What "Google Level" are you?

In case you haven't noticed, Google seems is gradually taking over the Internet. Therefore, if you're not with Google, you're falling behind the times. Also, the company has managed to garner an almost religious following and commitment to its products.

Many people think of Google as just search, but in reality they offer many many more services. I've noticed that people adopt certain sets of Google services in waves (i.e. you spend a few days "discovering" a certain set of Google's offerings).

People start by learning a certain "set" of products, then wait for a while, then eventually, they will learn another set of products. These products have a natural grouping, and there is a natural progression to learning and using them.

What "Google level" are you?


1. Seeker
You've just discovered the Internet. You are probably pretty old if these are the only features you know about.

• Search, images

2. Dabbler
You have experimented and had fun with some of Google's most accessible offerings.

• News, Maps, Earth, Finance, Scholar, Picassa

3. Disciple
As you use Google you have started discovering some very nifty, useful and fun features. It has started changing the way you work on the computer and on the Internet.

• gMail, Blogger, Personalized home page, Desktop
  
• Nifty search bar tricks
• FireFox (not actually Google... but usually goes hand in hand with Google)

4. Committed
Google is at the center of all your online activities. Even if there are better services available for some things, you are likely to use the Google version anyways... because it's Google.

• Calendar, Talk
  
• Reader, Web Alerts, News Alerts
• Page Creator, Groups,Notebook
• Web Accelerator, Google extensions for Firefox

5. Monk
You and Google are one. You don't need a personal hard drive anymore, your entire life is online. You probably work on multiple computers and can reformat your computer on a whim.

• Docs & Spreadsheets
• Google Apps for your domain

6. Evangelist
You believe and promote Google, and try to make more Googlers. You actively participate and contribute to the Google community.

• gBase, API programming, Google 3D, Code Search

Also of note...

Quirky
This category of tools doesn't really fall into the ordered list. You may use them anywhere along the continuum, but you may not be using these even at the highest levels of Google enlightenment.

• Orkut, Music trends, Transit, SMS, Search by location

Tiffany's Falls, frozen photo album

Did you know that Hamilton has over 70 waterfalls? I paid a visit to one of the this weekend (Tiffany's Falls) to take some frozen waterfall pictures. Click on the picture below to go to the full album.

Tiffany's Falls

Enjoy!

Death is killing stories

Why is it that the big event in "stories" these days is "who's gonna die?". Somehow, we have become pre-occupied with who might die in today's stories, that the rest of the story takes a sidestep.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but normally in life we don't know ahead of time when somebody is going to die. So, why reveal these kind of things ahead of time (even if we don't know who) in books and on TV?

Let's take three examples and explore; Harry Potter, Lost and Heroes.

Author J.K. Rowling said two characters will die in the last installment of her boy wizard series, and she hinted Harry Potter might not survive, either. (CBS News)

The Potter books have become the absolute worst in making the entire story about who is going to die. In the last three books, Rowling revealed before-hand that key characters were going to die, then the discussion boards swirled trying to figure out who was going to die. Now, in the 7th and final chapter she reveals that two characters will die. My opinion of the previous book (Half-blood prince) is that it's sole purpose was to set up the death of one key character, which could have been accomplished in maybe 2 chapters, rendering the remainder of the book unnecessary.

The TV series Lost is also a big offender. Every time a so-called "major" character is killed off the TV stations run a major advertising campaign telling you ahead of time that "somebody will die". Then, it ends up being either a minor character or a character that was so annoying that you won't miss them anyway (I'm thinking of you Shannon).

This week, the show Heroes did the same thing. The preview at the end revealed that "somebody will die", so now I'm supposed wait in suspense all week trying to guess who is going to die.

I've heard talk radio pick up these stories as if they are big events, so I guess the publicity stunt works well.

Sorry, I'm not going to play along. I really wish that they could just go ahead and kill the character without telling me ahead of time. Often they end up killing a minor character and I think, "they were making a such a big deal that guy?", and end up a disappointed viewer.

Writers please, just go ahead and kill the character warning me ahead of time, and I will be a happier viewer/reader.

Viacom vs. YouTube , bold business move, I like it.

