Recently in the "Google" category...
The Seattle Times ran a story on Google Kirkland this morning and our new, upcoming, office.
By early next year, some 195,000 square feet of offices along Sixth Street South, on the site of a former Navy depot and door company, will be occupied by Googleites. They will move into three office buildings in a campuslike setting near downtown Kirkland between Lake Washington and Interstate 405.
Googleites?
You’ll notice over on the right hand side of the blog (if you’re reading this on the website, rather than through RSS) a little widget that will let you chat to me, even if you don’t have a Google Talk account!
Sweet or what?
This new feature of Talk, Chatback, just shipped - developed by the Google Talk team right here in Kirkland.
It looks like we did it again.
Following on from last year’s win, Google continues to be the best company to work for according to Fortune magazine.
My latest 20% project at Google shipped today and as a result the blogroll on this site is now powered by Google Reader! That’s right folks, get them while they’re hot! Easy blogroll creation for everyone. Well, assuming you use Reader as your RSS aggregator….
Check out the post over on the Official Google Reader blog for all the juicy details:
As a blogger I like to include a blogroll on my site so that friends, family and other readers can take a look at what I like to read. It’s also a nice way to give a shout out to the authors of the blogs that I like. However, maintaining a blogroll can be a bit of a pain as your subscriptions ebb and flow.
…
20% time is such a wonderful thing. As well as being able to actually implement my own wishlist in another Google product, I get to play around with technologies that I might not use day-to-day. As a backend engineer, mucking around in frontend code can be refreshing…
And welcome to all you readers that came here from said blog. Kick back and stay a while.
Hey! So our stock closed the day at the cosine of 45 degrees.
Well, I found that kinda cool :-)
What a great way to start the week. Andy Summers was at Google in NYC this morning to talk about his new book I’ll Be Watching You - Inside The Police 1980-83 and his photography. We video conferenced into the talk.
This was a double treat for me - first, I’m a huge fan of Andy Summers the guitarist and second, I had no idea that he was such a great photographer.
Wow.
The talk was very amusing too - with lots of small anecdotes about life on the road.
Anyhow, just one more great thing about working at Google :-)
The talk should be up on YouTube later - I’ll update this post when it’s available.
Update: The video is now available.
Our second intern of the summer, Julia, headed back to college this week. She rocked quite hard - we’ll miss her…
Gayle has all the details…
Oh, and Ming, yes you were our first intern, but Gayle forced us to promote Julia… Or something like that…
Before you ask, no. I had nothing to do with this.
There is a hidden easter egg in the latest revision of Google Earth, the formula for access to which is currently making the rounds.
Basically, to quote TechCrunch
To access the hidden feature, open Google Earth and hit Command+Option+A (note it must be capital A) or Ctrl+Alt+A if you’re using a Windows Machine.
However, given my obvious conflict of interest, I’ll just take exception to TechCrunch’s final statement:
…It wasn’t perfect, but it was as good visually as the paid Microsoft Flight Simulator, and in terms of actually presenting real objects it was better…
Obviously they haven’t looked at FSX. The two products have both different visual focusses and merits. How does the terrain and imagery look outside of major cities? How do those airports compare? How are the flight systems? ATC?
I’ll just stop now before I dig myself into a hole :-)
I have to say though, as easter eggs go, it’s a goody. It’s up their with the shooter in Excel 95. Btw, Excel 97 had a flight sim based easter egg too…
