Missing Sandwich!

FIrst Self-Propagating Virtual Lifeform

While software viruses are nothing new, Corrupted Blood is unique in that it's the first such infection ever to spread through a virtual environment without being deployed by malicious intent.: "When infected adventurers returned to town at the end of their quest, they inadvertently passed along the Corrupted Blood infection to those nearby. In short order, the plague ravaged the population. Soon entire cities fell victim to the artificial disease."

Do More (At Odeo!)

Ciao, Macromedia. Dom is leaving the Dreamweaver team and joining us at Odeo on Thursday. Can't wait to show him all the fun stuff. Welcome, Dom!

Hmm, Interesting

Can we interest you in some interesting interests? Nitin built an Odeo recommendation engine that's like biodiesel is to gasoline. We can't say for sure that you'll smell french fries while browsing Odeo but you may very well take some wrong turns—in a good way.

The Atari Flashback

For $30 you can play 39 original Atari games on this look-alike console—and all the games are already in it! Nice.

Trusted Search

Rollyo: "Roll your own search engine. Create personal search engines using only the sources you trust."

Live/Work

Soon Google employees will be able to *live* at the office: "The Internet giant, which has been looking for expansion space during the company's extraordinary growth spurt, plans to build offices, housing for workers, roads and infrastructure on a vacant section of the sprawling NASA facility in the heart of Silicon Valley."

Stealth Clippers

Sandra agrees with me that public nail clipping is unacceptable. It creeps me out. When I get some time in the lab, I'll see about inventing a pair of silent fingernail clippers. At least then I won't hear the nasty business.

Caltrain Clippings

There's two people below me on the Caltrain right now (free wifi until we leave the station) and they are clipping their fingernails. On the train. I do not like that.

Looking Bad in Margaritaville

This is why I went to the barber shop as soon as I got back from Florida.

At The Barber Shop

Back in Palo Alto.

Sarasota Int'l

From here to Atlanta and then to San Francisco.

No Harm, No Foul

Matt on the WordPress Inc kerfuffle: "What was called WordPress Inc. never really got off the ground, and I continued my job at CNET and Jonas (who I couldn't afford to give a salary) ended up going to work for Technorati." The inspiration for Matt's statement is here at Airbag Industries: Wordpressed.

Om says BitTorrent recieved funding. Nice.

The Cosmic Blogging Utopia

Mena Trott hopes to build a product that her mom will actually want to use. I think that's a good idea. However, the more mainstream blogging becomes the more there will be a need for something else. Namely, a place for people who don't want their mom to know what's up. Perhaps a community site intentionally designed to be janky-looking with a barrier to entry that's just high enough to keep out the right kind of folks?

Serenity Now

Blogger movie screening: "Townhall.com is excited to have the opportunity to get bloggers added to the press list for advance screenings of the sci-fi movie Serenity before its release on September 30th." Update: The screenings are fully booked.

Hey Ho Hi

Somehow our yet-to-be-released Odeo Studio seems all that much classier when Quebecois blogger Marie-Chantale Turgeon tests it out.

Florida

I'm in Florida this weekend visiting my mom who moved here two years ago. This is the first time I've visited. There's lots of lizards.

The United Animal Nations

Photo by Anne Chadwick Williams
"Livia McRee, a newly-trained EARS volunteer from Palo Alto, California, enjoys taking a walk with some smaller residents of the Jackson shelter. Livia was rarely caught without her wide-brimmed hat." The UAN put a few photos up.

New Blog Ranking Thingy

Welcome to TailRank: "We're introducing the world's most powerful and personalized weblog ranking system (at least we think so). You should judge for yourself."

Skid Row, Mississippi

Livy just got back from a week of volunteer work in Mississippi helping out with the animals displaced by Katrina. She put some photos up on Flickr.

Dunstan Has Too Much Free Time

Nice photos though. They have a children's book illustration quality about them. Actually, I'd love to read the quirky story that goes with these images.

A Chef Strikes Out on His Own

NYT on Chef Charlie's new startup: Calafia

Goldman in a Blazer

I swear that the Goldtoe himself also once wore a dark blue blazer in my presence. Damned if I can't remember when I saw him wearing it.

Writely So

You can post to Blogger from within Writely (the online word processor). Pretty sneaky, sis. (Via On the Side)

Yowzers

Netvibes is cool. You can customize the page like nobody's business. I like it.

The Odeo Player Widget

We rocked out an Odeo widget last night. The thing is neat I tell yah. Neat. I also figured out a trick pretty quick. If you haven't tended to your queue in a while or you don't have an Odeo account then here's what you do. Find someone who has a great queue going and put their feed in the custom feed area of the widget. You can get anyone's queue feed by typing /rss after their name in the url. For example, here's Ev's: http://odeo.com/profile/Evhead/rss

Reverse Commute

On the old Caltrain.

