humor

Video: A Conference Call in Real Life

On a related note – finding more and more of my conference calls are now Skype video or Google Hangout video calls. And if it’s audio-only, I’m a big fan of Uber Conference. Great service and has nice little touches like showing you who is speaking, and being able to call-in through your browser.

Cuil Search Engine Thoughts

Like everyone else I watched the frenzy over the launch of Cuil, a new search engine founded by several ex-Googlers.

After using it a bit, there is definitely something nice and elegant about Cuil, and I noticed that Matt was going to use it for a few days to get a better sense of it as well.

As I’m sure 99% of people do, I typed in my own name to see what results would come back, and was shocked by the results 🙂

On the one hand, it correctly identifies me as a multi-dimensional athlete – baseball, basketball, and boxing ( thai kick boxing in my case ).

On the other hand, it appears that Matt has taken over my “look & feel” UI aspects, as it clearly shows his head-shot on my blog.

So why is Cuil showing these results ? How does Cuil have the confidence and “chutzpah” to make these associations ?  Ouriel may have stumbled on the answer based on his recent post to twitter:

“CUIL in French is like “Balls” (the dirty meaning)”

Ahh !  Now it all makes sense 🙂

But seriously — it’s good to see another search engine play – and hope we see some great innovation and search improvements overall.

Apparently My Family is Secretly Making Gmail Better

A few months ago I switched from gmail to google apps for personal email and subsequently also moved over a few of my family members.  Little did I know that these family members have been secretly working on new cool gmail features as part of Google’s “Labs” effort.

Take a look at what appears at the bottom of my google apps email settings page 🙂

And joining the “Bar-Cohen Family Mail team” has many benefits:

The team
We work on lots of different things: making email better, faster, and more fun, and developing new ways for users to share and communicate with each other. We take on hard computer science problems — like making large amounts of Javascript run insanely fast on different browsers, storing and scaling petabytes of data, and ridding the world of spam. And Gmail is like a start up inside Google. You can build and ship new stuff quickly, and enjoy all the great benefits Google is known for.

Gotta love it !  🙂

Stuff White People Like #91: San Francisco

One of the fastest growing, and funniest, blogs on WordPress.com is Stuff White People Like.

I cracked up this morning when I read this latest post on “San Francisco“:

Though it is exceptionally easy to put someone from San Francisco in a good mood, there are some caveats. When talking to a white person who lives in San Francisco, it is best not to bring up New York City. Though they live in a world class city, San Franciscans have a crippling inferiority complex about New York and even hinting at that will make them very sad or very defensive.

🙂

Read the whole post here