Had the greatest of laughs just now. Cheley is going to be late for an appointment, she had to send a text to that effect to my land line. To hear a computer say “Looks like it’s gonna be 12:30″ is priceless. Made my day! Oh yeah, I’m hard to please.

Wow, this could actually be something bigger–a recording of priceless utterances from autoreaders…. anyone know who’s done it before?  Examples?

One of my reasons to hang with iGoogle — the Motivational Quotes gadget.  And this just popped in from Jim Henson:

“When I was young, my ambition was to be one of the people who made a difference in this world. My hope still is to leave the world a little bit better for my having been here. It’s a wonderful life and I love it.”

The gadget stays at the top left, and this is one of the great reasons why.  I’d love to share the gadget more easily.  Hopefully that will improve.  And with words like Henson’s, we need more of this sharing, big time.

FriendFeed - Top 10 Reasons to Stick With FriendFeed

Mommy, I Don’t Wanna Go Anywhere Else! See before and after shots of TOS The reward, the reward It’s the tightest community I’ve seen, just about It simply can never be unstuck.  Too sticky! I needed that blank space where my embed was. Random Facebook content in my FriendFeed embeds could be so entertaining, so serendipitous The R&D could still show up here, before it does anywhere FriendFeed is a friend indeed.  I have the need. Do I really need a reason?

The nicefishfilms interview with Scoble et al provided good insight into the scenario, the enthusiasm, the reasons why FF made such an impact. FaceBook’s app universe is so robust and deep and open to coders it’s going to be a very difficult one to match by anyone. FriendFeed wasn’t necessarily about that out of the gate–it apparently was moving in that direction, but there are only so many resources to make that happen alongside its brilliant piece of web poetry. And the upside with this acquisition is infinite. FriendFeed gets to contribute to that, bring blindingly fast innovation to that community. I’m faithful that we’ll see the benefits within the FriendFeed interface and embed system, that it won’t go away.

I mentioned to my wife–who’s on her way to DevLink– this morning how amazed I was that Mr. Buchheit was present (not to mention the other stellar folks), that I could get a glimpse into his thinking, what he sees as something that matters; that he was at least virtually there, this master, this key creative force in the maturing of this living, breathing internet.  It’s a privilege.  It’s going to keep going.  I know it.

In thinking about what’s incredible in this online paradigm, we are sharing our knowledge, and hopefully our friendship, and hopefully there’s good karma with it.  We syndicate ourselves, our thoughts.  We have control over where to share, how much to share–and it will continue to be refined.  I was more than stoked at how FriendFeed took this syndication to the next levels, beyond what any of us thought was possible.  These are tools to help us spread, it is hoped, good words, and exchange anywhere we wish to in this vast, amazing virtual world in which we work and play.  The great minds and creative forces that made FriendFeed such a fantastic tool will be present and continuing to create.  I’m staying tuned, that is for sure.

One can look at the world pre- or post- google.  Maybe you wouldn’t necessarily want to do that, but you still could.  I know for sure it has made research a lot easier, and it has saved my tail more than once.  I for one do not have such an encyclopedic mind as to immediately know exactly what to do when some obscure error comes up in html, xml, visual basic, or any other app–or for that matter, any other matter of life!

In short, google has exceled.  Sure other search engines have been existent for a longer period of time, but none has been so simple and elegant as the king of white background and understatement.

This same less is more philosophy seems to have come to Google Chrome, the company’s new internet browser.  This morning I finally decided to take the plunge.  Just about the first thing I did when I installed was to make Chrome the default browser.  What came over me?  I haven’t seen the reviews, but here are my impressions:

• Would love to see toolbars/plugins – being a firefox/ie user for a good number of years, i miss the plugins such as Web Developer, Compete stats, blinklist, and more.  The developer community certainly has had a great deal of time with these other browsers vs. chrome, but they’d still be nice to see out of the box.  I’m sure the volume of plugins will mushroom in the coming months.
• Open source code – solid, great to see this, it should ease plugin development!  And yes, should I care to do some spare bathroom reading, it would be nice to print out a section or two.
• Memory footprint – Chrome does well here.  Less than 50% of my firefox memory usage–but with Chrome at no plugins, this is a big advantage.
• Ease of installation – There was no issue here, it downloaded quickly even on a (gasp) gprs connection to my laptop.  Not necessarily a distinguishing factor, but it’s nice to have.
• GUI Impressions:  Lives up to simple and elegant.  Here’s where an absence of toolbars is of benefit.  Chrome just lets you get to your web pages.  There’s solid storage/thumbnails of visited sites, as well as integration with your google account.  Big convenience here, but I have not necessarily been big on storing my browsing history on my google account.
• Performance – no true technical benchmarking here, just impressions, which are that this is average, and a page or two typically working perfectly in other browsers crash in Chrome.

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I see Chrome as a 3 out of 5 for the moment.  It’s no longer the default browser (that lasted about 5 minutes).  I might use it as an outlyer for now, to see if pages rendering well elsewhere will work well here.

Of course, Google overall as always blows me away with innovation, convenience, pertinent results, endless capabilities.

A friend recently told me about an inspiring lecture by Ben Zander. After a look around in the video player, I stumbled upon TED, which was the conference at which the lecture took place. On this site are experts, tall figures in the worlds of Technology, Entertainment, and Design (hence TED). You can join the TED community as well, add your profile and join in the dialogue.