marramgrass

What is it with me and Google lately?

Just a quick one, here. When posting yesterday I needed to find my old post about jPod, and dredged up from the back of my mind a little bit of Google functionality that I’ve never used but is handy to know about.

To get the “one search engine to rule them all” to search a specific web site, just sart your search string with the name of the site preceded by “site:”. So yesterday I used the search site:marramgrass.org.uk jpod to find my old post.

Not at all exciting, but occasionally quite useful.

Or, “How Google Is Taking Over The World.”

Over the last eight or nine years, I’ve become at home with two artifacts of modern life which are at the same time constant (in certain societies) and fleeting: email addresses and mobile phone numbers.

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Hooked up to our house WiFi, I’m posting :-) Or I could just be randomly tootling around the InterWeb. Or even lying here watching Serenity (when experimenting with my first video capable iPod, what better disc to apply HandBrake to?).

Sorry. Just had to share. It’s the most capable mobile Internet thingy I’ve ever had. And the keyboard isn’t nearly as bad as they say. I’m getting quicker already and the autocorrect is scary, but I doubt I’ll work up to any two-thumbed action – my thumbs are a bit too fat!

• Some time in the last month or so, Google Maps has had its satellite imagery of at least some of Belfast updated. Used to be if you looked up close at my parents’ house, it had their old car (now my brother’s and his fiancee’s) in the driveway. The green Mazda has mysteriously disappeared from the image.
• Andy McKee on YouTube. I believe he’s performing at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast even as I type this. I heard him on Radio Ulster this afternoon, but bizarrely my stumbling across his videos was entirely independent of that.
• The iPhone is way cool. Yes, I bought one. Yes, I probably am a mug. But no, probably not as much of a mug as you think.
• Related to that, the customer services people at T-Mobile in the UK are exceedingly pleasant to deal with, even when you’re leaving them. Chatty, but not annoyingly so, good-humoured, efficient. In the eighteen months I was using their service, every interaction I had with them was great. Everything the actual effectiveness of their network wasn’t :-/
• I find it hard to work productively with such a seductively new toy hanging off a USB cable beside me.

Today is iPhone day.

The InterWeb is going nuts over this thing. And I’m sorry to say I can see why.

At this point I don’t know if I’ll get one or not. But I’ve just had my birthday, and a celebratory opening for self-indulgence, so maybe. Maybe.

Of course, I’ll tell all here, because it’s the sort of thing that amuses me. To my shame.

It’s mighty expensive (not the hardware, it’s iPod priced — which means pricey, but at a level we’ve become desensitized to — rather the contract costs to the mobile network), but oh so cool. And actually, no more expensive than I’ve ended up spending on phone for the last few years, as work requires it. But just that little bit less for the money.

It’s a sad case of gadget lust. And I’m torn. So very, very torn. And I bare my weakness for the world to see.

Sorry.

In which we resurrect the switch-blogs to ponder a long-awaited upgrade to the operating system. And find it good.

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How many ways do you know to dry your hands?

Out last weekend for a family meal, we found a new one: the Dyson Airblade. It’s like all those hot air blower-things you get in pub and restaurant toilets everywhere, only it’s not.

Rather than the normal ‘blast of hot air and your hands will get themselves dry’, the Airblade gets all scientific. Kinda. You put your soggy mitts in the two obvious looking spaces, then pull them out s-l-o-w-l-y — there’s a helpful little diagram on the top to keep you right. The blower goes hard, and very loud, but isn’t as brute-force as the norm. Instead, as you withdraw your hands, the water gets pushed down your fingers and off your fingertips by the precision ‘blade’ of air.

Or something like that.

Maybe not a revelation, but last weekend each of our party of fourteen had to visit the loos to see this marvellous spectacle.

See, it’s not just me :)

:p

(Photo courtesy my brother-in-law, Matt – the only one with the nerve to photograph in the gents’ toilet!)

Google seems to be taking over the world.

In preparation for the UK arrival of the iPhone, and all it’s flat-rate data ever-connectedness, I’ve been putting all the blogs and things I read into Google Reader. I haven’t decided yet whether I will actually nab an iPhone this time round (it really isn’t cheap), but it has spurred me to give Reader another shot.

I’m not a big fan of the whole web apps thing that’s going on. I much prefer ‘real’ software running on my computer, rather than all the to-ing and fro-ing to the web server. I use Gmail, but mostly access it through Thunderbird. I do appreciate some of the niceness of it, though.

Back when Google Reader was first made public, I played with it, but didn’t get along with the interface. They’ve revamped it, and it’s much handier – even if it doesn’t always play 100% nice with my browser of choice (Opera). Handier enough that I plan to run with it for a while and see what I make of it.

I’ll let you know.

For some reason, yet to be determined, I have been moved to sign up at Twitter. I can’t shake the feeling that it’s the real low-point of the new, interactive, 2.0 web, but at the same time it is strangely fascinating.

Cue questions of self-censorship and the further shrinkage of the already miniscule online ratio of signal to noise.

I’m at http://twitter.com/marramgrass/.

It seems there’s a guy in Sweden who was tired of writing on white paper with darker-than-white lines on it, so he decided the way forward would be pale grey paper with white lines. So Whitelines happened.

What a bizarre idea. Apparently it also means the lines disappear in the photocopier.

/shrug.

Still, I ordered a couple of pads (although I could only find one UK stockist, and they got a bit silly on the postage) because I’m a sucker for a cute gimmick. They came today, and in person the whole idea seems a bit cooler than it sounds. First impressions are that the white-on-pale-grey is actually oddly relaxing to work on.

When I get round to it, I’ll post a pic or scan or something.