Left Turn at Albuquerque

I learned something new today when I was trying to add up some numbers at work. Not in the mood to open up a new application, I did a Google search for an online calculator. To my surprise I discovered that all I have to do is simply type in the calculation right into Google and it will tell me the answer as I type it. I then clicked on the Google Calculator link and discovered that you can do some big time equations (that I don’t exactly understand) in Google as well.

More about Google Calculator.

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For the weekend of May 21–23, 2010, Google changed the Google logo on its homepage to a fully playable version of Pac-Man. The logo change was done to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the game’s release. This was the first fully interactive special Google logo. Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time, or $120,483,800 in productivity. The logo is still playable for now at the link below

More @ Google.com/Pacman.

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April 1 is a time for pranks online and off. Google is playing a big one today by changing their name to Topeka.

More @ Google blog.

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Yesterday was National Pi Day and I know this because when I went to Google to search for something I noticed an awesome Google logo. In case you don’t know, Pi is a mathematical constant whose value is the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter in Euclidean space; this is the same value as the ratio of a circle’s area to the square of its radius.

More @ Wikipedia.

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Yesterday at a press conference, Google announced a new tool called Buzz. Now Google wouldn’t be the Google Gods they are if they weren’t continuing to come out with new and better ways to communicate and socialize online. Google Buzz is a cross between Facebook, Twitter and Email. It lets you share images, videos and stories with your friends or with the whole world and it works in with Gmail which is great if you already use a Gmail account as our primary email because you will already have all the people you communicate with built-in. Instead of just emailing a story to friends with annoying attachments and links to videos and stories, why not just send them the pictures, videos, stories and your thoughts right in Buzz? It currently has built-in Picasa, Flickr, Google Reader, and Twitter integration. Google also rolled out a phone app that works with Buzz.

Features include:

• No setup needed: Automatically follow the people you email and chat with the most in Gmail.
• Share publicly or privately: Publish your ideas to the world or just to your closest friends.
• Inbox integration: Comments get sent right to your inbox so it’s easy to keep the conversation going.
• Photo friendly: See thumbnails with each post, and browse full-screen photos from popular sites.
• Connect sites you already use: Import your stuff from Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, and Google Reader
• See updates in real time: New posts and comments pop in as they happen. No refresh required.
• Just the good stuff: Buzz recommends interesting posts and weeds out ones you’re likely to skip.

More @ Google Buzz.

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To help celebrate the 40th anniversary of Eric Carle’s book; The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Google used this logo for a day back in March, 2009. The book has sold 30 million copies since it was released in 1969. It teaches counting and the days of the week through the story of one very hungry caterpillar. It also features some beautiful illustrations and is a great book for all children. It’s currently on sale @ Amazon for $7.91.

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The United States Apollo 11 mission was the first manned spacecraft to land on the Moon on July 20, 1969. On July 20 of this year, Google posted a logo on their website in honor of the 40 year anniversary of the landing. The logo, while first being a little difficult to read is genius. Each crater represents a letter or a part of a letter with the spacecraft has footprints leading to it representing the “l” in Google.

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Google is working on a new operating system for the inexpensive netbook market, a market of portable computers that didn’t really exist a couple years ago. The open source operating system will be based on their own web browser, Chrome. Google has already introduced an operating system for mobile devices, called Android with some success. Google’s new OS is expected to begin running on computers in the second half of 2010.

More @ Yahoo Finance.

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Going on Google this morning I noticed that they changed their logo to celebrate Tetris’ 25th anniversary and 125 million purchases and downloads. I love it!

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Leave it up to Google to have some extremely clever logos depending on what holiday, birthday or other event happened on that day in history. Take the Dr. Seuss logo above. Typically a fun company would do something exciting to celebrate Dr. Sueuss’ birthday but Google goes out and changes their logo for the day. Google has an archive of logos they’ve used over the past few years. It can be found here.

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Logging into Google earlier today I noticed a new feature: Themes. Themes let you customize your Gmail experience with a distinct look. There are currently about 35 themes to choose from and I’m sure Google will add more in the future. Some of the themes are even customized to you depending on your location. To choose a theme, go to Gmail and click a thumbnail on the Themes tab of your Settings page.

More on Gmail themes.

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Search millions of historic photos from the Google LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google. Once you find a photo that interests you, click it for a larger version with a short description along with the location, date taken, photgrapher name and size of the photo. You can browse the photos through decades, categories or just choose to search whatever you have in mind.

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Google has finally added their street view service to the Baltimore/DC metro area. The service lets you view pictures to scope out areas for whatever reason using Google Maps without actually traveling there. The service has been available for a while now in other cities but was just recently turned on in the area. I heard the reason it didn’t come to the area sooner was for security reasons but according to the Fox 45 news it is because they were shooting hi-res pictures which delayed the process. Whatever the reason, it’s nice to see they added the area.

More @ Google Maps.

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Gmail: Google’s approach to email, has recently announced a bunch of new updates. Gmail has already not too arguably been the best online e-mail solution and the new slew of updates just prove that even more. Maybe with all these new features, Google will finally take Gmail out of Beta? Here are the highlights of the new features:

• Tons of new emoticons that are now available in e-mails, not just chat
• Colored labels to better categorize your e-mails
• Chat with groups of people, not just one on one
• Chat with your AIM friends in Gmail chat
• New 20MB maximum attachment file size
• No invitations needed anymore to sign up for Gmail
• Check up to five e-mail accounts through Gmail

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Today Sony released its free service, Life With PlayStation, which lets you view news and weather from cities across the globe. The service lets you access an interactive globe with information provided by Google News and The Weather Channel. Wii has a similar service which isn’t as graphically heavy as Sony’s Life With PlayStation. I am looking forward to downloading it tonight and trying it out.

More @ Sony Blog

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