Posts from — May 2007

Cory Doctorow (of BoingBoing and formerly EFF fame) spoke at Google a little while ago. I couldn’t make it because of a meeting, but the video is worth watching. He talks about DRM, copyright, and other issues of importance for the future. Nothing groundbreaking, but worth watching.

The film he references, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, is really good. The film rating system is quite a racket.

This project is really cool. They take stacks of books and form poems or short stories with the titles.

Here’s my favorite:

Just in time for my plane trip… Google Reader has offline access. There’s a lot of other interesting google stuff out this week, but this one I can use right away.

That’s enough google posts for this week, I guess.

Thanks to everyone for the ideas for office decorations. Right now we’re going for something different than all the ideas there (my officemate came in with the idea this morning). It’ll take a couple of weeks to get there, so I’ll post pictures once we have something.

Google Maps Street View was launched today at the Where 2.0 conference. It lets you view street-level imagery in a bunch of locations. Imagery is available in a bunch of cities, including the SF bay area. If you’d like to demo the feature, try it in San Francisco, since the imagery is higher-res there than in some other cities (e.g. NY).

A few people think it’s “cool, but useless”, but I disagree. It’s really useful whenever you’re going somewhere you’ve never been before, such as a new store or visiting a new city. For example, I wanted to use it when finding a place to stay for my Boston trip, so that I could see what was around some of the hotels. Unfortunately, there’s no imagery there yet.

There’s a picture of the team on the map, too. The amount of engineering effort needed to get this sort of thing done is amazing.

This idea isn’t completely new. Amazon used to have 2d scrolling street pictures, but they shut down that project. Microsoft has a preview service that simulates driving a car through Seattle. Their interface makes it not very useful, though. To be fair, that preview is a few years old, so certainly they have something more interesting now.

Here’s a rather strange video that explains how to use the feature:

Google Developer Day is on Thursday, so more interesting stuff should be happening then.

A couple of weeks ago, I moved from a cubicle to an office (I share the office with Thomas, an intern). At the moment, we have a reasonably good amount of floor and wall space unused, and I feel like we should have some sort of creative use or decoration for it. Unfortunately, all of the ideas I’ve been able to come up with have been uninteresting or unworkable. Do you have any suggestions?

There’s already a pirate-themed room on this floor, so anything beach-themed is out.

Some ideas I’ve already had:
- Accumulate post cards and cover the wall with them slowly (problem: we don’t really have any postcads)
- Same thing, but with comics
- Cover the wall with pictures of random people from the internet (problem: could look kinda creepy)
- Get a fish, name it, add its name to the list of people in the office on the door. Get an email alias for the fish, get a blog for the fish, etc. (problem: could get old, really fast, and smell strange)
- A bunch more that were even worse than these.

I’ve been successfully avoiding computer games for the most part since I got to CA, though I must admit that I’m excited about the upcoming release of Starcraft 2. The gameplay video on the site is worth the download, if you’re interested.

Gas prices around the world converted to USD/gal.

I meant to write about the “Don’t buy gas on May 15th!” meme that was going around earlier. I don’t think I need to explain the colossal stupidity of such a movement, but I think it is indicative of a modern lack of willingness to sacrifice. It’s not “don’t use gas on May 15th”, it just says to wait until another day to buy it, thus not affecting the oil companies’ bottom lines at all. There’s really no sacrifice, no real protest, and the cause itself seems to be “we’re entitled to cheaper gas”. The same applies to war to some degree. There’s no sense of sacrifice, no homefront. If I didn’t have any contact with the news, I’m not sure how I’d figure out we were at war. I wonder how long it would take.

The sacrifices we’re asked to make for the larger war on terror do exist in a sense, though they aren’t too tangible: things like habeus corpus. That and getting hassled more at the airport. I accidentally smuggled a liquid or gel onto the plane last weekend. Good thing I wasn’t able to build a squirt gun…

I need a credit card recommendation. Do you have a good one?

I saw Bill Richardson speak today, and was really impressed. He was also my favorite candidate in the Democratic debate. If he makes it through Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina, I’ll probably vote for him in the primary.

Jay Leno referred to him as “the most qualified candidate you haven’t heard of”.

The two most important issues for me are foreign policy and energy. Richardson has unmatched diplomacy credentials (4 nobel peace price nominations, UN Ambassador, temporary ceasefire in Darfur, negotiations with North Korea, Iraq, etc etc). He was also Secretary of Energy during the Clinton administration.

If I had to write up qualifications for a great candidate, it would look something like that.

Those things are necessary but not sufficient to catch my interest, though. Richardson didn’t have the rehearsed oratory of some of the other candidates, but he talked honestly and had a sense of humor about himself. When people at Google asked him questions, he’d often answer and then ask them what they think the answer should be, something none of the other candidates did when visiting (they’d often just recite part of a speech, it seemed).

Richardson’s talk was very positive. He didn’t talk too much about the mistakes of the current administration, which would have been an easy topic with that audience, but instead focused on the future and his credentials.

As he said, he’s not a “rock star” candidate, but I think he’s worth a look.

I’m Matt Casey and I approved this message.