If Google were to go away, how would we find out?

A few days ago, for no more than 10 or 15 minutes, everything google suddenly went away. Maybe this occurrence was limited solely to my place of employment, maybe not, but the varied attempts to find out what was going on were entertaining.  Where would we find our news? How would we ever find out if this was just happening to us without the massive power of Google.

This made me think about how much of my life is wrapped up in some sort of Google application. Gmail, documents, YouTube, calendar... the list goes on and on. Looking at the analytics for our website at work (another google product) I see that 92% of our search engine traffic comes from google. In any given work day, i spend probably 25% of my day using a Google tool of some sort (not counting the entire day that I have Gmail open. When I get home, I catch up on my RSS feeds, sometimes post to a blog, watch movie trailers, and update my personal calendar. All of these things are Google services. (I even use a Google browser)

So, when I see that Google stock is dropping, in some ways that scares me more than other signs of the economic apocolypse, because I know how ingrained in my entire life a "search engine" is. I guess I don't really have a point, but most of this musing was done in the absense of Google for a mere 15 minutes.

Flash 10 Headache

One of the problems inherent with being part of a very small (one person) development group, is that it is difficult to maintain the ability to test your site/application with every browser on every os with every new update and release. That is why, when I got that terrible email that says "I just installed Flash and the website doesn't work" I panicked.

What was calming, and frankly pretty funny, was upgrading myself to Flash 10  and wandering the internet looking at the large number of sites that didn't work properly.  The irony of seeing "Hey maybe you should update your Flash player" messages everywhere moments after getting the newest release.

The culprit? A little bit of javascript which was, in fact, the exact script recommended by Adobe in the first place. The purpose of this script is to make sure that the user has a new enough version of the plugin installed to get the full impact of your totally awesome Flash animations.  The problem is (here is where I probably bore some of you) that the script pulls in the description of your installed plugin, which might be something like "Shockwave Flash 10.0 r12". Well, that "10" used to be a "9" and had never before been two digits. Adobe's sample javascript just pull the ONE character to the left of that first period, and called that the version. Sadly, with Flash 10 installed, that script would think you had version ZERO which logic told it wasn't enough to handle state-of-the-art.  Nice forethought Adobe. 

Fresh start # 2

April was the last (and only so far) entry on this blog, but there have been a number of things in the last few months that have inspired me to start documenting my thoughts and activities again.

In April, I was still very much "the new guy" both at work and in New York, which in many ways is a very comforting title to have. Lower expectations mean higher rewards when something actually goes right. 

So here is my life over the last six months, summed up in bullet point form (in no particular order):

• Learned how to try to catch mice
  
• Learned how to just give up and live with mice
• Went to ATP in Monticello (Catskills) and saw My Bloody Valentine, which I thought might be something that would never happen.
• Continued to meet new people, but mostly just got to know people better that I had already met.
• Launched a great website at work
  

So, from now on, I will post here more often. I will post pictures that I take, probably talk about work a bit, maybe about technology, maybe about music, maybe about how frustrating it is to go on dates. I am not sure what the "personality" of this will be, or if it will have one. I don't think anyone is reading it anyway...

When in doubt, create another blog

Of all of the reasons to start blogging, unless you plan on having a schtick, boredom is likely the one that hits me most. There's the livejournal, the myspace, the tumblr, the podcast, and now this. The over/under on the actual number of posts I make can probably be counted on one hand, but for now, let's see where this goes.