I use the google for lots of services in this life. Most recently it's started making recommendations for music.
It is not good at this.
That's a solid no google. Not good.
I'm reasonably sure it's because I watched this video sometime ago.
The song is interesting, the video is pretty much every bit as awful as the particles song.
I wasn't sure if I'd ever come back to this blog, I'm still frustrated at Google for tearing off the little badge of anonymity that made it so freeing to be on the blogger platform. I'm reasonably sure that that choice propelled the growth of several micro-blogging sites like tumblr and squarespace. Places where you could easily post without having to reveal your identity. It's not that this was ever a terribly personal site, but it was a nice place to unpack things, to consider them and keep track of them. I'm considering coming back here for a personal and public face that isn't Facebook. We'll see how that goes.
The real name policy and google+ fucking nightmare is finally getting acknowledged as the clusterfuck that everyone said it was back when they started trying to make it a thing. It's largely why I've abandoned this shit hole. They held my blog hostage, use your real name or it's going to be read only, and I caved.
I caved because I've been blogging here for years, I liked it more or less and liked some of the people I'd met. Not so much after they purged all the good people, but the spammers are still thriving. They've driven adsense payouts down to the point that it's not even worth pursuing as a small time blogger.
So thanks for the memories Google, blogger used to be kind of awesome.
An odd assortment of tidbits that have nowhere else to go. At nearly 1000 posts I'm loath to let this place wither on the vine, but at the same time Google's real name policy makes me loathe to participate any longer? Where does that leave me, something like facebook? A highly postured subsection of myself where I post PR approved sunshine to keep from endangering my future? There's plenty of places still online not owned by Google, and not being slowly killed by their aborted/failed/stalled crap social network. I cannot believe that they mortgaged their sub-properties to try and buoy up a new one. Look what it got you Google, no one wants to manage two social networks for the purpose of connecting and sharing. It's too tedious, people are happy to maintain different profiles for different purposes. This blog was some spleen venting, some part nerding out about various technology things, other parts being a book nerd. It was a place to put things to remember for later, a place a few friends knew about so I could just be me.
Our past defines us, moving to somewhere new gives us a chance to change that and our corporate overlords don't care for that. It's hard to sell to a multi-headed hydra of a person. They need to be one monolithic person a collection of all there pieces so we know exactly how they'll move when we push them. To that extent it's no wonder that the NSA was tapping into Google's vast store of information about us. They already did the hard work aggregating data on us.
But enough about my complaining what about Me?
Well, I've been busy. Oldest boy is working his way towards being 3 and we just had another son that's 3 weeks old. Otherwise I've been spending way, way too much time in the hospital for <cough>swollen testicle<cough> for my own good. Now as much fun as it is to have repeated ultrasounds on your nuts, the blood work and peeing in the cup hardly makes it worth the effort. Also I got my favorite and most often response from the many days there. "Huh, don't know what that was about. Looks fine now."
Thanks Doc, glad to see those years of med school are working out for you.
In the months since my wife got pregnant, I've not managed to brew a damn thing (though I did do a run on my still) and only have made one batch of hard cider in the last year. My brewing skills are in serious disrepair, and I want to get a lead test kit before I run the still again (better safe than sorry)
Given the amount of my day that I spend answering peoples questions by typing in the question to Google and reading them back the answer, I starting to think that Google Power Search courses should be taught to in middle school. Perhaps with brush up courses every year for the truly dense.
So if you or someone you know could use some extra google-fu check out the power search courses.
Via Lifehacker
The collateral damage of me overreacting to the impeding close of Google reader has been somewhat staggering. Both in the amount of time I've wasted preparing for it and in me trying to get a handle on my overflowing digital data. For the time suck I've tried several feed readers, and decided to go with feedly because they are saying that we won't have to do anything if you sign in with feedly they'll import your feeds. I've been using the mobile app for a while now, and the chrome extension is acceptable. I was using a skin on Google reader called Reeder for Chrome that fixed all the white space Google introduced a few revisions ago and Feedly's Chrome extension is pretty close in appearance to that. So bloggy friends you should give it a try. In the event that doesn't work out I used Google Takeout to export my data so that I have all the feeds in .json format in the event I want to try a different reader later (Several readers have setup .json imports to get your feeds imported and ready to go.) You might take some time to download all your bits before the shutdown if you really want to cya should feedly drop the ball. All of that was really a wind up for what really has consumed the most of my time, dealing with my Starred and tagged posts from Reader.
