Alfred's musings

Music is built deep into me... it moves me, it energises me, it transform my thinking... so no wonder that my highlight of the (short thus far) week at work, was the impromptu flashmob-style singing that me and a few of my fellow Googlers did a few minutes ago in the canteen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x25WuQ0ih8 And thinking back through my life... other highlights certainly included Windhoek youth and school choirs, Randburg School choir, Sonitus, Dolce, Dagbreek  Eiffelkoor , and the worship teams I've had the pleasure to sing in... Kerugma and at Southcourt Baptist Church. 

I recently suggested that developers interested in attending Google I/O should act quickly... Yesterday the public ticket sales for Google I/O opened... and less than an hour later, all were sold out! ... and we're thinking about how we can create a fairer distribution of tickets, rather than just see who can fire up Chrome the quickest after registration opens... If you have any smart ideas, please shout! Also remember that you can watch the live stream of the event and follow the IO team on twitter .

The last quarter have just seen smartphones outselling PCs . Apparently, there are more phones now in the world, than toilets... and any day soon we'll have more phones than people having access to taps with fresh water!  All this means that marketeers and businesses that are not already thinking about serving the customers and markets on their phones, are missing an enormous opportunity.

...build cloud printer drivers. http://code.google.com/apis/cloudprint/docs/devguide.html I've been an early proponent of moving things to the cloud... even before it was called "the cloud". But in the early 2000's I always used a few things as examples why not quite *everything* would move to the cloud. One by one, these "never to move to cloud" items are moving there! a) Spell checking... surely locally would be better, not true? Well, sort of only. By using my browser to do spell checking (perhaps with local processing, but fed by a dictionary from the cloud), I'll get better accuracy across more words and languages. And by building it into the browser (or OS), all apps benefit from this, not just my word processor. b) Video editing... I could not envisage how the web would ever deliver a better experience... but it does!  http://www.youtube.com/editor , and now rendering can be done one a farm of powerful machines, rather than my own limited mach...

I've seen one of these virtual presence/teleprecence robots at a Google meeting before... but is was a bit futuristic and without huge real life value... but this made me think again: Original article...   This Texas student has a weakened immune system, and this robot now attends class and interact with friends and teachers without the risk of catching anything nasty. Awesome use of technology. And what I like a lot is that it's not space age tech... it's web cams and wheels and wifi... stuff we've all got to grips with already.  Go Lyndon!

Google I/O is the premier Google developer event, and is always sold out *very* quickly! Very. Keep an eye on the registration site... as soon as it opens, you should be booking your seat. Don't say you've not been warned! ;)

I've got a Nexus One and Nexus S, and just *love* my Android. My personal favourite games certainly all involve the science engine... Angry Birds (who has not played this??!) X Construction (but quickly reached the end of the challenge) Spaghetti Marshmallows  - in fact this inspired me to do this for real in the 3d non-virtual world! Slice It If these appeal to you too, and you've found other great games, let me know!

I know it's just an advert, but I lovvit! I vividly recall my dad (while secretly pressing the key fob on his Jetta 1), kicking the tyre... and experiencing the "magic" of the car unlocking itself!

Manu brilliantly captures some of the funnies we encounter every day... And his latest cartoon is so brilliant , I want to copy it :) Enjoy, and thanks Manu! PS. I'm not specifically referring to copying search results... but that too!

I love having the ability to blog on the go. Somehow I encounter more inspiration with the stimuli outside. And now thanks to the fresh Blogger for Android from Google, that just became easier.

As I've switched to using my CR-48 exclusively, I was expecting and indeed have encountered a few usage scenarios where I had to rethink and change my habits. Today I wanted to send a screen shot of subset of a spreadsheet (a Google doc) to someone via email. And... it was remarkably easy, despite expecting it to be a pain. A screen shot came courtesy of ChromeOS CTRL+"next screen" (f5?) - that I've found using the CTRL+ALT+/ help window. The screenshot was landed in my "downloads" folder, which popped open to guide me nicely. Next challenge was cropping it. I've jumped into Picnik (installed as Chrome Extension), and uploaded the relevant picture (from /user/downloads), cropped it, and saved a local copy to attach to the email. All in all, the process took me a minute, which included figuring-out time.  Another great experience.