It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, and—as always—I have so much to say.  I’ll use my recent and upcoming schedule as a crutch for providing some musings and commentary

Last week:

- Monday:  Special Google Event and Hakone Gardens private party.
Early in the day I got to test my Event Planning mettle.  It all came out okay!  No one was electrocuted.  No one went hungry.  No one fell or was thrown off of large balconies.  Reviews were good, and I wasn’t fired.  In the evening, I joined a friendly group of geeks at a private party at the beautiful Hakone Gardens in Saratoga, California.  Free sushi!  Company presentations in the blissfully short form of one haiku each!  Plus prizes, a Futurist presentation, and much more.

- Tuesday:  The Fifth Annual Google Dance and included “Meet the Engineers” event
I was responsible for planning this year’s Meet the Engineers event upstairs during the Google Dance, enabling lots of Webmaster’y-type folks and Googlers to chat informally about largely search-focused ideas, questions, and more.  Overall, it seemed to go pretty well, though I certainly got some good feedback to improve the event for next year (feel free to add more feedback in the comments below if you’d like!) And in the general party there were battling robots, lots of cheese, wacky green-screen dancing karaoke, demo’ing and dunking Googlers, and lots and lots (thousands!) of geeks in various stages of buzzed revelry

- Wednesday:  Search Engine Strategies Conference (continued from Tuesday) and yet more geek parties
The Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, California is one of the largest events of its kind… four solid days of learning ‘n’ camraderie in the Web Marketing / Search Engine Optimization space, with four evenings of networking, drinking, and playful debauchery.  My colleagues sumo wrestling!  Geeks Gone Wild on the dance floor!  And, on a serious but equally important note, it was a great chance for me to meet some fascinating heavyweights in the industry and for me to do my best representing Google… answering questions, gathering thoughtful bits of feedback, and happily putting names with faces ("Ah, you’re THAT blogger...").

- Thursday:  My first speaking engagement on behalf of Google!
My boss, Matt Cutts, is one of the most articulate and likeable fellows in the search engine realm.  When he speaks, people listen!  When I speak… well, I really hadn’t ever publicly spoken on behalf of Google before, so as you can imagine, I was a bit apprehensive and also quite excited.  Making matters even more interesting was the fact that all of my fellow panelists (from Yahoo, MSN, and Ask) came prepared with Powerpoint presentations and I came prepared with… nothing.  Well, that’s not exactly true.  I had spent quite a bit of time thinking about the subject at hand (how Google looks at links on the Web) and was pretty confident about my ability to answer questions… but I certainly hadn’t thought of making an opening statement.  It was a “Q&A” session, after all!

Well, luckily, during the few minutes of the others’ presentations, I managed to quickly shuffle a reasonably organized selection of thoughts into my head and then out of my mouth in a basically impromptu four minute speech.  I even squeezed in a bit of geek humor, specifically a reference to Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” book… which was, to my pleasure and relief, pretty well-received (yay, fellow geeks with good taste in literature!).  I was asked some great questions and had answers for all but one of them, for which I admitted “I don’t know.”

Overall, it was an enjoyable and worthwhile experience, and I look forward to speaking at another industry event.

Microsoft Access is for masochists.  It’s expensive, a pain to learn, and—frankly—quite overkill for nearly any home application.

So, for too long, folks like myself have kept lists in Excel.  This works… sort of.  But it’s a pain to share, and it lacks a lot of the usefully-database’y features that make working with data multidimensionally both useful and fun.

For instance, I’m trying to keep track of where I’ve traveled around the world, what sets of pictures I’ve taken, where those pictures reside (online, in photo albums, etc.), who I have yet to share them with, and so on.  I *could* do lots of messy filtering and sorting on Excel as I try to handle related action items, but a database (featuring multiple persistent views) would be so much easier!

Well… dabbledb and Zoho Creator to the rescue!  Below I’ll talk about my initial experiences using both services, some advantages I perceive in each, and I’ll also demo my first “app”—a filterable/sortable list of movies I’ve seen and want to see (all 217 of them so far!)

I’ve been at Google about four months, and it’s been a hell of a great ride so far.  I really need to write more about this later, but in a nutshell… my colleagues rock, the flexible and trusting environment is awesome, and I’m very excited about what I’m working on. 

However, I do have to admit to sometimes being a bit freaked out :o.

I love RottenTomatoes.com.  It’s one of the most useful and addictive movie sites I’ve found, right along with IMDB.com.  Now I can look up movies on either database in a snap by using a surprisingly little-known Firefox feature that lets you assign a keyword of your choice to any search on any site.

A couple of months ago, I became a Googler.  Since my boss—Matt Cutts—has already so kindly introduced me on his blog, I feel this is probably a good time to say a few words about my new job

The short version:  I’m honored, humbled, a bit nervous, and yes, very happy.  As a lifelong geek who’s been excited about search and Google in particular for many years, it’s hugely fascinating to be experiencing new adventures from the “inside.”

Okay, now for the longer version!

It’s easy to get your own space on the Web (Geocities, Google Pages, Live Journal, Blogger, etc.) without cost and without fuss.  So why get your own domain name?

• It can provide you with a nice vanity and (generally) permanent e-mail address… e.g., or
• Same goes for a Web address; also, you can then host your site anywhere you want!
• It’s dang cheap!  $5-$10/year for the domain registration (+ optional Web site hosting costs, usually $2-20 depending on how much space/bandwidth/power you need)

In the rest of this note, I’ll cover very briefly how you get a domain name, and—more comprehensively—some things you’ll want to consider before choosing a domain name.

As seen by this Australian TV commercial from Super Geek and this admittedly damn funny Fear of Girls video, we learn that…
- Geeks are all guys, and not particularly attractive fellas, either
- Geeks are typically sporting taped-up glasses and completely uncool fashion
- Women AREN’T geeks (and they’re most often confusing/confused AND helpless)

Let me bravely be an old fuddy duddy and remind Webmasters of something here:
Everyone… I really believe everyone using the Web knows that blue, underlined text signifies a link.

Unfortunately, here’s what I’m seeing a lot of nowadays:

Bookmarks.  Favorites.  Most of us save a list of sites we often visit or want to re-find again… either by adding them as a Bookmark in Firefox or as a Favorite in Internet Explorer or even adding the site to our online list residing on del.icio.us or Spurl, and so on.

Also, lots of us have browser toolbars by Yahoo! or Google or other folks.  Unfortunately, there’s a huge disconnect here.

I visit Salon.com regularly.  Same with Google News, SlickDeals, and many other sites.  In Firefox, it’s very easy to assign a shortcut to access any one of my favorite sites; for instance, I can type sd into my Firefox address bar and be immediately whisked to SlickDeals.net.  Even cooler, I can type gns lindy hop and instantly be brought to the search results page of Google News that shows me if there are any recent articles about Lindy Hop.

The downside?  If I want to use any of these shortcuts on other computers (at a friend’s place, at work, when visiting my parents), I have to somehow copy over my Firefox preference files over via a thumbdrive or whatnot.  Or, if they don’t have Firefox, I’m screwed. 

This is where browser toolbars come in—or, rather, where they SHOULD come in.

I haven’t had a chance to watch more than the first few minutes of this film, but Waterborne has been generally well-reviewed… and you can watch it for free either below or directly on Google’s site through January 15, 2006.

Rather than spoil even part of the plot, I’ll instead invite you to begin watching it now without preconceptions, with a note that it’s a serious film focusing on characters rather than explosive action.