My first experience with Google came in 1999 or 2000. I was working at Dell and one of my coworkers made the statement “Just Google it” in response to a question, and I didn’t know what that meant so I searched Yahoo!. It took several more years for them to become my primary search engine because at that point I was already very familiar with Yahoo!. Now they ARE my primary search engine.

In fact, there are a number of Google products that I use on a daily basis.

Search. This is what got them started, and its still their salient product. The search results found within Google are still better than those of the other major players, in my opinion. I also love the simplicity and white space. I never use the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button because I like seeing all the options and selecting myself. I don’t really know what else to say about search, it’s been my home page for years now, and I use it at least 30 times a day. Seriously. And even I don’t know all of the commands that can be used to make their search results more targeted. Define, site, omit, and, or… I know there’s a list, but I’m not sure I’d use them all so I never look them all up. And did you know that Google is also a calculator? 32,874 divided by 4.

Mobile. How often have you been out and wanted to know the start time of a movie, but couldn’t get to a computer? Or wanted the answer to a question right away? If you have a smart phone that’s no trouble. If you don’t there’s Google Mobile. Send a text message to their servers with your search query and they’ll reply via SMS with your answer. This is awesome. I don’t use it every day, but I do use it, and it works exactly as you expect.

Gmail. When Gmail was announced my feathers were ruffled because the media played up the fact that Google servers scan your inbox for keywords that prompt advertisements. Then the service was launched and you couldn’t get an account unless you were invited. I think I bought my invite on eBay for $1. I’ve never looked back. There is no other email application that can compare with Gmail. Threaded email history, categorizing via labels instead of folders, filters, IMAP/POP/SMTP support, ever increasing storage capacity, fantastic search capabilities, easy archival, excellent spam detection… no one else can hold a candle to Gmail. My Gmail account has been my primary email address since the summer of 2005, I very rarely delete anything (and I send myself files all the time), and today I’m only at 20% of my total storage capacity. And, every once in a while I learn of another feature that I’ve never heard of. This is definitely the product that sold me, I may have never become a Google fanboy were it not for this product.

Maps. Before Google Maps I used MapQuest. At first I didn’t think that there was a significant difference between the map providers, it was just a matter of who you were familiar with. Then I realized that you could switch between map, satellite and terrain views. And you can email maps to people as a link. Then they published their APIs and you can embed their maps in your own web pages. Their directions are super easy to work with, they give you a couple of routes to work with, and if you want to alter one (to avoid a toll road, for instance) you just drag the route and the travel time and distance update automatically. Whoa! With street view came the ability to look at the buildings you’ll see when you arrive, before you even leave. Just a month ago I realized that you can search within Maps and it’ll show businesses in your area. Type in Austin, TX pizza and you’ll get a number of dots on the map. I’m not a map expert by any means, but if anyone else has brought in this many features without bloating the application, I don’t know about it.

Reader. If you like reading blogs, there are a couple of services that make it a snap to handle the RSS feeds of all your favorite publishers. I used Bloglines for years, and then finally succombed to Google Reader. I can’t say that Reader is hands above any of the other online RSS readers, but the truth is that it works perfectly and is very easy to use.

Goog-411. Do you ever have to dial information? If you call the phone company it costs. If you call Google its free. I’ve been using it for a couple of years and there have maybe been only two times that it couldn’t find the number that I was looking for. Just like the phone company, once you find the number it’ll dial and connect you, and you even have the option of having the info texted to you.

Voice. This service is newer, but man did they get it right. Once you have a number (currently by invite only, and not all areas are being served) you can easily forward that number to any or all of your other numbers, home, office or cell. You can also send or receive text messages using that number. Here comes the good part, you can arrange your contacts just as you would with your email addresses, work, family, friends, etc, and route them accordingly. Want all work contacts sent to your work number and all friends sent to your cell? No problem, either way, they all dial the same number. This service also converts your voice messages to text, and you can either listen to them or read them (or both) online. Phone companies, please pay attention.

Analytics. If you have a website, and you like monitoring the traffic that it receives, Google Analytics is a fantastic service. How many visitors, how long they spend on your site, how they found your site, their geographic location, etc. Its advanced features allow you to filter out your own visits, create and track campaigns, segment the traffic any way you choose and more. I have tried many other traffic monitoring tools, and I would recommend this over all of the others, free or otherwise.

Documents. Ten years ago it was pretty tough to get by without having a copy of Microsoft Office on your computer. As much as I hate the way Microsoft treats their customers, Word and Excel are some of the most useful programs available, I use them daily for work and in my personal life. Today there are plenty of free options. Google Documents is one of the best. Through this tool you can create letters, spreadsheets and presentations. They don’t offer the same amount of features as their Microsoft counterparts, but that’s one of its salient points, they’re generally much easier to work with because they aren’t bloated with options that you never use. Plus, you can use this service to create PDF files. If you used Microsoft Office you should at least check this service out.

