A list of the UK Google doodles. I like the St. Patrick’s day and Braille doodles from 2006.
Google Doodles
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Tucker On A Blackberry
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.
How To Prevent Hearing Loss
A good analogy:
“If you have a field of grass and you walk on it, you compress the grass and it bends down over the night, and in a few days, it springs back up and is OK again. But if you keep doing that over and over, you wear a path in it. And that’s kind of what happens with hearing loss.”
Juggling to the Beatles
Not sure if these Google videos work for dial-up users. This one features Chris Bliss and three balls.
The DVD Drive in the iMac
Mac17:~ cashel$ drutil info
Vendor Product Rev
PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-106D A612
Interconnect: ATAPI
SupportLevel: Apple Shipping
Cache: 2000k
CD-Write: -R, -RW, BUFE, CDText, Test, IndexPts, ISRC
DVD-Write: -R, -RW, +R, +RW, BUFE, Test
Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, CD-Raw, DVD-DAO
Up With Lowdown!
Lowdown is a MovableType plugin that simplifies text, converting “high characters” like curly quotes to low characters and also strips out html. I’ve been trying to get the html to not show in the recent comments section on the main page. The MTGlobalComments plugin I use does not properly process the remove_html=”0″ setting. But now I can use a lowdown=”0″ setting and all html is stripped out.
Not only does it strip out the html, but now the right side of mac5 will not get broken in IE when a truncated link tag is displayed… because now it doesn’t display.
Descenders Below the Date Line
A digital sketch I worked up to send to our ANSI standards expert asking about the potential problem we could have when people write below the date line on a check. Has to do with check imaging. He says we’re ok. Nice handwriting, huh?
Google Maps for Mars
Just released. Starts off in a colorful elevation mode. Infrared looks more like the red planet than visible. Tried to zoom in and see the rovers. Couldn’t.
See the links at top for articles and other information.
Report from Dauphin Island
Kathy, Kelly, Claire, and I visited Danny at Spring Hill for Family Weekend 2005. It was held this Spring instead of last Fall because of Katrina. We arrived late Thursday evening. Danny had a paper to write, and then had classes all the next morning, so we left him alone. The four of us decided to go find a beach Friday morning, and we followed signs to Dauphin Island.
This barrier island guards the west side of Mobile Bay. There is a fort and sea lab on the east end, a village and golf course in the middle, and then a long stretch of stilt houses on the west end. We drove as far as we could on the west, but the roads were partially washed away from Katrina, so we decided to just stop there and visit the beach and ocean.
Several of the stilt houses were damaged, and many were being repaired. It became apparent that houses nearest the beach were simply gone, with nothing more than a pylon or two and a recently capped sewer line indicating the sand was someone’s property. There were no lawns, bushes, or landscaping to be seen. Katrina’s storm surge had washed away everything and left six inches to a foot of sand covering driveways, patios, carports, and side roads. Upon closer inspection you could find entire carports and side roads broken like peanut brittle under the sand.
The center of the island seemed to have been spared because the village and woods are shielded by a giant sand dune. Several people were playing golf.
We decided that with the village, bike paths, golf, fort, sea lab, and beaches, this might be a good place for a vacation. It is 35 minutes from Mobile, allowing for a quick trip into town, much like going into Savannah from Tybee.
Flickr Badge
Flickr is a site that allows you to store and share photos. It was acquired by Yahoo. You can create multiple albums. There is a neat way to create a “Flickr Badge” to put on another website that leads to one of your photo albums:
.zg_div {margin:0px 5px 5px 0px; width:117px;}
.zg_div_inner { color:#666666; text-align:center; font-family:arial, helvetica; font-size:11px;}
.zg_div a, .zg_div a:hover, .zg_div a:visited {color:#3993ff; background:inherit !important; text-decoration:none !important;}
zg_insert_badge = function() {
var zg_bg_color = ‘ffffff’;
var zgi_url = ‘http://www.flickr.com/apps/badge/badge_iframe.gne?zg_bg_color=’+zg_bg_color+’&zg_person_id=41043338%40N00’;
document.write(”);
if (document.getElementById) document.write(‘
what is this?’);
}
zg_toggleWhat = function() {
document.getElementById(‘zg_whatdiv’).style.display = (document.getElementById(‘zg_whatdiv’).style.display != ‘none’) ? ‘none’ : ‘block’;
document.getElementById(‘zg_whatlink’).style.display = (document.getElementById(‘zg_whatdiv’).style.display != ‘none’) ? ‘none’ : ‘block’;
return false;
}
www.flickr.com
zg_insert_badge();
if (document.getElementById) document.getElementById(‘zg_whatdiv’).style.display = ‘none’;