Crack Smoker of the Month

(source)

Meteor Shower Tonight - UPDATED August 12th 2010

Perseus Perseid will give us the pleasure of a beautiful Meteor Shower tonight August 12th, 2010 beyond just decapitating Medusa.



Star Watching Tips:

• Be as distant as you can from downtown, urban areas.
• Pick a comfortable place.
  You will sit for minutes, maybe hours viewing the spectacle.

Good luck!

Swimming Pool Trivia

Click the image to enlarge

Wow. I had no idea that swimming pool maintenance was so expensive... well actually I did but never in the context of all U.S. swimming pools combined. Interestingly, water evaporates at a rate of 1-2 inches per week during the hot season... which if you run the math gets you 13 million gallons per hour for all US pools. With so much talk about water conversation one really wonders whether we are doing a good job managing water (see the Niagara falls & rainstorms stats). I would have liked to see actual water costs (e.g. how much does it cost to fill up your pool)... How much do you pay per 1,000 gallons?

The Crack Smoker of the Month Award goes to...

...Bob Parson... but I mean it in a positive way... I actually LOVE the video and what he says...

Google Mayday Mayhem

Something looks broken at Google. Check these out:

• Google not updating EUR / USD exchange rates. This has been happening for ~1 week. Today media reports EUR USD at 1.22-1.23 yet Google reports 1.2699:
  
  
  

• Google showing duplicate content (same article republished all over the place) - this has been happening since last week:

• There's additional symptoms reported by webmasters here and here.
  
  
• Google App Engine not updating reports. Check the following screenshot: reports are 4 days old yet Google tells you it updates them at least once daily.

It looks like something massive is going on infrastructure-wise at Google.

CRM for Gmail ... or Xobni for Gmail

I recently mentioned I missed some form of tool to help me track who I need to respond to, flag an conversation when some amount of time has gone by without response, etc. I.e. a mini-CRM (customer relationship management)... although don't let the acronym scare you: customers can be anybody that you email...

In sort, here's what I've found and are MUST-HAVE Google chrome extensions that will add CRM-like functionality to gmail:

• Etacts: Has a unique "Remind me if I haven't heard back" feature that I absolutely love. Well done!
  
  
• CureCRM Magnify (free) adds social features on top of gmail:
  
  

And finally I am about to test Rapportive CRM which looks similar to the one above. I will report back.

The Crack Smoker of the Month Award goes to...

...Google

for dubbing legacy printers all printers not supporting cloud printing:

Legacy Printer

Every printer in existence today falls into this category. (This situation will change, of course, when someone—perhaps you?—updates the firmware to make the printer cloud-aware.) This category includes printers connected directly to PCs (for example, via USB cable) as well as networked printers (Ethernet or WiFi). This category also includes the recent crop of "web-connected" printers that provide users with access to certain web services (such as maps and movie tickets) directly from the on-printer LCD. While these are "web connected," they are not cloud-aware printers in the way we describe above because they don't know how to talk to a cloud print service to get print jobs, etc. We want users to be able to print to legacy printers via Google Cloud Print. This is accomplished through the use of a proxy, a small piece of software that sits on a PC where the printer is installed. The proxy takes care of registering the printer with Google Cloud Print and awaiting print jobs from the service. When a job arrives, it submits the print job to the printer using the PC operating system's native print stack and sends job status back to the printer.

It must be fun to work at Google.