Maybe I’m getting caught up in the details, but as has been the frequent refrain on Capitol Hill lately: The devil is in the details.
SmartMoney published another article with some fairly sloppy journalism. In “8 CEOs on the Hot Seat” the authors claim that Ford CEO Alan Mullaly was once “CEO of Boeing”. Alan Mullaly was never CEO of Boeing. He was CEO of their Commerical Airlines unit, and after the resignantion of Phil Condit he was considered for the top job, but he was never CEO of the entire company.
Is it too much to ask our journalists to check their facts? Sheesh…
Yahoo! Finance had a great article on how to do your taxes in 7 days (and wouldn’t you know it, they listened to the biblical admonition, and gave you a Sabbath to rest?). For those of you who procrastinated, this might be your one week ticket to tax filing bliss–or at least it should reduce some of the pain. It seems like a pretty straight forward plan. In short, here’s the steps:
Day 1 Gather data.
Day 2 Reduce taxable income.
Day 3 Find your forms.
Day 4 Fill out your forms.
Day 5 Take a break.
Day 6 Check your work.
Day 7 Sign, seal and deliver.
As I mentioned previously, I finished my taxes with the help of TurboTax. It more or less takes care of Days 3, 4, 5, and 6, so it was mighty worth it to me to buy. Speaking of TurboTax, Bank of America is currently having a deal where you can get it for 35% off the regular price. That’s even a better deal than getting it from Costco.
In general, I’d say the most painful part of filing taxes is the gathering of documentation and forms. Fortunately, most of my material was filed all together in one folder. There were a few pieces that seemed to escape. So for tax year 2009, I’m going to be extra diligent in keeping all of those pieces of mail together.
I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but a few times in the last few weeks when I go to http://www.google.com, I end up here:
I can click the link on the bottom that says “Google.com in English,” and I end up back where I wanted to be:
But you can see that it still has the “Go to Google Korea” link at the bottom. I’m not sure what this is all about. But it seems weird to me. Maybe Google launched a new Korean site and they want exposure? I dunno. Weird…
This morning, Apple.com was sporting the iPhone 3G:
Now, they’re sporting the new iPod Touch and iPod Nano:
Very cool.
I was looking for some camera gear today, and I typed in “17th street photo” into the Google Search Box. I tried clicking on the first link, and I was taken to this page:
I thought this was very curious because though it gives me written permission to contine by saying “Or you can continue to http://www.17photo.com at your own risk.” it does not actually give me a way to continue to the site. As you can see from the screen shot, the only links are to return, and to go to various Google websites.
The only way I was able to get to the site was by actually entering the URL into the address bar manually. I guess either Google wants to make it as hard as possible to get there, or this is just really poor design. I suppose the conspiracy theorists out there surmise that it’s censorship. I’m inclined to believe it’s just bad design.
This blog posting was pretty helpful in getting me on the right track to adding Adsense to my website. If you’re thinking about adding it, maybe it will be helpful to you as well.
Just keep in mind that it was written for WordPress 2.5, so some of the screenshots might look a little different, especially if you’re running the latest version (2.6.1 as of today)
Google released their own, open source web browser, Google Chrome today. I downloaded it this evening, so I’ll play with it and see what all the fuss is about.
Those Google guys always have a lot of fun, and for this release, they’ve written and illustrated a Google Comic Book detailing the how and why they decided to build their own web browswer. It was very interesting and informative, but not for the faint of heart as it is pretty technical. (Mind you, it took me about 20 minutes to read, and I’m a pretty fast reader. It’s 38 comic book pages that are packed with information.)
Ars Technica has a review I haven’t yet read. One cool feature they mentioned in the comic book was that it always opens up to a customized, user-specific, page that has the nine most visited sites and a list of recently searched terms. The idea is that the browser should make it quick and easy for the user to get where he’s going. Nifty idea. It’s basically a browser-based portal or home page in that it’s generated client side rather than server side.
This week has been really crazy. I’m trying to finish up a web development job I’ve been working on for the past couple of weeks. Nuts! I’ll be glad when it’s over.
It has been a lot of fun, and I’ve really learned a lot. I think this is my first all CSS layout. Most of my other stuff has all been table-based. So there has been a learning curve, but the site is finally based on web standards. Yay!
I’ll post a link when I get everything finished.
So maybe I spoke a little too soon. I’m not sure if it’s because of Firefox 3, or some new updates that have been made to Google Maps, but Google Maps has pretty much refused to work on my computer ever since installing Firefox 3. It will work from IE, but in Firefox, it just sits there and tells me “Loading…”
Update: I tried uninstalling Firefox 3 and reinstalling it. That didn’t seem to do anything. So I tried going back to Firefox 2 (in this case the latest version of 2, which is 2.0.0.14). Google Maps works again. So I’m highly inclined to believe that it’s a Firefox 3 thing. If I give Mozilla the benefit of the doubt, maybe it’s because they’ve got enhanced CSS and JavaScript rendering that Google Maps doesn’t really conform to. In that case, it’s really Google’s fault. But regardless, Google Maps doesn’t work in FIrefox 3 on my machine, so I’ll be reverting back to Firefox 2 until it’s fixed.
The Firefox Download Day 2008 Challenge is officially over. It appears that over 8 million copies were downloaded in 24 hours. That’s a pretty amazing feat. If you haven’t downloaded it, you really should.
(I won’t post the links again because you should be able to find them in the posts below.)
