I just got invited to and joined Google's new acquisition, Grandcentral. It would seem I can invite people and get them past the waiting process. If I know you and you're interested, let me know and I'll invite you.

One of the coolest features is the ability to transfer an active call between your registered phones without the other caller knowing. If they call me on my Grandcentral number and I pick up on my cell, when I get to work I can press *, my work (and home) phones will ring and I can just pick the call up at my desk.

It even has Project Gizmo dialing support.

I got an e-mail from Orkut telling me that yet another person has left a scrapbook entry for me. While I knew it'd likely be just another spam, I actually decided to login and see what it was. This is partly due to the fact that Google just opened Orkut up to everybody, not just join by invite anymore. I was hoping it'd be something awesomely spam.

The first thing I saw when I logged in was:

New! Now you can choose to get friend requests from everyone or only from people that speak your language. Please adjust your settings.


I just have to tell you Google guys that it is too little, too late. Orkut is ruined. I consider it a territory owned by the country of Brazil, really.

One final note though... It wasn't spam! It was somebody asking me about the school I work at.

I just saw this e-mail at work:

OMAHA, Neb. - Accommodating people with disabilities in the workplace
and at the university level will be the focus of a fourth annual
conference presented by the American Disabilities Act Committee at
Creighton University on Oct. 5 at Skutt Student Center.

If anybody from Google HR is reading this and thinks it might benefit them to attend, please let me know. I'll see if I can pull a few strings and get you in. You need it. Trust me.

Oh yes, girlfriend. I totally went there.

Back in the beginning of August, I was contacted by Google to see if I was interested in a job as an Unix System / Applications Administrator in their Site Reliability Engineering group. After going through the month long totally unorganized interview marathon, I got to the point where they wanted me to have an on-site interview. It was at this point, for many reasons that I won't go into here, that I turned them down and ended the interview process. We'll just say that we couldn't come to any decent agreements on how things should be executed and carried forward.

Now that I am done with Google, I realize now that I am better off not working there. By working for Google, any innovation I come up with becomes theirs. Just think how the world would be different if HP had exerted their rights to the Apple 1.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Now, that leaves me with the job of finding my corner of the universe to latch onto, mold, improve, and conquer. Time to get thinking, right after sleeping.

Here's to us crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes...

Goodbye Google, and happy indexing.

I was looking for a way to contact Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google. In doing so, I stumbled across his personal web page. It is a pretty bland page, but there is one interesting bit about it.

If you look at his contact information on the page, he's got his e-mail address listed as EricSchmidt1@yahoo.com. However, his address is listed as 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway. So, apparently the man at the top of Google uses Yahoo Mail, a competitor.

Thinking that the page was bogus and registered by somebody else, I decided to look a bit closer. First, I looked at the domain registration:

Record expires on 08-Mar-2014.
Record created on 07-Mar-1996.

He is masking his address in the WHOIS database, but if you head over to the Wayback Machine and look at his page from July 22, 2001, you can see that instead of Google information it has Novell information.

So, either Mr. Schmidt likes publicizing the fact that he uses Yahoo Mail instead of Google's mail, or somebody has been posing as him since 1996.