Media companies have long hated the way that YouTube profits from their copyrighted material. However, for the past year all they have done is yelp and complain, and occasionally take down clips. This was self defeating of course, because these clips actually promoted and popularized a lot of shows.

Viacom is the first company to finally fight back with a real solution: Their are making their own youTube.

Viacom moves on without YouTube | CNET News.com: "The company recently began offering so-called embed code that allows fans of popular programs such as the The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to post clips to their MySpace.com pages or blogs. That embed code duplicates one of the more popular features of YouTube: the ability to easily post videos on other Web sites and blogs."

While the site cannot possible be as popular as YouTube, it is very forward thinking of Viacom. In the absence of a deal with YouTube, this is the best business decision you could make. Kudos to you.

YouTube is missing out on this opportunity. They have the chance to form strong partnerships with big media companies, by hosting copyrighted content and sharing ad revenues.

Unfortunately, both sides lose out on this scenario. Content would certainly be more valuable on YouTube than on the Comedy Central site, and YouTube doesn't get to share any revenue.

Music industry fires back at Apple

Steve Jobs has asked the big media companies to remove the requirement for DRM (Digital Rights Management) licencing from music downloaded from iTunes and other online music stores. This is basically the technology that makes music purchased from iTunes only playable on iPods, limits the number of copies, limits the number of computers it can be played on, etc...

Jobs said eliminating such restrictions would open up the online music marketplace.

This is probably true. The interesting thing about downloading music legally online is that it is actually less valuable than pirated MP3s, because you can play MP3s anywhere, anytime. As such, it can reasonably be inferred that there are people who would be willing to purchase music from iTunes (myself included), but have no interest in owneingcrippled music. If there were no protection, more people may actually be willing to pay for the convenience that iTunes provides.

The Music industry struck back, declaring Apple's hypocrisy in that Apple is not willing to licence out it's technology to other media players or music devices. Fair enough. Steve Jobs would argue differently however:

globeandmail.com: Music industry fires back at Apple: "In his essay, Jobs said Apple is against licensing 'FairPlay' as an alternative method for making iTunes accessible to all portable players, because making the technology widely available would make it easier for hackers to figure out how to bypass it."

Come on Steve, you're a good guy and all, but this is not a valid argument. The argument breaks down in that hackers have already broken Fairplay, rendering your point moot. In fact, you don't even need to be a hacker to break it, all you have to do is burn iTunes music onto a CD and then rip it back onto your computer as an MP3. You lose a little bit of quality in the process, but few people really care.

Please Steve, don't treat your customers like idiots, all we ask is a little bit of intellectual integrity. The labels are right, play fair and licence out your DRM to others.

And to the music industry, Steve also has a good point about opening up the market. It is a fallicy (ad hominum) to say his argument is wrong simply because of Apple's hypocrisy. Get with it and get rid of DRM.

You're both right, and you're both wrong. Little children, shake hands, say your sorry and get on with it, or I'll send you to your rooms.

Finally, a good wiki summary

For a week or two now, I have been trying to explore and understand "enterprise-wikis". It is quite easy to find high-level philisophical discussions about the importance of wiki adoption at the enterprise level, but it is HARD to find honest reviews about various wikis.

The reason this is frustrating is because I am trying to choose an enterprise wiki for deployment at my place of work. Heck, it's even challenging to find a list of different wikis and what they are good for.

Finally, I found a good article here. It is written from a non-geek perspective, and he gives an accurate summary of the key criteria is a good enterprise wiki:

• is beautiful
• is easy to use
• integrates with our corporate authentication system
• allows users to "email to a page"
• has rock solid WYSIWYG editing (including tables!!)
• can absorb Microsoft Word's messy HTML without barfing
• has great management tools for pruning and gardening the wiki
• allows for attachments of files
• includes great threaded conversations on a page
• is hosted but can also be used in an appliance inside the firewall
• has granular user & group security privileges (ideally tied into Active Directory)

My list of criteria is pretty much exactly the same, and I thought that this criteria was pretty obvious and self explanatory. Lo and behold, when I started exploring different wikis (socialtext, confluence, PBWiki, stikipad, zoho), and found that that all fell short on many of these criteria. The biggest offence was usually against the "rock solid WYSIWYG" (not all WYSIWYG editors are created equal) and "great management tools for pruning and gardeing the wiki".

