A list of the UK Google doodles. I like the St. Patrick’s day and Braille doodles from 2006.

www.google.com/intl/en/holidaylogos.html

Some people leave their hearts in San Francisco. I left my cell phone in Chicago. I think it is in the back seat of an Avis van. It was a 3-year-old phone, and I was planning on getting a new one, so this forced the issue.

After two visits to the Verizon store and consulting with some IT folks at work, I ended up buying a BlackBerry 7250. It came bundled with a Bluetooth (wireless) Jabra BT350v Headset. The photo shows me holding the BlackBerry, browsing mac.five, scrolled down to Tucker. Hi Mom & Dad! The wireless headset means the BlackBerry can sit on the car seat, in my pocket, or in my backpack, and I can take and make calls while looking like someone off of StarTrek with a blinking blue ear. Oh boy.

I’ve been watching the wave at work of e-mail by phone. It reminds me of previous technology waves: pagers, e-mail, Apple Powerbooks, Dell laptops, Palm Pilots, cell phones, camera phones. When a few top executives get something, it rapidly spreads down the org chart. People are surprised, but I’m not an early adopter. The leading wave rarely has utility, and is mostly fueled by false hope that this new device is going to solve your communications problems. However, once a technology gets a foothold and spreads like kudzu, it is usually time to join in or be left out.

So I went looking for a phone that could do e-mail. That way I, too, can reply and forward e-mails on the go with very short messages like: “Look at this.” or “I agree.” I find most of the thumbed e-mails to add little value, but I suppose being able to read detail on the go is useful.

Waiting has paid off because the company is going to standardize on the Enterprise Blackberry Server. This gives a superior e-mail experience over the Palm / Treo solutions that have been adopted by the leading wave. The second wavers are all getting Blackberry phones. The leading wave will not care because it will be an excuse to get a newer thing.

Borrowed without permission from Scot Hacker:

Been a long time since your last quantum physics class? Lost touch with the essential weirdness of the double-slit experiment? Amazingly clear and enjoyable explanatory video, now visible inline thanks to the new “Put on site” feature at Google Video.

Thanks Oliver

This is a document. I am writing it with Writely which is an online word processor of sorts. I can write a posting using Writely (which has spell checking) and then post it to my blog. Writely will post it automatically.

Bold is this. Color are these.

1. Bullet one
2. Bullet two
3. Bullet three

Will I ever use Writely again? Perhaps.

Be careful. You might get hypnotized.

Thanks to Scot.

If you find a website that you want to revisit, where do you store the link? You can bookmark the link, but I don’t like this because I use more than one computer and the bookmarks end up on different machines.

I’ve used bookmarks.yahoo.com for a long time to store links I regularly visit… bank login site, 401k site, and the like. I put the bookmarks module on my.yahoo.com page. I even keep important (and difficult to remember) links that only work inside our company including human resource links and reporting links.

But what about links that you want to share and maybe revisit some time in the future once or twice? This is where del.icio.us comes in. You can quickly store a page on your del.icio.us page and go back and quickly find it later on. You can even share it. My public site is del.icio.us/fishback. I’m surprised how often I go back and look things up there.

One of my most recent links is to an article on how to include your del.icio.us links on your MovableType page using Feed Digest. You will see my most recent 10 links to the right.

It took me a while to understand how to use del.icio.us. Remembering how to spell it and where the dots go was one hurdle. However, I installed two bookmarks in my various browsers: one to del.icio.us/fishback for my own reference and one that lets me quickly post new links. Along with my.yahoo.com and bloglines.com, del.icio.us has become an important web surfing tool for me.

Oh… and in December, Yahoo bought del.icio.us, but I have not seen it show up as a Yahoo module yet.

Google’s Adsense Reporting has a new feature that allows you to create custom reports and have them e-mailed to you periodically. I set up an “All Time” report to have e-mailed weekly. I’m up to $74. The comma-separated-file (CSV) was easily imported into Excel to make the chart below… which sure looks like more than $74, but many days are zero and most are 8 to 13 cents.

Click to zoom in:

This 30 day average report shows trending better, showing how much was made in the previous 30 days:

Are there any web pages that you visit looking for changes? I use Bloglines.com to watch web sites that have an RSS feed to let me know about changes, but not all websites have RSS feeds. For example, I have a file upload page where Sherry posts the latest church bulletin so that I can use it to update the SJN website. However, I never know when she has uploaded the new file. Now WatchThatPage.com looks several times each day and lets me know if there is anything new. Below is a test e-mail it just sent me because it noticed the two file name changes I made an hour before.

Rather than give them my real e-mail address, I used a temporary bloglines e-mail address.

WatchThatPage: 1 pages changed

By WatchThatPage

To [email protected]

View your changes online at http://www.watchThatPage.com/watchChanges.jsp

*********************************************************************************

Differences in page http://merline.netcentrix.net/jeb/upload.nsf/uploads?OpenView

*********************************************************************************

Linus and Lucy Song

[http://merline.netcentrix.net/jeb/upload.nsf/9fc54ebe0c01abb6]

SJN bulletin 12-11b

[http://merline.netcentrix.net/jeb/upload.nsf/9fc54ebe0c01abb6]

mac.fiveforks.com has moved physically (to the Rum Ridge data center) as well as upgraded from a Mac G3 called Wart to a Mac G4 called Oz. Everything seems to have transfered well, but let me know if anything misbehaves.

Wart is now being loaded on the Gramalie Express and heading for Lakeland to join the famous Duct Tape iPod.

Clay works at Google… at least for the moment. Interesting first name given this post…

Official Google Blog: I’m feeling silly