Found Via The 'Weird' Tag

Look At His Butt! The podcast where two geek babes, talk about Star Trek, science fiction, books, TV, the Internet, sex toys, and William Shatner's butt. Weird.

Livy's in Katrinaville

Livia is part of a disaster response organization here in California that got called to Missippi to help out with Katrina related stuff so I'm in charge of this little devil for the forseable future.

Different But Similar

I'm at Yahoo! headquarters right now. Heh. Just attending a micro-conference type dealy. I bumped into Ernie outside on my way in.

Digg Blog

Cool, it looks like there's going to be an official Digg Blog soon.

Audioscrobbler web services.

First Day At Odeo!

Noah is helping me build my desk. Well, he's building my desk and I'm blogging about it. So we're cooperating in a way. Right?

Congratulations to the fine folks at Blogger for blog search. I was a but a mere visitor last night as that was launching.

Warblogger Snapped Up by "The 'hoo"

It looks like solo journalist blogger Kevin Sites has been snapped up or at least has a contract with the 'hoo. Look for Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone from Yahoo! News late this September. There's even a tagline best read aloud in movie preview voice style: "One Man. A World of Conflict."

Clue #6

Just Finished A Run

Biodiesel Blog: Gas prices

Eric Case reports that he's paying less money for biodiesel than people are paying for gas. Fuel we can grow, harvest, and grow some more. Sounds like we could use more biodiesel stations.

Funny, You Don't Look Scottish

Quark changed their logo recently but it looks exactly like the logo for the Scottish arts council. Oops! (Via Mefi)

Funny

Daring Fireball: The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme.

New Sony Walkman.

Godzilla Eggs!

Watermelons packaged as Godzilla eggs (via BoingBoing). Nice!

Conspiracy Theory?

BoingBoing: The 17th street levee was bombed by the Army Corps of Engineers to save the more valuable real estate in the city.

No Wooden Stakes

My last day at Google is September 13—the same night the Pilot for Bones is on. It's David Boreanaz's new show directed by my friend Greg. So watch it! Sept 13th at 8pm on FOX. Boreanaz plays an FBI guy though, so no wooden stakes.

Thank You And Good Night!

Last week I resigned from Google. I used a Seinfeld quote in my announcement to the Blogger team: "Showmanship, George. When you hit that high note, you say goodnight and walk off." Blogger is hitting a high note right now in more than one aspect with lots of cool stuff to work on over the next year. It's been awesome here at Google and I'm going to miss working with such a great group of people.

A couple years ago I started using my one cent Nokia mobile phone to share dispatches from the road with my family and friends. Before that I was manually transferring Chris Lydon's interviews onto my retro iPod. This was neat stuff but there had to be an easier way. Later, Ev, Noah, and I shared an enthusiasm for how this might be and it turns out, other folks were already thinking about it.

Odeo was officially founded in December of last year and recently announced funding. There's already an awesome group crowded into that little San Francisco office and I figured if I wanted to play, then now is the time. So I looked into it and Williams told me I have a face for Odeo. Well, not in so many words but you understand. There's lots of potential here and I'm excited about doing my part to help see it through. I'll miss working with my Google friends but I look forward to shaking things up and, er, making some noise at Odeo.

Heh

President Announces Global War on Weather: "Critics of the plan urged Bush to finish the job of cleaning up from Katrina, and noted that oil-rich Venezuela had nothing to do with the Gulf Coast storm."

43 Guesses

43 Things, 43 Places ... guess who's next? 43 Sneakers. Yeah, that's gotta be it. Sneakers. I'm sticking with that. That's my guess.

Finding Blogs Back In The Day

Dan and I were ahead of our time! Technorati's new Blog Finder reminds me that we launched Blogfinder.com on the side back in February 2001 while I was still at Xanga. It was too distracting so we didn't continue. Too bad. Here was the QTAFA (Questions That Are Frequently Asked).

Millions of Tons

Bush says we're sending "Millions of tons of food". Umm, that's a lot.

Zombies Beware

Pal just posted some good news at Blogger Buzz: Next Blog, Now With Less Spam! There are some Blogger engineers with an almost unhealthy obsession with defeating spam around here. That's a good thing for blog readers but sitting bolt upright in the middle of the night with spam-defeating algorithms floating around in your head can disrupt a good REM cycle.

WiFi Cameras

Kodak and Nikon Go Wi Fi: "Nikon's Coolpix P1 and P2 have built-in Wi-Fi features, that let you transmit images wirelessly directly to a computer, or to any PictBridge-enabled printer equipped with the optional Nikon Wireless Printer Adapter (PD-10), for wireless printing." What about wirelessly to Flickr or Blogger? That would be cooler. Maybe they will.

Writerly is neat!