I was at the first New York Video 2.0 Meetup last week, and I pulled out my camera and recorded most of what he was speaking. Afterwards, I got a chance to chat with him, and get permission to throw the video up, and he’s a pretty cool guy who probably didn’t get a fair shake in the recent hubbub more because of his lack of long hair and breasts than anything else. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there, so, barring the first minute or two I missed while fumbing with my camera, enjoy the video:

Two notes: First, I’m kind of dissapointed it took me so long to be able to post this video. I uploaded it Wednesday night, and five days is an interminable wait. Google needs to have an express lane, one I’d gladly pay for. Two, I’ve been growing my hair out lately (since my wedding), and I look like a twelve-year old in my introduction. If you’d like to skip my brief intro, click this link.

Google has added a new feature to the mobile version of Google Maps: live traffic conditions. When viewing Maps on your phone, hit “live traffic”, and (if you are in one of 30 supported cities, including LA, New York and Chicago), you will see if there is a pileup you’d best avoid. Maps Mobile is available at google.com/gmm and requires a JRE browser plugin (a list of supported devices is here).

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So, here’s my experience visiting Google Maps Mobile on a Windows Mobile 5.0 phone:

Google Maps
Google Maps may not work on your phone. If you’d like to try, download Google Maps for a high-end phone or a mainstream phone. (US/Canada)

Select a different language.

Clicking either of those links downloads a file named “…-Generic-Advanced_MIDP2_L1.jad” (or MIDP1). What the hell is a “jad” file? I’m sure I’ll figure it out, but my phone has no clue what to do with it. Well, by not linking to it from google.com/pda, and not giving it a friendly URL like maps.google.com/mobile, I’m guessing Google doesn’t feel like appealing to the typical phone user with this product just yet.

• Techdirt: Microsoft’s New Motto: Don’t Be Evil Anymore
  (tags: microsoft corporate evil)

Philipp pointed out a cool site which shows off what a Google Paint program might look like (Firefox only). It isn’t much to sneeze at, since it has no features not found in Microsoft’s Paint software, and has plenty of unimplemented nonworking buttons, but you have to admit that a working drawing program running on a Google Pages site is cool in and of itself.

Valleywag posted this incredibly unflattering video of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, back in 1986 at Sun Microsystems, sporting the largest, most plug-ugly pair of glasses I’ve seen in awhile. Sadly, I think I was wearing a very similar pair in the late 80s/early 90s. Blech!

Yeah, I don’t think I’ll ever regret switching to contacts.

Kirb wrote about his extreme dissatisfaction with Google Checkout, detailing his horror story using the service. Barely a week later, he got a goodie bag from Google, containing a Google-branded USB stick, USB hub, retractable USB mouse, USB light, chewing gum, tshirt, hat, mug, pens, paper and possibly a few other things. Wow, if that’s what you get for complaining once, where’s my Porsche?!

Hat-tip: Hans Mast

John Battelle wrote last week about some improvements Google shipped for Finance. They include an autocompleting search box, a stock market module in Google News’ business section, support for multiple portfolios, auto-refresh on the portfolio page, reverse chronological reading of discussion groups and links to free transcripts of earnings calls. There’s even a new suggestion box. Nice!

So, back in February, the headphone jack on my Dell laptop stopped working properly. It seemed to think that there were headphones still plugged in, and wouldn’t play sound over the speakers. I tried everything, including bracing it against staples, but couldn’t get the sound to play without serious effort every time I needed it.

Since I went cheapo on the warranty, and the headphone jack is part of the motherboard, I couldn’t get it fixed without sending it in to Dell. Which, given that I would never be away from blogging for any period of time (uh, oops), meant that I would have to live with it. No way was I giving up my wonderful laptop.

Today, fourteen days before my warranty expired, I bought two more years of service. Along with the two years, I got a better deal: on-site repair. Finally, a technician can come to my home and fix the damn thing, so I can watch plenty of pirated downloads with ease.

Oh, but he can’t do it until the original warranty expires, so I have to wait until August 11th. Bleh. I’ll live, but that sure is annoying. Maybe the new Dell blog can help?

Zorgloob noted this Google Doodle which was up on Google.fr on Bastille Day.

Any other Doodles I missed while I was gone?

I’m really liking this: an online poker game built on the Google Web Toolkit.

Very good game, very well designed. You can do everything you’d expect in an online poker game (except bet real world money), and use any image (including my animated Zidani headbutt gif) as your picture.

Check out GPokr.com

My kudos to Ryan Dewsbury, creator of GPokr.