He argues that confluence is the best, and based on what I have observed I would tend to agree. However, even confluence still fails in the two key criteria I listed in the table above. Yes, it's got WYSIWYG, but it's table layout functionality is very inflexible, and until you've figured things out it's not intuitive where you are saving pages.

"Incent" is not a word

While doing my MBA, there were many occasions on which I would be writing a report that included an element about how important it was to incent your employees properly. I was always confused when MS Word's spellchecker flagged the word, and was convinced that the dictionary was wrong because we used the word so often in class.

Today I learn that according to Paul Brians' book, "Common Errors in English Usage", the term "incent" is not a verb, or even a word for that matter.

Business folks sometimes use “incent” to mean “create an incentive,” but it’s not standard English. “Incentivize” is even more widely used, but strikes many people as an ugly substitute for “encourage.”

I suppose I should have known this. However, this brings up a philosophical question; if the word is "commonly" used and understood, then is it really an error at all?

iPhone lawsuit, don't believe a word

Make no mistake about it, the iPhone from Apple is the quintessential in cool technology. This much is undisputed.

However, Apple has an interesting situation on their hands with a lawsuit coming from Cisco, who actually owns the trademark to the name "iPhone". Interestingly enough, Steve Jobs of Apple came right out and decided to call his phone the iPhone as well, despite not owning the trademark.

Gutsy Steve, gutsy.

However, I don't buy it. You can bet your bottom dollar that this is a marketing stunt.

Lets look at the facts:

• Apple has been in "negotiations" with Cisco for a few years over the iPhone trademark.
• Cisco released an "iPhone" only two months before the launch of Apple's iPhone, even though they have owned the trademark for many years.
• Apparently, The companies left the negotiating table at 8 p.m. the night before the iPhone announcement, with only a few points left to negotiate.

Lets analyze this situation for a moment, what does each party have a stake here?

• The iPhone trademark is not really worth much to Cisco as their iPhone is only a marginal side business. There are plenty of other "i____" products that are knock-offs of the iPod line, and Cisco's product will fall in that category of products in consumers' minds. Over the long term, the iPhone name means nothing to Cisco.
  
• The iPhone would be nice to have for Apple, but Apple could call it the iPumpkinHead and still not lose any sales.

My skepticism arises from the fact that the current situation is not in favor of anybody, despite the parties having ample time to negotiate. Furthermore, Cisco's "explanation" of why negotiations broke down doesn't hold water:

Fundamentally we wanted an open approach. We hoped our products could interoperate in the future. In our view, the network provides the basis to make this happen—it provides the foundation of innovation that allows converged devices to deliver the services that consumers want. Our goal was to take that to the next level by facilitating collaboration with Apple. And we wanted to make sure to differentiate the brands in a way that could work for both companies and not confuse people, since our products combine both web access and voice telephony. That’s it. Openness and clarity. (Cisco Blog)

Apple is NOTORIOUS for being NOT open. They build their entire platform around a core philosophy of non-interoperability with their hardware/software mode operandi.

In other words, to ask Apple for interoperability in exchange for a silly name is just
absurd. It's not negotiating in good faith, and Cisco knows it.

Here's what I think actually happened. Cisco is trying to extort an absurd amount of money out of Apple for the iPhone name. Apple, knowing that the name is worth nothing to anybody but Apple, called Cisco's bluff. Then, Cisco realized that there is more to gain by riding on the Marketing coattails of Apple, and agreed to go into a drawn out, public war with Apple over the name.

This costs Apple nothing, and Cisco get the kind of advertising that money can't even buy.

I think they have already come to a deal. They will just publicly "pretend" to reach a settlement the day before the Apple iPhone release.

Am I cynical? Maybe... but this is the only scenario that makes any business sense, and at the end of the day it's still all business.

Movie Review : Army of Darkness

Rating: Worth my while
Reason: Army of darkness is one of those movies with a small cult following. It is the third installment of the "Evil Dead" series, and was directed and written by Sam Raimi (Same director as Spiderman and Spiderman II). I have to say, I think that Army of Darkness is a great movie. Now, it is very campy, but it does campy so well. At the start, our hero "Ash" gets his hand replaced with a chainsaw, a la Freddy Kruger claw style. Who has a chainsaw for a hand!?

