google

Oh hey there, Path. How are you? It’s been a while. How’s start-up life?

Oh, I’ve been good, you know hanging out with Facebook and Twitter, and a lot with Instagram; and you?

I’m sorry to hear that.

No, no, don’t think that; you’ve got a great personality. You’re inventive and unique, and I like the people who hang out with you a bunch, it’s just… well… you’re a bit antisocial still and I tend to hang out where people actually are a lot. I think it’s just that our paths don’t cross very often.

Yes, yes, I know your name is Path… yes I know you’re supposed to be more limited and all that, it’s just that I only have so much time in my day that I can put into “social” networking, and most (not all) of the people I really want to interact with don’t hang out with you!

Yeah. Yeah, it’s not you, but it’s not me either it’s just life, you know?

Hey, I’m traveling next week, how about this – I’ll get ahold of you then and you can come to Austin, too, okay?

Alright. Well, have a good one, tell Google+ I said, “What’s up!”

Post to Twitter

There appears to be a controversy brewing around Google’s custom logo in honor of Veterans’ Day.

The shrill accusation that I’ve started to see pop up on blogs (which seem mostly to have a “Christian” or Arch-Conservative bent) is that there is a Muslim crescent hiding sinisterly behind the American flag. The accused implications being thrown out there include (but, I am sure they’re not limited to):

  • The setting of the sun on the USA and the rise of Islam.
  • Google is trying to make some sort of “secret” statement that they’re all pro-Radical Islam.
  • Obama, the secret Muslim that he is, forced Google to do it.
  • It’s part of the Red/Communist logo. [Added: 2:38pm]

One guy, ironically on a Google-hosted forum, said something about the “obvious extra space” that they’ve added to make it stick out that way.

My Answer & Rebuttal

  1. Calm down. There’s no conspiracy. If there was, Google would be the worst conspiracy-planner ever – they just outed themselves on the most visited site on the internet.
  2. The spacing is the same:

    Basic Google logo overlaid on today's special logo.

    Basic Google logo overlaid on today's special logo.

  3. Google is playing with the illustration in the same way that they always do by making things line up to give a hinting of their name. The pole representing the L and the flag filling in for the top of the lowercase E.
  4. [Added 2:46pm] It would be interesting for Google to be so secretly promoting Islam overtly, since they failed to create a special logo for Eid, Islam’s most important feast day.

That’s all. If there’s still an issue with this, I don’t want to trouble you an more; you probably need to spend some more time shoring up the supplies in your bomb shelter and improving on your tin-foil hat design.

Post to Twitter

Wanted to share a post on the Official Google Blog about Google Books and the importance of projects like it.

But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down.

via Official Google Blog: A tale of 10,000,000 books.

Post to Twitter

This is why I seem like a genius most of the time:

August 26, 2009

“Some people think I’m smart, but the truth is, I just intuitively know what words to type in the magic Google box.” @sunblush 2:09 PM Nov 20th, 2008

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ATT iGoogle

August 11, 2009

Does anything seem wrong with this picture? Why is there an ATT favicon on my iGoogle tab? I thought that ATT & Google were fighting because of the whole Google Voice iPhone App thing. I know, it’s probably some sort of cookie error with my Firefox browser, I just thought it was funny.

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