I've been keeping track of many different things that I'm interested in, with the tag functionality of Reader, and this post on Hackaday.com gave me the keys to get some of the functionality back out of that data. The original post was a python script to email article to your Evernote account, but the output was rather ugly. Since then other people have added to that git hub scripts to dump to html files or directly import to Evernote. Evernote is an okay note taking application (I prefer OneNote from Microsoft), so I've worked through my 707 Starred items from Reader somewhat sorted into notebooks so I can keep my track of my starred items. Now I need to do the same for my various tags, but I'm finding some sites have gone dark so outside of the giant caching machine known as Google images and even whole articles are missing on the import process, particularly on sites that have changed some portion of their back end in the last several years.
For some reason working on my Reader data also prompted me to start reviewing my terrifying array of accumulated downloads, programs and such. I have about 80gb of junk on my work computer I've been sorting though.
So the big G is going to murder my favorite product on the internet bar none, Google Reader. What's next, you going to kill the blogger platform next? I can barely imagine all the people that I've told to start using this product over the year. How many times I've tried to convince people that RSS is the best thing on about the internet that they don't even use and here we are. So Feedly, charge for it please. I want this platform to be around for a while. I'm happy to pay for this service, because I use it every day. Seriously.
So in closing, I'm sad and come July probably going to have a lot more free time on my hands.
If you don't have analytics you should totally get an account if only for random joy's like this one. 2.09% of my traffic for the last year has been searching for vampire porn. If that isn't a win, I don't know what is.
So I typically schedule posts at into the future so I'm not on the hook to be creative every day (it can be challenging I find), but this week not of the scheduled posts have posted on their own.
That is not acceptable!
Scheduled posts are my life line here, I am guilty of not checking my blog every single day so I need to know that time I did use was productive. I've been with blogger since 2005 and for the most part I'm happy with it as a platform, but the push to modernize things seems to be breaking shit around here. For the longest time I couldn't see the sections under posts where it said all posts, scheduled and draft posts. I figured out the url and manually typed it in there to get to the various sections when I needed to, but I don't appreciate a wonky interface. I'm not running blogger in draft stop fucking the mainline up, some people actually use this shit.
Also as a side note, I think the new interface for reader, and gmail are piss. I use Reeder for Chrome to fix the interface on google reader and read my gmail on my phone to stop from being pissed off at you. If you're going to update interfaces stop filling the page with so much white space my eyes bleed. Ditto on the plus.google overhaul. I don't give a flying fuck about the trending topics, stop trying to be twitter. Twitter is it own shitty little nest I don't need you to try and fail at being a bad interpretation of Twitter.
Rawr, go back to executing well god damn it Google, I'm gonna jump to wordpress or tumblr so help me
Google catches so much shit lately, I just don't understand how a company that dares to dream about shit like the following can catch so much hate.
Augmented cyborg reality (also that guy's a tiny bit of a douche), yes please! Also self driving cars?
I'm going to start this by assuming that you have heard about the android operation system and I'm going to further assume that you've heard about apps. All of that assumption leads me to the hope that news that The Android App Inventor is now available for download might stir some interest in budding developers that don't strictly speaking want to learn to code.
Right now it's just a source download and you have to install and configure it on a linux or mac system to run it. I'm thinking that this either needs to be deployed as a virtual appliance (hello vmware!) or I have a Pogo Plug I plan on running Arch Linux that I could build the source on. Anyone have more than passing interest in this? I hate coding, but Android is fun and it would be supper sweet to have develop applications for managing your home.
So the screenshot below will illustrate my problem with the new google reader and expose my ocd tabbing and crap ton of stuff open. In the new interface I have 567 vertical pixels to view content on.
<slow clap> way to fucking go google</slow clap>
I have 900 vertical pixels on my display, I waste 84 by not browsing in fullscreen for the tabs and the address-bar and my bookmarklets. Your google+ uses 29, and then you waste 177 on whitespace that could be displaying the content that I use your product to view!!! I'm not overly concerned about this, as I read more on my android tablet using Feedly, and for Chrome I'll install a user script to fix your fucking retarded design choices. But I really would hate to see what this looks like on a netbook.
Hope you fix this soon, because it is a failure in my eyes.
