I’m done with Google.

I was already annoyed on 9/11.

First they didn’t change their logo to commemorate the anniversary, again, then they notified me that “today is a day for service” and offered me links to help President Feckless carry out his shameful day of service crap.

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

But then came the Google Updater that felt the need to install itself.

So now the camel’s pretty much dead.

So, it’s over. It will be a slow migration, but I’ve already added Bing to my shortcut bar, which is taking some getting used to.

Since I decided to get into the web hosting game, I’m planning to buy a domain name and move my email there. Any of you loyal readers who want web based email at my new domain are welcome.

And I’ll move the blog over to a new name/location at some point too. Hopefully I can take my content with me.

Now I need to find alternatives to the other Google stuff I use.

• Google Reader – Looking for a decent RSS reader. Preferably web based.
• iGoogle – Some type of aggregator/control panel like thing. Maybe I’ll build my own at my new domain. That could be cool.
• Google Voice Chat – Yeah, there’s skype, but anything else out there I should be looking at?
• Maps – The new version of maps on Bing looks pretty good. It should suffice.

So, I’m taking suggestions for product alternatives, new blog names, and an email domain. Ideas? Post in the comments, or shoot me a gmail. While I’m still there.

The other day I installed the add-on to Google Chat that allows you to add voice and video to your chats.

But what I didn’t (knowingly) install was the Google Updater Service. It’s a Windows service that is always running on your PC in the background, taking up resources, and, if the crazies on the world wide web are to be believed, sending info about you to Google as you surf the web.

I don’t particularly care if the last part is true or not, the bottom line is that the Google Talk plugin did not have any options when I installed it, so I was never asked if I wanted to install the update service or not.

Removing the software is not as easy as you might think. You see, it’s not installed as a regular service. So you can’t just go disable it. In fact, once you install it, it is deeply entrenched in your system.

So, here’s a step-by-step on how to get rid of it on Windows XP. Users of other OS’s – you’re on your own, suckas.

(Actually, there are a ton of tutorials on how to remove this. Go ahead and Bing it.)

1. First, go into Task Manager find GoogleUpdater.exe and kill the process.
2. Now, the program installed two automated tasks in your task scheduler. If you are like most Windows users you never even knew you had a task scheduler. Open Control Panel and double click on Scheduled Tasks.
3. Note with anger how you never consented to add scheduled tasks to your system. Then note that they run once an hour every day.
4. Highlight the tasks, right click, and select Delete.
5. Now, for another part of your system you never knew existed, we’ll go into msconfig. Click Start, then run (or Window Key + r).
6. Type msconfig and press Enter.
7. Click over to the Startup tab.
8. Find the entry for Google Updater, and uncheck the box. Hit Apply.
9. Nope, you’re not done yet. Now we have to delete the program. Manually.
10. Start –> Search –> Files and Folders
11. Search for googleupd*
12. Note, you’ll have to include hidden files and folders, since the files are, of course, located within hidden folders.
13. Delete the files with extreme prejudice. If you notice a file in your WINDOWS\PREFETCH folder, you can safely delete that file. It’s there so the Google Updater can load super fast when you load your PC. Because you want that.
14. Still not done. Time to go to the registry. Default registry warning: You can really, really screw up your PC by going into the registry. So do so at your own risk.
15. Start–> Run –> type regedit, press enter.
16. Navigate to HKey_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\
17. Delete the Google Update Key if it exists.

There you go. Only 17 easy steps to remove software you never wanted in the first place.

Hmmmm… software that installs itself without your knowledge or consent and is very hard to remove… isn’t there a classification for software like that?

For a few months now, I’ve been using NewsGator products for my RSS feeds.

I was using NewsGator Inbox as a plug-in to Outlook, so my RSS feeds came in like emails. I absolutely loved it.

Then, I was also using NewsGator online from my laptop.

The best part was that the online and Outlook versions would sync up. So if I read an article through Outlook, it no longer showed up in the online version. Same goes for the reverse.

Yesterday I got notice that they are discontinuing these products, and I’m supposed to use Google Reader instead. Well, I don’t want to use Google Reader. It’s not as good as NewsGator. Plus, it doesn’t plug in to Outlook. Plus, did I mention that it’s not as good as NewsGator?

So… any ideas out there? Or am I stuck with Google Reader?

I got invited to join Google Voice the other day.

It’s basically the coolest thing ever.

Here’s how it works:

• You get a phone number from Google. I picked a vanity phone number where the last 4 digits spell out my last name. I also picked a MN area code.
• You go into the Google Voice app and set up your forwarding phone numbers. Now, calls to the new number will be forwarded to your forwarding numbers. Basically, when you call my new Google number, both my cell phone and home phones ring.
• You have a ton of options for incoming calls. You can set up call routing rules (always send this caller to voicemail or only forward this call to my cell) and even mark certain callers as SPAM.
• There is a Do Not Disturb function that will send all calls directly to VM.
• Voicemails are transcribed and show up in an inbox like emails.
• You can also make outgoing calls through the web interface. You enter the number that you want to call and then select which phone you want to make the call from. Google calls your phone, then completes the call to the other phone.
• While you are on the phone, if you press 4, your conversation will be recorded. Then you can review it later from the web interface.

