Written by on May 23rd, 2008 with no comments.
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Recently two enormous tragedies struck China and Burma. China suffered a serious 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Sichuan that killed tens of thousands of people. And in Myanmar (Burma), Cyclone Nargis ravaged the coast and also killed tens of thousands of people.
Disasters on this scale boggle the senses. The sheer amount of destruction is overwhelming, and the cost in human life cannot be calculated. I know that people at Google have tried to help in many different ways. I appreciate that there is a donation page for charities to help in China and for charities to help in Burma. We are all in this world together, and I urge people to do what they can to help the people in China and Burma in this time of need. My thoughts and sympathy goes out to the families affected by these catastrophes.
Written by on May 19th, 2008 with no comments.
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Man, I love Maker Faire. It’s almost as if Burning Man mated with Slashdot. Here are afew of the fun things I saw today.
In the Craft area someone showed the credit cards that they accepted, but the credit card sign was hand-made:
Also in the Craft zone was a “postcard machine.” It was a person sitting inside a booth pretending to be a machine. You could select the postcard you wanted and push two dollars through the slot. The person in the booth would make beeping and booping noises and then slip a custom postcard into your hand:
Outside, several people were driving around in mobile muffins:
Not to be outdone, someone had decorated their art car entirely with pens and markers:
I forget where I saw this, but someone had made a Q*bert quilt:
Finally, I enjoyed this art installation about the “newspaper of the future.” It was a standard newspaper machine but had […]
Written by on May 4th, 2008 with no comments.
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I communicate with people in lots of ways: face-to-face, email, via my blog, leaving comments in the blogosphere, conferences, etc. At SMX West a couple people asked “I sent you a friend invite on service X but you haven’t responded. Do you not like me?” Please don’t feel bad, because it’s not that. I’m letting a lot of requests drop on the floor — even requests from other Googlers to chat on Google Talk. I did a quick check of various social services and here’s what I found:
LinkedIn: 176 invitations to connect
Twitter: 671 requests 1060 requests
Google Talk: 27 chat requests
Facebook: 190 friend requests
MySpace: 35 friends, and it’s a fake account that someone else set up in my name (I’m not 42 years old, thank you very much ).
At this point, managing friend invitations feels more like work than fun. Many of these services have really poor interfaces for mass […]
Written by on April 17th, 2008 with no comments.
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The title pretty much says it all. A while ago, someone saw my call for good summer vacation reading and the resulting pile of Amazon books that I bought, and they sent me a couple free books, maybe to get a review or a mention. I appreciate the creativity, but please don’t send me any books or other free stuff. If you’ve got a new book coming out, I’m happy to hear about it, but if I decide to read or review it I’ll buy my own copy.
A while ago, someone sent a big cookie with a “No spam” message like this:
I appreciate the thought, but please don’t send me any free stuff. Google has a gift policy to avoid potential conflicts of interest. Even if Google didn’t have such a policy, I wouldn’t want to accept any gifts of value, because it’s important to avoid even the appearance of […]
Written by on April 13th, 2008 with no comments.
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Honest. I wanted to write a big, in-depth blog post about X (pick whatever X you want), but then Emmy came and sat down beside the keyboard with a forlorn face. This is what she looked like:
Emmy was just waiting patiently for me to get off the computer so that we could play or hang out. How am I supposed to blog under those kinds of conditions?
Written by on April 10th, 2008 with no comments.
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I recently discovered something really crazy: the iPhone has a secret SATA interface. Using the SATA interface, the iPhone is much easier to hack because it looks just like a hard drive to a computer, so you can replace individual executables and symlinks with no effort. Readers know that I’m a bit of a storage freak. A month or so ago, I was reading on Lifehacker about this cool SATA USB docking station where you can just slide a hard drive into the dock:
So I ordered one and set it up. The accident that unlocked all this is that I was getting up out of my desk chair while reading on my iPhone. The chair bumped me and I dropped the iPhone from a couple feet up. By some weird chance, it landed in the docking station. Not only did it fit perfectly, but a hard drive picture appeared on […]
Written by on April 1st, 2008 with no comments.
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