---Update----
There may have been some confusion here I think that the article is full of shit. To try and claim that Google is a monopoly in search is Prima facie full of shit. Dominant option? Yes absolutely, I don't use any other service because the results tend to be awful seriously try it. The switching costs to set Google as you default search provider are still high enough that most people have Bing as their default and have to install the Google Search bar (which they do willingly) to get the better more relevant results. Google is killing it in search and has been for a long fucking time, anyone that has anything else to say is in blanket fashion someone that is being paid to say otherwise. Period.
Microsoft has, and continues to pay shills (ie the sleazy fuck that wrote the article that I'm pointing to) and will continue to do so into the future until they can cajole and bribe the DOJ into anti-trust proceedings to break up a competitor they cannot beat.
I was saying that the patent litigation that is underway in the smartphone arena, is like watching an IT gang rape, IE Microsoft and Apple and everyone else that is a fucking coward trying to pin Google in a corner.
Here's the thing no one puts the Big G in a corner.
And further more the champion of our Authors heart Microsoft has been doing the things that he takes offense to for 2 decades now. Xbox didn't just materialize and the 360 actively used the chips designed by Sony for the PS3 in a very shady deal with their long time partner in the sack IBM. No one's hands are clean here, and painting Google as some new cancer just pisses me off.
/---Update---
Recently I'm annoyed by everyone that is a shill for Microsoft and Apple
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-do-i-hate-google-let-me-count-the-ways-2011-8
Wow, this has been sitting in the drafts folder for so long that it looks like there is a new tech that will make both Google Gears and CouchDB irrelevant. HTML5 is supposed to ship with the ability to cache data offline natively. I almost feel bad that CouchDB came out to fill what is an obvious gap to the worldwide Web with a tech that was simple enough to scale only to have their lunch stolen by the standards community.
CouchDB article
HTML5
GoogleGears shutting down
Does anyone else get this error every time they visit Google's Adsense? I believe I asked once before, but I never got any answers.
I have get it from multiple locations on different ISP's always on FireFox. I don't get it on IE 7. Any ideas?
I was reading this post on Geeks are Sexy blog in Google Reader, a post all about cake, and at the very bottom was a diet advertisement. I personally find that hilarious.
This is a little stale, but still bothers me. Michael Arrington wrote a post about big name sites that are using their general relevance and Google Trends to snag some extra traffic by posting hastily about the trend words regardless of the relevance to the general content of the site. I have been looking for the last few days and no major sites (that I read anyway) have been showing up in the trends that they don't belong in, but I will most definitely keep an eye out for odd posts from blogs I read.
One site that has consistently been in the top of the blogs that appears to be specifically gaming the system is http://aliaffiliate.com/. I don't want to help their Google juice, but man splogs like this and http://pictures.smashits.com/ seem to be abusing this system extensively. You would think that smarties at Google would have away of trending how often your site posts a trended search as a post.
The algorithm isn't completely broken though. Greenbaglady.blogspot.com is the blog of the actual Green Bag lady, and is the number 2 result for blogs on that story.
Any where there is a buck to be made I suppose, but still just fills the internet with crap that links to other crap with no value added, no thought, and it only serves to get shady individuals more ill gotten gains. I imagine bonnet operators also engaged in splogging as a hobby between writing quick attacks for newly published vulnerabilities, and crushing baby kittens.
The attached image is something weird that is happening with my Firefox when I use Google reader on XP and Vista. Every FF3 browser I use gets these lines, IE7 does not. I don't know who's issue it is, but it is starting to drive me crazy.
Edit for Piss poor grammar.
So I being one to look on the loving Google with a forgiving eye have come to end of my toleration for the Adsense site ssl cert throwing errors. Google is frigging huge, I assume that engineers at Google use Firefox, I also assume that someone would have seen the following error and fixed it. Like a year ago when it started happening.
Firefox 3 makes it kind of hard to ignore anymore:
So if a Security Engineer, or Web Master (if they even have titles like that) could get on this, and get some extended validation or whatever it takes to get ssl on subdomains that would be great. I don't feel like adding exceptions to good rules because someone can't figure out how to buy the right cert (not the the vendors make it easy).
I will give you an "A" for effort Bloglines, the beta features mentioned on TC sound nice (the save feature especially), but not quite enough to make me switch back from Google Reader. I have overcome the shortcoming of no save feature by email tags. I setup several filters, and email articles based on content to the correct filter. Not the perfect solution, but the results are searchable in gmail, and makes it relatively easy to forward on when someone asks for some information I have squirreled away about this or that product.
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