New Google Services

Gmail, Gdocs, Maps, Gcal, Youtube, Groups, Picasa, and many, many more. With the list of web services offered by Google growing every day, it seems appropriate to take a(n entirely satirical) look at the untouched realms Google has yet to tap into.



Having a bad day? Select "Grouchy" from the drop down menu and everyone will know to stay clear. GTalk will make your status into a "stay away" message, while GMail optionally bounces emails from preset filters. Don't have many friends? Google will send SMS's with messages like "Cheer Up," and "Don't worry, be happy!" Plus, GFeelings will allow you to catalog your emotions in one easy to reference database. Imagine, being able to reference exactly how you felt after that conversation with your mother-in law two years ago.



















Google Socks, a new addition to Google Search, allows you to index and search for all of your household items. Lost your keys? No worries, just type it into the search bar and you're greeted with a the helpful "Room View", pointing you in the right direction.

Not satisfied putting your schedule, private emails, personal documents, and medical records all into one integrated service? Want the same company that controls all of your information to control your assets to? Become a member of Google Bank! Needless to say, there is excellent integration with Google Checkout.




Another addition to search, Google is continuing to improve their natural language processing by indexing all the conversations you have with your loved one. With technology similar to GAudi, now being used to index speech in Youtube videos, GBicker records all of the "conversations" you have and indexes them. You will be able to scan the transcript by time or keyword. Now you can find out exactly what they said and prove you were right once and for all.








Much like the past couple generations have been raised on television, Google now offers today's modern family a chance to pass the buck on the responsibilities of child rearing. Just sit your kid down in front the household computer and start them off at http://parenting.google.com/. The page automatically starts incessantly jamming useful benign information into the child's mind. Right now it's only available for ages up until ten or eleven, but development has begun for an "adolescent" package.

Hard Earned Lessons about Upgrading Ubuntu

With Ubuntu 8.10 just around the corner, I'm reflecting on some lessons learned from previous upgrades.  My hope is that new ubuntu users will be benefit.

1.  There's no rush.  I know, you're practically salivating at the thought of all those new built in features.  But remember, you have a working system now, and in fact you like it a lot.  It will still be there in a few weeks, about the time that the "last of the last minute" bug fixes have made their way to the repositories.

2.  Back up your system before you upgrade.  You may have forgotten about that weird software RAID you setup six months ago.  Upon upgrading all of the sudden your computer doesn't remember which hard drive is which, and simply neither do you.  Hope you didn't have any striped drives.  This is just one of thousands of things that can go wrong, no matter how much faith you have in the Ubuntu community.

3.  Adjust all of your third party repositories.

4.  If you're doing a fresh install and downloading the .iso, use the bittorrents.  Don't put unnecessary strain on the servers.

That being said, who else is excited?