I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

What happens when you switch from being a search engine to a Q&A site?

Curious to know why Ask routed this question to me!

Milestone

The first line of code of the Offline Labs codebase? She has been committed. Project Dragon is GO!

Informed Consumers

Engineers deciding how to raid Google's tech supplies. [From the SPP dev chatroom]

“The Social Network would like to be your friend on myspace.”

(Sent to a development account with zero friends. Thanks, MySpace)

End of an era

Slide Inc. Google Inc. (former Slide office) is now closed.

“Contextual” advertising

The Pandora iPhone app apparently uses the text on album art to give you "useful" advertising.

ReTweeted

This weekend, I got retweeted by a top chef from off the telly (after praising the creamed corn at his new restaurant)(!), and one of my all-time favourite indie musicians of all time (after buying a t-shirt from her). All hail the power of Twitter.

Flurry

I love, love, LOVE David Lanham & Louie Mantia's Flurry icons for OS X. iPhone-like rounded-squares for pretty much all the apps that sit in my dock.

(Applied using Panic's CandyBar)

iBooks highlighting

Jeez, even the text highlighting is gorgeous and magical! (Quote from Richard Herring's How Not to Grow Up)

I love my new Google background image

inspiration

world cup - Google Search

Nice easter egg if you search Google for world cup

Bacon’s had a busy week

“THE SYSTEM WORKS!”

(or: "Why Rod can't be trusted with trust systems")

I've received my first review on half-assed cockamamie untrustworthy LinkedIn attacker "Unvarnished".

Fun fact: It blocks the words "cockamamie" from reviews.

(View full size to read it)

Smart-assed skeptic…

I'm not entirely sure I understand the point of Amazon's new "PayPhrase" system (How is this phrase and a PIN easier than entering my email + password, exactly?) But I am quite pleased with the phrase they let me use (after filtering out all my profane first attempts)

Enter your Facebook password

Setting up the Facebook app on Xbox Live.

Rather than the gorgeous OAuth flow used by the Netflix app for the last year (The Xbox displays a six-digit number, you visit the Netflix website on your PC, log-in and enter that number, Tada, everything's linked), the Facebook, Twitter and last.fm apps all require you to fiddle around, entering email addresses and passwords on an on-screen keyboard.

Oh, and remember not to change your password on those services, because you'll need to go through the dance again.

(Particularly like this: "If you can't enter the characters you need here, change your passwords on www.facebook.com")

Yelp in “Actually doing something innovative” Shocker!

The new Yelp iPhone app has snuck in a nifty "Augmented Reality" view. This shot is taken from out of the window at Slide.

Where The Wild Things Are

This is the scene in the Where the Wild Things Are trailer that gets me most excited. For whatever reason -- the wolf outfit? the crown? the silhouette? -- it's the one the punches my memory and says "You love this book."

Can't wait to see what Eggers and Jonez produce.

Dustin Pedroia

Let's take a moment to celebrate Dustin "Petey" Pedroia, who won the 2008 AL MVP award today. For two years in the major leagues, this list of achievements from his Wikipedia page is damned impressive.

Shout out too to Youk, for coming in third in MVP voting.

MLB At Bat

The MLB's official iPhone app finally has pitch-by-pitch game tracking. Hooray! (This screenshot was taken while I was following the game at the Embarcadero BART station!)

My first FireEagle query

About 10 lines of Python can now work out my physical location.

Next task, integrate this info into my blog. Task after that? A cool ambient location-setter idea I'm hatching.

Number 3 Rod

I'm currently the 3rd search result on Google for "rod". Just pipped by a custom cars magazine and everyone's favourite MFY A-Rod, but trouncing pretend-Scot Rod Stewart.

(I also take 9 out of 10 slots for "Rod Begbie", which must annoy my doppelgangerly-nomenclatured Australian singer/songwriter and Scottish financial manager virtual brethren)

Daylife’s photo-to-name matching algorithm needs some work

Two out of six isn't bad, I suppose.

(Captured from Daylife, a Google-News-on-steroids news aggregator.)

“Project threequarters” is live

Just launched my rebuilt and redesigned blog. It's still a bit on the brittle side, but I'm really happy with it as a first step.