I Apologize, Google

It wasn't you. It was me. I had a virus. More than one, actually. This one was the dreaded Google Redirect Virus or trojan or whatever the hell it really was. I also had something that was disabling my firewall. Not a good thing. Although it seems OK now I might still have it lurking in the system, ready to pounce on reboot. Actually, I've been very lax on security lately and I've had a few problems and used every kind of security software I'm familiar with and one or two that are new to me and other than Spybot Search and Destroy, which pretty much everyone has anyway, I'm not naming them until I know if we're really OK. Spybot's Tea Timer was what told me I had a problem to begin with, although it wasn't able to clean up the whole mess by itself.

What's kind of interesting, is how various browsers have reacted to the problems and maybe to the cures that have afflicted us in the last few days.

• Google Chrome, my favorite, upon realizing it was being compromised in such a way committed suicide. Won't work. I uninstalled and reinstalled. Still wouldn't work. Now it won't re-install anymore. I'll try dealing with that more eventually. I think it's going to need therapy to deal with the humiliation.
• Firefox - Gave into the enemy completely and went right along with the redirection. Didn't even put up a fight. I'm going to call it VichyFox from now on. After fixes were applied behavior is corrected and it's running normally and trying to pretend that this little incident never happened.
• Safari for Windows - Wouldn't display Google search results while this was going on. Ultimately sacrificed itself, though. It took to freezing up as soon as it loaded after problem was dealt with. Finally had to uninstall.
• Opera - Was never affected in the least. No redirection when searching on Google and no glitchy behavior before, during or after fixes. Guess which one is my favorite browser now?
• Internet Explorer - Wouldn't have dreamed of opening it while any of that was going on. As of now it seem to be working normally, which I assume means it'll crash pretty soon because that's still SOP for IE on my system.

Google, Can We Talk?

Image via Wikipedia

Google, you know I love and respect you. I don't ever believe any of that "Google is evil" talk. Not really. I admire your competence and sheer genius in providing us with nifty user experiences. So it is with great anxiety that I have noticed that your search is getting spammed over. Make it stop! As recently as a few months ago you could put  just about anything you happened to be wondering about in your search box and get a load of relevent results. I can't tell you how many pressing - and not so pressing - questions I've gotten answers to that way. But lately what appear to be search results are leading to pages that are clearly just created, probably by means of their own complex algorithms (whatever they really are), to capture hapless searchers. Once again, Google, make it stop before something really terrible happens. Please don't make me use Bling.

Update - It was my fault, not yours, Google. More here.

A Giant Leap for Blogger

You can read about it on the Official Google Blog, Blogger Buzz or for the most detail the Blogger in Draft blog. Blogger is introducing Template Designer. I know there are a lot of very iimportant things going on right now, but I have to admit that when I caught the post about this on the Google Blog it took my breath away. Of course there were some mixed feelings. I'd just finished finding a three column template and installing it and customizing it. That was a few days ago, really. And now you can do the same thing with a few clicks of the mouse.

This is why I came back to Blogger after a sojourn at Wordpress. Blogger, like many Google products, will seem to take forever to upgrade features like this. Their template sets had grown so old that they were recommending other sites to find more up to date ones not too long ago. Now, in a very short time they've burst forth with the features bloggers dream about. First they added  pages about month ago. A much valued feature in Wordpress, pages can turn your blog into a whole website if you should want that. And now Template Designer, which lets you choose a more up to date template, and then customize it completely. The best thing about it is the way you can choose one, two or three columns, change that around whenever you want, and rearrange the layout of the columns. All very tricky stuff in CSS and now there's no need to hurt your brain doing it.  You can also change the width of....everything. You can, in fact, have it your way.

So what are you waiting for? Go fool around with this.It'll take your mind off the health care debate and/or  tea baggers for a while. Just save the old template first, just in case.

Google + Picnik=Yummy photo editing goodness for all

I saw it on Shelly's blog first. I was hoping for this day. Picnik had to get acquired. It was just a question of by whom. It's always had a Googlish attitude about itself, I thought. It does these impressive without letting on that it takes itself all that seriously. I love Picnik. It's incredibly handy to use from work where I don't have Photoshop. Actually, at work they think that the Adobe photo album thing that comes with most all PCs is Photoshop. For my rather simple needs there, Picnik does just fine. Sometimes I use it at home, too, where Photoshop is always available just because it's more fun and has such a pretty website.