Do you use WordPress’s standard comment moderation, rather than some fancypants (and probably easier) plugin? I do, since I’m deathly afraid of missing even one usefull reader tidbit, and sometimes having a page with 10,000 comments can be unwieldly (and crash browsers).

Well, here’s a helpful tip if the comments are just piling up and driving you crazy. Basically, by adding the bolded code to your wp-admin/moderate.php file, you can limit the comment moderation screen to just the most recent n comments, in this case, one hundred at a time. Oh so very useful. My 10,000 comments are now done, and I am a happy blogger once again.

{{{
#!php
$comments = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM $wpdb->comments WHERE
comment_approved = '0' ORDER BY `comment_date` ASC LIMIT 0 , 100“);
}}}

As Miel so perfectly noted (milk carton and all), I have been persona non grata for about two weeks, and, you know what? It sucks! I blame Time Warner.

Lets have a little bit of “me time”…

So, when I got married, I also moved into a new apartment. Stupid me, I assumed that it would be a simple matter to get the internet in New York City, especially if money is no object (and, when you make money online, it isn’t). First, I called Verizon for DSL, and discovered (horrors!) that my residence was not yet equipped for it. As Verizon says, they are just two blocks away. Gee, thanks, put me on the waiting list.

Next stop: The cable company. The whole house is wired for cable, so this should be easy, but they explain to me that since someone else at my residence is using the cable line (I’m splitting a house with another couple), they need to send a technician to activate a second line. And, since so many people are having problems with their service in my area, it’ll be at least ten days to send out a technician. Blech!

However, I can split the net with my housemate. Problem is, I need to install a second modem (wireless is logistically a problem), and they need to send out a technician to install that, too. Of course, I could pick up the self-install kit.

So, off to the mall, find out I need my housemate’s picture ID, get them to fax it, get the modem and back home. Plug it in, and: Signal Error.

Oh, oops. They forgot to tell me that when the sent the technician last week to activate the other cable modem, he turned off all the cable jacks in the house, except the one in use. So they need to send a technician to activate the lines. My appointment: August 7, twelve days from today.

ARGHH!!!

So, what’s a blogger to do? As you may be able to tell, I love blogging, and am committed to this blog, so much that I could be committed, and for that reason I am leaching wi-fi off my folks’ DSL, five blocks away from my lovely sleeping wife, at 3:30 in the morning. I just couldn’t take it anymore, so I just had to post.

What have I learned? There is nothing more difficult in the world than convincing a company to let you give them your money. I am going to spend the next two weeks doing everything in my power to get any other internet service than cable, just out of anger and spite. Screw Time Warner, I say!

I also learned that London is an extraordinarily expensive city, while there as part of my honeymoon. The cabbie told me that you need around 40,000 pounds a year just to support a family (that’s over $70,000). No wonder I’ve heard about problems in Europe with upward social mobility!

Did you know that it costs eight pounds to drive into the city center of London? Just to enter it, not including parking or gas (over seven dollars a gallon!). Worse, soon the cost to enter the area may be raised to 25 pounds, almost fifty dollars! Wow!

By the by, if you were worried for my life, you had good reason to be. Part of my trip took me to Israel, and I left just one day before Hezbolla attacked. Dodged a bullet there!

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Okay, I need to start blogging with a fresh start. That means clearing out some old stuff, most of it at least a month old. I can’t guarantee regularly scheduled blogging, but I will shoot for a few posts a day, and I want to get caught up immediately. So, for your reading pleasure, a long list of links, some of which you may find interesting, in order to get back to the good stuff:

- Show your AdSense stats in your blog sidebar (I need to install this one day). This sidenotes plugin also rocks

- There’s a blog dedicated to Wei-Hwa’s puzzle challenge, and helping you solve them. You’ll need it!

- Are a lot of AdSense publishers afraid to go on vacation for fear of “click attacks”? I hope not. I’ve only been semi-active lately, and nobody attacked me.

- This is fun: Search Engines: Where Are They Now?

- Google Pack: Now available in more languages

- Google Pages: Now allowing AdSense

- Digg’s got some funky new AdSense ads. Me likey.

- Google Reader: Now more mobile-friendly

- Google launched Google Desktop Gadget Designer, a development enviroment for their widgets, released Desktop 4 out of beta, and announced a Gadget creator contest

- Some EU countries may charge a VAT on AdSense. That would suck, and be a bit strange as well.

- MySpace Videos is beating Google and Yahoo Video, and closing on YouTube.

- YouTube’s market share in the UK is more than four times that of Google, and almost 2/3 of the market

- Findory launched Video and Podcast sections. NICE!

