The Real Time Google Search
After being pleasantly surprised by what I thought was a new feature to the Google Homepage, here I am writing about something that caught my attention. After a slightly intense lunch debate, I returned to ‘research’ a few things to get my facts together. Google returned a page with results where one of the results was termed “Latest Results”. While I’m quite certain I wouldn’t have missed this earlier, the Live Results had a “Pause” button right next to it and newer results were being populated by the second in a frame right below.
While I’m sure this is not a significant find, it seems to me like I’m finding something cool about Google everyday. Kudos to you Google!
New Classic Google Homepage
I have been reading on the web that a new highly minimalistic Google Homepage design was being tested. While its roll-out was slated to be imminent, I didn’t expect to see it happen today.
After entering Google in the address bar I was taken to a simple minimalist page
However when I rolled the mouse into the screen, a top bar rolls down and reveals the usual albeit previously permanent top navigation pane. Pretty nifty if you ask me 
Word Of The Year – 2009
Every year the good people over at the New Oxford American Dictionary elects one word to be Word Of the Year. This year the winner is “Unfriend”
unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.
I find it very cheesy to see Facebook, a commercial app, to be part of the definition of a word let alone the Word Of the Year. All reservations aside this led me to question what the winners of previous years were. With a little help from Google, the winners of the Word Of The Year are:
“Hypermiling” or “to hypermile” is to attempt to maximize gas mileage by making fuel-conserving adjustments to one’s car and one’s driving techniques.
The “locavore” movement encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food, arguing that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locavores also shun supermarket offerings as an environmentally friendly measure, since shipping food over long distances often requires more fuel for transportation.
Being carbon neutral involves calculating your total climate-damaging carbon emissions, reducing them where possible, and then balancing your remaining emissions, often by purchasing a carbon offset: paying to plant new trees or investing in “green” technologies such as solar and wind power.
a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player
A lot of technology related words have been inducted into the dictionary and have even won the coveted Word Of The Year Awards. But by god, I would’ve though Twitter/Tweet had a fair shot at the title. Oh well, maybe next year!
Soap vs Oil
After a recent night of brilliant partying, we were all set to head back home when one of the guys decided to pause for a couple of minutes and lean on the passenger door of my car. What started of as a good conversation quickly morphed into my lone stifled scream when I noticed an unidentified foreign object now stuck to the passenger door. Imagine my horror when my attempts to wipe it with a wet towel yielded no success. My desperation quickly led me to use alternatives like soap and/or oil to try to wipe the sticky away. Scrubbing with soap touched tissue gave no clear results and while desperation was quickly moving into exasperation I decided to try olive oil and voila it started to slowly disappear. Rest assured no one is coming close to my vehicle anymore without the minimal inspections
And my whole-hearted support to the cause and use of Olive Oil!
Abbreviations – The Nonsensical Edition
Instant This
That’s probably an apt tag line for the way our lives progress as days pass by. Everything has to be super shortened or condensed so it can be consumed with speed and ease. Our attention spans have constantly depreciated like the current housing industry (2009). As this gene took effect at some point in the 15th century a super smart wise guy lauded himself for figuring out he could communicate words even by shortening them by making use of one or two alphabets usually from the words he was trying to communicate in the first place. This was all completely ingenious and evolved to a point where it was used to spawn an entirely new lingo – The Internet Lingo.
What surprises and partially irritates me ,however, is the relatively new fad of pretending to abbreviate complete words – emphasis on the word pretending. For instance someone recently signed off an email with F.R.I.E.N.D. Three things I found wrong with this:
- The practice of signing off with the word ‘Friend’. Did you think I would forget what our relationship was since the last time I spoke with you about 7 hours ago? Did my recent track record of forgetfulness lead you to believe this would be of some use?
- CAPITALIZING IS REALLY NOT COOL – EVEN IF ITS USED TO SIGN OFF AN EMAIL. IT REALLY FEELS LIKE YOU ARE YELLING AT ME!
- As if your presumption that I was deaf wasn’t insulting enough, you introduce the period after every letter. Pray tell me, just what is this supposed to mean? Was capitalizing as a form of emphasis not good enough? Does your keyboard insist on inserting the period after every letter? Now that you have abbreviated it, for no particular reason,what does it stand for?
Now don’t get me wrong here. Besides the obvious rant angle to this post, I really do find this practice nothing short of hilarious and pointless.
In Facebook recently I was reading through a series of comments where F.R.I.E.N.D.S friends were giving props for a certain something accomplished by someone. One of the comments read
R.E.S.P.E.C.T
I stopped for a second to actually search for what the acronym stands for (maybe I missed the memo) and found these
Refugee Education Sponsorship Program Enhancing Communities Together
Re-Empowerment of Skilled and Professional Employees and Construction Tradeworkers Act
Respect Equality Socialism Peace Environment Community Trade Unions
Responsibility, Etiquette, Sensitivity, Pace, Educate, Conditions and Tradition (Junior Golfer’s Creed)
Risk Evaluation and Stroke Prevention in the Elderly Cerivastatin Trial
Rotorcraft Efficient and Safe Procedures for Critical Trajectories
Residents Encouraging Study Peaceful Environment and Community Thinking
Responsible, Efficient, Skilled, Professionally Educated & Caring Team
Requirements Specifications improvement for federation of Co-operatives in Trento
Perhaps its just me, but I just can’t see how abbreviating the word in this context helps one bit. Now I’m no literature connoisseur, but all I’m saying is that I would think words when spoken or written should make sense in the context.If not, then it probably shouldn’t be used there.
P.E.A.C.E - Positive Energy Always Corrects Errors
Print Ads
As much as how online ads have developed over the past years one cannot deny the power of print ads. A set of 40 seriously funny print ads was posted over at WebDesignerDepot. This site does go beyond showcasing some of the best artsy stuff around the web so check them out when you get a chance.
While in the process of roaming around for more info I did manage to find something pretty interesting and funny. This ad featured in 1895 might certainly not get any serious air-time in our current society.
An advertisement showing a young woman with a package of Loring’s Fat-Ten-U food tablets and package of Loring’s Corpula, a fat-producting food.
MacHeist – Apps for Free
My good friend over at Clazh recently wrote about the new Macheist Nano Bundle – a collection of 56 applications(6th application will be unlocked and made available when 500,00 participants are reached) usually priced applications being distributed for free. While I personally don’t see myself using all of the products, I have already started making use of 3 of them
The other applications ,useful to many others no doubt, doesn’t excite me one bit (yet) since I either don’t see my needing them and/or have applications that serve the intended purposes pretty effectively.
For those of you who are new to the Mac scene and/or are an avid user already, there might be one or two applications that you just might like and continue using. Without boring you with details you can find elsewhere, let me just say something like this doesn’t last forever. With only 2 days left (as of penning this post) for the promotion to end, it might be wise to get in line right now and snag your own copy.
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