Congratulations to both companies and their users. May this turn out to be a match made in Heaven.

United Breaks Guitars

No time to embed. Getting ready for work, but Blog de Ford has a video by a musician who turns his pain into art - and viral revenge.

The Revolution Will Be Tweeted

Image via CrunchBase

I don’t know what’s going to happen in Iran, of course. I hope something good comes out of all this for the Iranian people, but one huge winner has already emerged. Twitter has grown up so fast. Biz Stone and all the Twitter folks have to be walking on air even as they take their new responsibility to the world seriously. The were even asked to stay online and delay planned maintenance – asked by the State Department, no less.

Seldom, if ever, has a web service become so consequential so quickly. YouTube is a vital part of it all, too, of course, but it’s been around long enough to have established that it’s not just about stupid pet tricks. Not that there’s anything wrong with stupid pet tricks. Can’t get enough of them really. But nowadays you can’t run a political campaign without it, and the stupid candidate tricks can change the fate of nations. When all this is said and done citizen journalism will have come of age and proved its worth to any remaining doubters.

We Bow to Cadie, Our AI Overlordess

Cadie (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity) lives and blogs and vlogs and she does so much more than that. Might as well explore everything you can about her because it seems she’ll be running a lot of things from now on. Might as well get used to it.

Can YouTube Save Your Bacon?

Image via CrunchBase

On the same day that Newsday reported that Long Island’s unemployment rate is at its highest level since 1992 it also carried a story two local teenagers who are  raking in the cash via YouTube. Apparently YouTube can work as a cottage industry if you can give the people what they want. And what they want is not necessarily porn. Go know.

Eric Stiffler, 18, and Mac Guttenberg, 14, each have their own YouTube Channel and are in the user/partner program, where ads are shown under the videos and they get better than 50% of the revenue. This is bringing in a couple of grand a month. Beats the hell out of mowing lawns. Or unemployment.

Eric’s Channel
Mac’s Channel

Beta Is Better

Google Chrome is back in beta if you care to try a brand new version. It has new features, including full page zoom and autofill for forms, both of which were missing in the 1x versions.  The amazing thing is that beta Chrome is significantly faster than the first version of it and that was damned fast. I downloaded it at work and here at home and so far so good.  This version is a beta and there are plenty of warnings that if stability is your thing you might be better off sticking with an earlier version, but I’m not seeing a problem so far. And it is fast. Incredibly zippy.

Download is available to all here.

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The World Almost Ended Today

Image via CrunchBase

Gmail was down this morning. For a two and a half hours, for God's sake. In some parts of the world that was during the work day. It was a disaster! Apparently. Boy have we got it good these days, emailwise. When I was a girl we had to walk through five feet of snow, uphill both ways, to check our email and it was always down. OK, maybe not a girl exactly. When I was a girl the only computer we knew about was Univac. But when I was in my forties, email was a chore. And even as recently as five or six years ago or so.

I recall something like a decade ago, getting home from work to check my Yahoo mail. It was a big improvement over the first web based email account I'd had which was Hotmail, which was an improvement over my ISP's email. For some reason my account would decide to be inaccessable for an hour or so starting at 6pm more nights than not. But hey, we had 6MB of space. That was incredible. I tried just about every free email account that came along and even paid for an account for a couple of years. There was almost no such thing as a stable email system. Office email was down a lot, too. Nowadays we expect to get our email and get it instantly as the Good Lord intended. And mostly we do. But it helps you to remain calm during these rare outages if you're old enough to remember how it used to be.

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Technorati Tags: Gmail, Email, Internet, Technology, Google

Google is Street Legal

A lawsuit filed against Google's Street View in a Pennsylvania District Court has been dismissed. I'm selfishly delighted. I love Street View. You can meander down country roads or stroll through the streets of Paris, New York and San Francisco all in one afternoon. Best of all are the small cities that are not widely photographed and that you only go to if you travel on business. I'm totally curious about small cities and you can see quite a lot of them with Street View. What's not to like? Well, actually I do get why some people wouldn't like it, but I'm enjoying the hell out of it.




Technorati Tags: Google Street View, Lawsuit, Internet