- Google’s got balls

- Gmail now lets you apply filters to old emails and select everything

- There’s a whole bunch of new Google patents

- There’s an Australian documentary about Google

- BlogSpot is blocked by several Indian ISPs

- A company named AdSense calls it quits, sick of being stuck in Google’s shadow

Krugle is an open source search engine that went live last month. You can search for code, code-related pages and running open source projects.
You can save the results, edit them and share them with friends or co-workers. There’s also a blog to stay on top of the latest developments.

Very handy indeed. The coolest part is that you can select a specific coding language to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Randy wrote a cute little utility that generates a sitemap for a website. He used the Yahoo! Explorer API to extract the URLs, so you have to be indexed by Yahoo! to benefit. But, if you are well indexed by Yahoo! and not well indexed by Google, then this is likely the utility you were always looking for. A limitation of Yahoo! Explorer API limits the sitemap to 1000 webpages.

Head over to his blog; click on the link, open the zip file and run the executable inside (requires .NET 2.0). Type the website address you want to create the sitemap for and click the Generate button. Either copy the generated XML or click the Save button to save the XML file to disk.

From the Google Video Blog:

You’re watching this documentary on monkeys and then halfway through, this monkey does the funniest thing ever. So of course, you want nothing more than to share this hilarious monkey moment with your friends. Now, on Google Video, doing just that is easier than ever.

Now you can email links to specific points inside a video! All you have to do is add the time you’d like to share to the end of a video’s URL. We support hours (h), minutes (m), and seconds (s).

For example, Invisible Board is a 1 min 46 sec long video but I believe the coolest part is at 1 min 26 sec, so all I have to do is add #1m26s to the link I’m going to send to my friends! Just like this: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6396990712930217422#1m26s

Now that is a very cool feature. I’ve tested it myself and it’s really great! Two thumbs up!

A blind developer at Google has built a search engine to prioritise results that are accessible to visually impaired web users. The Google Labs project, launched last week, has been welcomed by RNIB and its US counterpart, AFB.

From The Register:

Put a query into Google Accessible Search and a standard Google search begins. But before the results are presented, they are re-ordered to prioritise those pages identified as the most likely to be accessible to visually impaired users.

The identification and prioritising process was the work of recent recruit TV Raman, a computer scientist with a wealth of experience in accessible technologies whose stated objective is “to develop technologies that drive the future of the web toward eyes-free, ubiquitous information access.”

See it here: http://labs.google.com/accessible/

From TechDirt’s ‘Just tryin’ to help’ department:

Google News has included Techdirt as one of its sources for a few years now. It doesn’t bring much traffic, to be honest, but it’s nice that we’re included. For some unknown reason, Google News changed something on July 6th, so that all of our stories appearing in Google News now show up with the headline “Permalink to this story.” We hadn’t made any changes to our site, and Google News had always performed flawlessly in the past. We figured the folks at Google News might want to know about the glitch, so our VP of Product Development Dennis Yang emailed them a friendly note pointing out that something on their end appeared to have broken. What followed was a series of emails from Google staff (much of it sounding like boilerplate “canned” responses) that in almost every case blamed us for their own glitch. That’s what we get for trying to point out a glitch to them.

Read more at TechDirt

Funniest piece in the article:

I’m now required by the Federal Aviation Administration to give the following safety instructions, because our aircraft is in beta and always will be:

In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, stock options will drop from the ceiling above you. Please inflate the options until you feel financially secure.

In the event of a sudden loss of propulsion, look under your seat for the blue, red, yellow and green Google parachute. Place the straps around your shoulders, tighten the waist belt, jump out of the aircraft and press the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on your chest.

In the event of a water landing, Sergey and Larry will have no problem walking for help.

In keeping with Sergey and Larry’s preferences regarding security and privacy, our destination is secret.

Read more of this funny article

Nathan has disappeared from the blogosphere. His honeymoon is supposed to be over for a while already but he hasn’t posted anything for the last six days. He hasn’t showed up online for the last six days either, so nobody knows where he is. A few possible answers:

1. He’s chained to a sink, doing the dishes, the laptop is out of reach.
2. His wife forbids him to blog, now that he’s married he has to obey.
3. He extended his honeymoon by at least a week, having fun somewhere.
4. Something happened.

I don’t know which one of these 4 it is, but I hope it’s not the last one. I’ve been posting a few things on his blog (the last 10+ items) but I don’t have the time to start moderating the 6000 comments that are in the cue.
Has anyone seen Nathan?

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