It was an semi-exciting week in Southern California.
For all the first timers who were shaken up by the earthquake, I
welcome you to our wonderful state!
- Amazon announced new payment services in two flavors - Checkout by Amazon and Amazon Simple Pay.
Frankly I am excited to see what Amazon can bring to this already
crowded space (PayPal, Google Checkout, eBillme and many more). Read
the thoughts of Linda Bustos and Scot Wingo on the new service.
- I will not make mention of that new search engine and be another one of the 24,928 posts about Cuil. DANG IT.
- Write your own blog? Want to take a vacation this summer? Lisa Barone
at Bruceclay is using guest bloggers to cover while she's on vacation.
I leave next week for my vacation but luckily I found a blogging
service called Posterous which you might be able to use. You can email just about anything to the system and it will post it your blog, pretty slick.
- Say, speaking of taking vacation like Lisa, and the fact
that I also live just a couple miles from our office, I was wondering
what else I might have in common with some popular bloggers. Please
help me find matches for the following or create one for me, I'll take
care of the first one.
- Live less than 3 miles from work - Lisa Barone, Bruceclay.com
- Is left-handed - ?
- Was born in the November - ?
- Has never experienced a tornado (since I've done the whole earthquake thing) - ?
- I've planned and routed my whole trip using Google Maps. Earlier this week it appeared that Google was testing new features
for Maps. As of today it looks like they may have rolled back certain
ones, but I'm happy that one feature they rolled back and kept is the
ability to reorder your multiple desitinations. I do appreciate the
"avoid tolls" feature, that should save me $20 by avoiding bay area
bridges!
- Microsoft's Live Search page got a makeover. If you are familiar with Easter Eggs on DVDs, then you'll enjoy finding the hidden hot spots on the page.
- SES San Jose
is coming up soon. It's already August?! It doesn't look like I'll be
going (not that I have something better to do), but please don't
postpone your honeymoon to attend like this guy.
- I lost all my Scrabulous games on Facebook! If you enjoyed this game as much as I did, be sure to add wordscraper, the replacement that was built by Scrabulous developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla.
- I love Firefox 3 more everyday. I found a new favorite
Firefox 3 plugin this week that refreshes webpages at customizable
intervals. No more pounding the F5 key during a Woot-Off (I
mean to review our orders tab without having to always keep logging
in). My top 3 Firefox add-on's I can't live with out at work are; ReloadEvery, Screengrab!, and Live HTTP Headers. Zach suggests Search Status, Session Manager, and Web Developer for SEO-minded folks.
- Ask yourself, am I a Guru or an Expert?
- My random fact of the day is dedicated to Matt, our
Development Manager, who's been looking to adopt a dog. Los Angeles'
top dog is the chihuahua according to the LA Times.
Good luck to all the athletes representing the United
States next week in China. Still looking for an iPhone? I think I know
where they all went. A friend of mine whose brother-in-law is on the
Men's Olympic Soccer Team told me that every player on the team
received an iPhone with a prepaid calling card among many other gifts.
Luckyyyyy. Gotta love Friday's at the Surplus, basketball and bbq day.