I chuckle to myself just thinking about it.

Furthermore, Ash has this wicked "don't mess with me, even if you're a demon possessed she-bat" aura about him. I can't think of another movie where the hero has so much attitude. He would pretty much spit in the face of the devil himself if he had the chance (You'll understand if you see the movie). Army of darkness won an Oscar for best special effects long ago, and boy, it must have been a long time ago. But, the "oldness" of the special effects kind of adds to the alure of the movie. Technically, I suppose it is a horror movie, but is screams "don't take me seriously" so loudly that you'll certainly being doing a lot more laughing than screaming. As such, "Army of Darkness" was worth my few hours and a bag of popcorn.

Alternate Rating: Made me dumber
Reason: If you can't handle extreme intentional cheesiness, then you're not going to like this movie. It's not cheesy in the same way as say, Batman & Robin (let us never speak of that movie again), but more so in an almost Monty Python type of way. As such, there will be a lot of people who won't get this one, and that's just fine. To each their own.

The merit of a cat

Well, my girlfriend asked me to write about "the merit of a cat". So, here goes my best shot. Let it be known that I am not a "cat person". So, I don't have the same "appreciation" that some do. So here is the merit of a cat, from my perspective.

• Cat's merit being not as fun as dogs. They're like... The high-maintenance teeny-boppers with ten mirrors in their room. Dogs on the other hand, are like the class clown, always ready to entertain.
  
  
• Cat's merit being thrown off low roofs by young children. Sorry, it had to be said.
  
  
• Cat's merit cleaning a house of mice.
  
  
• Cat's merit being good source material for the "Puss'n'Boots" character in Shrek 2 (coughing up hairballs, licking themselves, "kitty kat eyes")
  
  
• Cats merit being cool, as in "Cool Kat", but it has to begin with K, not C. I guess that makes "Kit Kat" bars cool by default. But it is kind of a self proclaimed coolness... I'm not sure if its "real coolness".
  
  
• Cat's do merit making kind of a cool purring effect... when they decide to sneak into your room and sleep on your head.

There you have it, "the merit of a cat". Comments are welcome. :)

Movie rating system

Rating systems for movies have long been a beef of mine. Do you use a four star system, five star system, ten point system, thumbs system, it's all over the map. And what does two stars mean anyways? The time for these ambiguous rating systems has come to an end, and so I propose a new, definitive rating system as follows.

Movies can be broken into 5 categories:

• Spectacular
• Worth my while
• Passes the time
• disappointing
• Made me dumber

There are a few rules to reviewing a movie based on this system:

1. They are not numbered, but they are ordinal.
2. A movie cannot fall between categories.
3. When presenting an opinion along with a movie rating, one must also present one alternate rating, that describes why another person may rank it differently.

To illustrate, here is a sample movie review abstract for TROY

RATING: Disappointing
REASON: Troy, plain and simple, is an avenue for the female population to drool over Brad Pitt and his 2 second naked scene. Half of the movie is spent simply holding the camera on Brad's face with his hair blowing in the wind. Brad's character "Achilles" is not well developed, which ask to fact that this movie is simply all about this pretty boy's presence. In fact, despite the fact that the movie has two love stories (one of which is Helen of Troy, a love-story that brought down a kingdom), neither of the love stories are believable or compelling. The only thing that saves this movie is that the war story and execution is actually fairly well done. This movie does not simply build up to one final battle like most movies do, but rather plays out the events of a war over the entire course of the film, working the human elements into the battles nicely.

ALTERNATE RATING: Spectacular
REASON: Girls will go googily. Visit rotten tomatoes, and you will see that the masses are divided 50/50 on this issue. Interestingly enough, fresh tomatoes were usually given by female reviewers, and rotten ones by male reviewers.

Me, check out my African site.

Hello there

This is my first post. My name is Tim. I have alot of interesting stuff about a trip to Togo West Africa that I took at www.berezny.com/tim/Togo. Check it out.