Jon Barclay

I love April Fools. It is so much fun to hear or see something on this day, fully believing it to be real, and then to remember what day it is and to chuckle at the prank.

Google never disappoints, and today released a new feature to gmail that allows users to send an email and have it show up in the recipients in box at a custom time. Last year they came out with their best joke yet, a new way of delivering free Internet service called TiSP.

My all time favorite April Fools joke though was an NPR report on Exploding Maple Trees.

Have you ever had a group paper that you had to work on, and in order to write it you emailed drafts around to each member of the group for revisions? It works, but not very well. Google Docs is an excellent solution to the collaboration problem. It allows you to create a document and give all the members of your group the ability to change it, simultaneously. Now this won’t get the paper written for you, but it can make it a heck of a lot easier.

Try it out and see if Google Docs isn’t the perfect answer to your next group assignment.

Its been quite a while now since Google announced a new product called Street View. It basically is a new way of seeing a street not from a satellite picture but as if one was standing on the street looking around. When I first heard about it I thought it sounded interesting and a little creepy but that they would just do it in San Francisco and San Jose.

Now low and behold Google has gone and expanded their coverage to many many places including our neighborhood! It is a little surreal to look at your own home, and especially if you happen to be lucky enough to be outside when the camera took the snapshot.

Google is no slouch and has been expanding the coverage very rapidly. On Sunday night I was looking at my in-laws neighborhood and was disappointed that they had not yet been added. However, within a few days Google added many streets around them. Check out this picture from their neighborhood, and keep in mind it won’t be long before yours may be added. Time to get to that yard work!

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This is a really interesting video. It reminds me that we can never become complacent, and always need to be learning and adapting. Continually working to keep up isn’t just for IT people anymore.

Every once in a while something comes along and changes the way we live. Gmail revolutionized email by giving users practically unlimited storage when 10 megs was the industry standard. Tivo ond DVRs changed the way we consume TV. Now a new service from Google may be able to do the same thing for telephones.

GrandCentral is a new service that gives you a new local phone number. Why would you want another number? Well it’s because of what it can enable you to do with that number. The idea is that this new number becomes the last one you ever need. You can answer calls to that number from any phone, and make calls originating from that number. That is only the beginning though. more…

A couple of weeks ago UVSC unveiled its new logos for the change to University status. I had seen them earlier when I filled out a survey on the logos that showed several different options. And while the final logos were not what I chose in the survey, they are growing on me.

Any change always seems to brings discomfort. But it seems as we live with changes many times we learn to like them. I think this will be the case with the logos. At first I just thought the Utah in the U was just silly and it really turned me off. But now after letting the new logos digest I kinda like them. Check out a video with the new logos here. What do you think?

I love this radio program. It is hard to describe what the show exactly is. Even the shows own web site explains that is has “a hard-to-describe sound”. Basically it is a show where they choose a theme and play a set stories on that theme. What that does not tell you is that the stories are amazing, funny, sad, evocative stories. Sometimes the stories are all of those, all at the same time.

This weeks episode is a rebroadcast of the episode that got me hooked. David Sedaris tells the story, Youth in Asia. Check it out: In Dog We Trust.

They also have produced a number of episodes of a TV show for the showtime network. I was unsure if they would be able to match the quality of the radio program with their television show, but they did. It is amazing! Unfortunately we don’t get Showtime, although it is tempting after watching one episode online.