Category: Geek

One night while I was driving back to my apartment after work, something unusual happened. In the lane next to me, I saw a Prius pull up with a spinning device attached to a large roof rack, and a passenger in the front seat who appeared to be operating a laptop. As it looked very similar to what Google’s our Street View cars look like, my only thought was, “Why doesn’t that Street View car have a camera, and why is it driving at night?” I guessed that they were just testing the laser scanning system, which is used to map building facades.

Shortly after that encounter, I learned about one of those projects brewing within Google that made me giddy. In fact, it made my dream come true. We were developing self-driving cars. In case you haven’t heard about this yet, take a break from my post and read Google’s official announcement or this piece in the New York Times, which includes a brief video.

I’m incredibly excited about this project, though I understand one of the biggest challenges will probably be getting humans to accept it. The only thing I have to say regarding that challenge right now is that a lot of airline passengers would probably be freaked out if they knew how much of their journey the human pilots voluntarily hand over to the autopilot.

Parrot AR.Drone

It’s a quadricopter with augmented reality video games built in to the control system. It looks awesome.

High speed video camera

I looked at the EX-F1 from Casio, but it looks like the higher speed videos are recorded at lower-than-SD resolution, and I don’t think that’s worth $1,000. Anybody have other suggestions at or below that price point?

Full-frame Nikon DSLR

I need Nikon because Canon doesn’t have an acceptable GPS solution. I want full-frame because I don’t like noise. I’m not buying anything right now though, because the least expensive full-frame Nikon DSLR is the D700, which was released in October 2008. Assuming that there is either a price drop or a product refresh every two years, I think I just need to wait a little longer for one of those things to happen.

Anyway, just thought I’d put that out there in case you didn’t know what to get me for Columbus Day.

Yesterday, Tony Trumbo and I presented at a webinar organized by WhippleHill about using Google Places and Google Webmaster Tools to manage how people find schools online. What we presented could apply to any business with a physical location and a website, but the primary audience for this talk was independent schools. There are one or two parts where we talk about WhippleHill, but remember that all of the Google stuff is open to anyone. If you’re feeling charitable, after watching the presentation try looking up a favorite local school or business and seeing if their listings could use some help.

Here’s a video of the presentation.

And here are the slides if you just want to skim:

The webinar format

We were originally scheduled to present this week in Nashville at the WhippleHill Summit. Unfortunately, severe flooding in Nashville damaged the Gaylord Opryland venue (where the conference was to take place), and the summit was cancelled. Since they already had a bunch of speakers lined up, the organizers asked the scheduled presenters to do webinars instead.

As a viewer, a webinar is pretty convenient. You don’t have to travel anywhere, you can multitask, and if you’re bored, you can quietly leave without the presenter seeing you. As a presenter, it’s convenient, but not ideal. You can’t see the audience, so it’s tough to know if they’re following you, and you miss out on that fun 1:1 hallway Q&A at the end. Fortunately we had Melissa acting as a moderator, so I didn’t feel completely disconnected.

Because of the nature of the content presented, it was tough to do a presentation without relying on slides. Generally when I present (such as when I teach how to search), I avoid slides and do live demos. In this case I think slides worked out pretty well, and Google Presentations has definitely improved over time. We were able to escape with only one slide using bullet points, and another using two ordered lists.

Sharing information

I think it’s pretty cool that WhippleHill is offering this type of training for free. If you follow the advice we give about SEO at Google, you’ll often hear us say something along the lines of “Create high quality content or a unique service and establish yourself as an authority.” That’s exactly what WhippleHill is doing. Many people may come across these webinars and watch them for free without becoming a WhippleHill customer, but that’s fine. Once the webinar is created, I’m guessing it costs WhippleHill virtually nothing to distribute. Bandwidth is cheap. But some people may come across this content, determine that Whipplehill must really know what they’re doing, and consider purchasing their services or referring someone else to their site.

Resources

Google Places

Webmaster Central
Webmaster Tools
SEO Starter Guide
Webmaster Central blog
Webmaster Central YouTube channel

Nobody asked about non-Google stuff, but I had looked these up just in case:

Bing’s local listings center
Yahoo’s local listings
Bing’s webmaster tools
Yahoo! Site Explorer

Special thanks

Special thanks to Nelson for taking my picture with Googlebot and to Albert for walking by the conference room and staring at me while I was presenting.

Today, I learned about a new feature in Google Earth and then used it to find the location of my bike accident.

Because I was horrible at baseball.

See also: #23.

Google Maps recently came out with a pretty cool new feature, and I got to see one of my photos is already in it! Check it out:

Here’s another search story/tip, and it’s much shorter than my previous one. Hint: You can skip the next paragraph.

Ever see those signs on the road that say “No engine braking”? During one of my many drives between my house and Baltimore in college, I learned that I can accurately mimik the sound that these signs are intended to prevent. My family has heard me make this sound once when someone asked what that sign meant, and I explained. Since they had such a strong reaction (it was positive) to the accuracy of my impression, I now can’t perform the sound in front of people without getting too self-conscious. While visiting Washington, D.C. last weekend with my family, I was asked to recreate the sound for my aunt, uncle, and cousin. I was too nervous, and said that I would find a clip of it on YouTube. It wasn’t as easy as I thought.

I figured I could just type in something like [engine braking] and get what I wanted. I found a couple of clips here and there that were close but low quality, and there was a lot of noise that had the braking sounds of cars and motorcycles. After a few more searches, I noticed that the term “Jake Brake” was used in a few results. It turns out that Jake Brake is a brand of engine brakes, and it’s common for truckers to refer to engine brakes simply as “Jake Brakes” whether they are that particular brand or not, just like one may refer to an adhesive bandage as a “Band-Aid.”

With this new knowledge, I modified my search to use the terms that a trucker would use when describing his or her sound clip. [jake brake video] did the trick!

Final Cut Pro’s built-in Boris Title 3D feature has been driving me a little crazy. On my first machine, I couldn’t get any of the buttons (including “Apply”) to activate unless I clicked it about 20 times. So, I moved to a second machine where I ran into an even stranger bug:

If you copy text with a substring of ffi, the i will be omitted. Traffic becomes traffc, and office becomes offc.

Try it and let me know if this happens to you. I’m running FCP 7.0.

Google I/O is this week, and this year you can watch the keynote presentations live on YouTube. There will be two streamed events that I know of: one at 9:00 AM Pacific (noon Eastern) tomorrow, and another on Thursday at 8:30 Pacific (11:30 Eastern).

This is a developer event, so I’d expect the content to be geared toward that audience, but if you have just a general interest in Google and the web, you still may find some of the presentations interesting.

To get an idea of what I/O is all about, you can check out last year’s keynotes and sessions on video.