There are a ton of other options, tricks, etc. that I haven’t even begun to discover.

But my favorite is the web site widget. If you click the link below, Google will complete a call to me from you. You never see my number. Go ahead. Click it. Leave me a message. I set it up for now to go directly to voicemail (complete with a special greeting). Click it. You know you want to…

The Science Channel told me that Glass is a liquid the other day.

Now obviously, anyone who has ever seen glass knows that for all intents and purposes it is solid. So this can only be a technical minutiae kind of claim.

But the world wide web leads me to believe that the Science Channel has led me astray. At best, the question of whether or not glass is technically a liquid is unsettled science dripping with nuance*. At worst it’s a persistent urban legend.

(*Pun not intended but appreciated.)

Here’s the crux of the matter: With water/ice, the liquid/solid thing is straightforward. When water cools down enough it crystallizes and forms ice.

Glass, on the other hand, doesn’t crystallize. So depending on how you characterize “liquid” and “solid” you may get into a semantic battle about in which state to classify our friend the window pane.

If you’re not interested in the gritty details of science, glass is a solid. If you are, you can check out this highly technical article, or this less technical article and decide for yourself.

This article centers around a guy whose life work has been to study “squishy” materials that defy classification like Peanut Butter, toothpaste, shaving cream, and glass.

On a semi-related note, I had a real life moment that paralleled the Microsoft Bing commercials. In the middle of my Google search results for “Glass is a Liquid” (38,200,000 results) was a link to Amazon for the Philip Glass album Songs from Liquid Days. There were, however, no ads on the results page.

For the record, Bing gave me several Liquid Glass automotive polish links, a few links related to my actual search topic, and 2 ads. One was for “Buy Liquid Glass at eBay you may be eligible for 8% off with PayPal” and the other was for “Glass Liquid” from Target.com.

So, based on this one very limited experience, don’t buy the “decision engine” hype.

So says Byron York. GOP members of congress, who can’t get the info from the Federal agencies, have turned to Google to tell them where the money is being spent.

The results are unsurprising, to say the least. Consider these details about a $1.5 Billion “Homeless Prevention Fund”:

An article in the Altoona Mirror reported that the small central Pennsylvania town was going to receive $819,000 from the Fund even though Altoona officials “may not have enough of a homelessness problem to use it.” And a Google search turned up a report from WHP-TV in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania saying the city would receive $855,478 from the Fund, but does not know what to do with it.

You really can’t make this stuff up.

The US Naval Observatory is a scientific agency that is part of the US Government.

It was established in the mid 1800’s, and focused on keeping the official time of the US, as well as calibrating chronometers for Navy ships. (A chronometer is an old navigation device that used stars + time to calculate global position.)

Today, the Naval Observatory still keeps the official time. You can get the time by calling 719-567-6742, 202-762-1069, or 202-762-1401. Or on the web at http://www.usno.navy.mil/.

The Naval Observatory is also the location of the official home of the Vice President, called Number One Observatory Circle.

The house located there was originally used as the residence for the superintendent of the Observatory.

In 1974, congress made the house the VP’s official residence. Before then, the VP had to provide their own house, or stay in hotels. The cost of security at private residences was becoming too expensive, so an official residence was proposed.

Source: wiki and this LA Times article, which predictably claims that Dick Cheney conspired to keep his house off of Google Earth (he didn’t).

I just had a heckuva time trying to upload an animated GIF file to a post. Turns out that as of right now, animated GIFs are not supported in Blogger. I found a workaround on another blog, but the instructions were confusing (to say the least), so I’ll take a stab at rewriting them in a way that makes sense to me.

The workaround uses Google Docs. If you have a Blogger account, you already have access to Google Docs.

1. First go into Blogger and write your post as normal. Upload the image as you normally would. This will be a placeholder. You’ll modify this later to swap out the working animated GIF image. Save the post as a draft.
2. Open Google Docs
3. Upload the animated GIF to Google Docs. (Select “Upload” from the main page)
4. Once the image is uploaded, go to Share–> Publish as Web Page…
5. On the bottom, choose Post to Blog. If this is the first time you’ve done this, you’ll have to set up your blog settings, which is pretty self explanatory.
6. Now, it will post your image to a new blog post.
7. Go into the blog post and go to Edit HTML to get the SRC of the image. Copy this.
8. Go back to the original blog post.
9. Go into Edit HTML.
10. Find the “SRC=” in the original image code and replace the value there with the new location from Google Docs (you copied this in step 7)
11. Publish the post.
12. Delete the post that includes just the image.

As I was typing this, I was thinking that an easier way might be to just use Google Docs to compose your posts that include animated GIFs, but I haven’t tried it.

Good luck.

Google made a competitor to Second Life called Google Lively. It launched on July 8, 2008, and is already scheduled to be discontinued by the end of the year! I guess everything Google touches doesn’t turn to gold.

Reading the Wiki, an interesting difference between Lively and Second Life is you can not buy or sell user created products. Thus, Lively would not be appealing to fraudsters or money launders. I believe this is one thing that lead to Livelys failure.

Source: This best/worst list and then the Wiki.

Somebody else owns the gmail trademark in Germany. And he’s not selling. So they offer GoogleMail.com as a German alternative.

Source: This article while searching for more about that baby name thing.