Hope You Enjoyed Your Fourth
Here’s hoping everyone enjoyed the Fourth of July yesterday, celebrating it, or at least having a nice time on our nation’s birthday*. I had fun, hanging out with my wife and in-laws, and enjoying a giant steak at Hapisgah Steak House here in Queens, and brought along my camera for an extreme close-up of my dinner.
To me, that’s America, good and bad. It’s excessive, and its delicious, and we thrive on being excessive in our “pursuit of happiness”. We try to do what many human beings want to do, just more successfully than others, and a lot of times we don’t realize the consequences of those actions until later. Our hearts are in the right place, and we get it right eventually, but sometimes it seems like we are just a bunch of animals, staring at juicy piece of meat. We’re not. We always pay the bill when it comes.
Anyway, that’s my strange analogy for the fourth. How’d you enjoy yesterday, or as the case was, not enjoy it?
The search engines did their thing, posting their holiday logos yesterday. Google went with the flag and the eagle:
Thankfully, Google corrected their mistake of last year, when they were doing cutesy logos:
And went back to basics. 2005:
2004:
2003:
2002:
Yahoo went the animated Flash logo route. Here’s what they ran:
And the non-Flash version (exact same one they ran last year), courtesy of Barry:
However, it was Ask.com that went all out, bringing back their recent tradition of giant, stunning, full-page holiday celebrations. Here’s a screenshot from Barry:
The one problem: If you personalized your Ask.com start page, you didn’t see the flag. They basically just changed the default scheme. I’m tempted to start using the default scheme, just so I don’t miss the next one. Here’s the full-size image (1600×1050, 134,251 bytes) that was used as the background, created by Stuart Seger:
Last year, Ask.com shocked me by doing the first of these:
And here’s the background image they used then.
And here’s Dogpile’s logo:
And, of course, Search Engine Roundtable’s logo:
Anyway, that’s all for this year. Let’s hope the next year for our country is filled with prosperity, sanity, and less violence and poverty. And let’s try not to obsess about celebrities, at least a little bit less?
* - Unless it’s not your nation, in which case, hope you got a day off work anyway.