Calendar. When Google launched their calendar service in 2006 I thought it was janky at first. Now I like it very much. The only reason that I don’t use it on a daily basis is that I’m required to use Exchange at work and its just easier to handle everything there. When I had a Blackberry, Google Calendar was my main calendar. Its a snap to create appointments or recurring meetings and invite anyone. You can share your entire calendar or just certain portions of it, and you can even publish portions of it on the web. Its very easy to use.

I haven’t even covered all of the tools that I wanted to talk about and I’ve already gone longer than I thought I would. I’ve also used and recommend Picasa, Google Earth, Google Finance, Google Desktop, Android, SketchUp and others that elude me at the moment. I’m also very excited to play with Google Wave when it launches.

Each of the services that I’ve mentioned above isn’t just great, they’re best of class. I don’t want to handle email without Gmail anymore. Phone companies, I’m paying you, please give me all of the features that Voice gives me for free. Is there anyone on the planet that still prefers MapQuest to Google Maps? Google doesn’t offer services, each time they launch something new it changes the way people think about the service. When you bring them all together in one account, it changes the way you use the web. Seriously. Sergey and Larry certainly don’t get all the credit, but their commitment to excellence shines through in everything this company touches.

Dear Google, I love you. Keep giving us the good stuff.

When he wrote me back, he offered me more than I was asking. Just to jack with him, I raised the price even further, and of course he went for it (when you don’t plan to send any money at all, what’s another $30 or $40?). So first I get a spoofed email from Paypal, saying that my account has been credited. I have to say that its a pretty bad spoof. But then it gets more interesting, I’ve gotten a total of three spoof emails so far.

The first email was sent by pp305@ultimateemail.com, with the name showing as service@paypal.com. If you use gmail (or Google apps) then you’ll see right off that the email was not sent by Paypal. The email asks you to send the shipment tracking number to “Paypal” at the same pp305 email address. Any astute user will note right off that Paypal does not send their emails through any free email service, ultimate email or otherwise.

Paypal spoof email from scammers

Within minutes of receiving that email I got a second, again from pp305@ultimateemail.com. This one is a reminder of the safety measures that Paypal takes to ensure the security of my account. Once again, its pretty easy to identify it as a fake.

Fake Paypal Safety Email

At that point, I sent Banderos an email saying nice try, and I figured we were done. I forwarded both of those emails to Paypal so that they’re aware of them, and went about trying to sell my iPod. This morning when I woke up I had an email supposedly from the FBI, threatening that if I didn’t provide a tracking number within hours that I’d be facing legal consequences. This one was sent from f_b_i_crimeteam@ultimateemail.com.

Spoof FBI email

Each of these emails was obviously a fake. I’ve pointed out a couple of obvious errors, there are several others that I won’t mention here because I don’t want to make it easier for them to fool someone else. Lets just say that there is quite a bit of evidence suggesting that this is a scam, for anyone that has the inclination to look.

Seller beware. The fact that they’ve put so much thought into this scam indicates that they’re taking advantage of enough people to make it worth their while, which is pretty sad. I still prefer Craigslist to eBay because its free. I’m sure I’ll be dealing with more cretons like these soon enough.

Just this morning I learned the solution. You can work with all of your Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Documents through a secure internet connection. And it won’t cost you a cent.

You just have to update your links to include https://.

• secure Gmail = https://mail.google.com/mail/
• secure Google Calendar = https://www.google.com/calendar/
• secure Google Documents = https://docs.google.com/

I don’t think Yahoo & Microsoft (Hotmail) even offer this with their premium accounts. All of the webmail providers keep increasing the account storage capacity thinking that will win new clients. Having a secure connection is more important to me than infinite capacity.

Way to go Google, keep up the great work.

I wonder what we’ll see next? R2-K9? Boba Fetch? Chew-bacca? Jaba the Mutt?

Wow, this post went south in a hurry, didn’t it? I’ll stop now.

I didn’t pay too much attention to it, but it didn’t look right for some reason. The next time I pulled up the page, I noticed that its one letter shy. The “L” is missing. A little surfing found Google’s explanation. I thought it was cool, but didn’t totally get it. Being focused on the task at hand, I wasn’t really eager to get it, either.

A few minutes later, just to be silly I decided to do a search for “googe”. I didn’t expect to find anything, I thought I was being clever in a smart alek way.

One of the first hits was for Barnabe Googe. Googe was an English poet that is famous for one single line of prose.

I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die.

Very clever Google. I like.

Happy St Valentine’s Day everyone (especially Isabella).

Okay, back to work. I still have two chapters to read and a lab report to finish.

I took up the habit for real when I was in high school. I think all told, I was a regular smoker for about 10 years. It took me about 5 years and a dozen attempts to finally quit, but now I’m a non-smoker, and have no desire to pick it back up. By the grace of God, I’m just done with cigarettes. It doesn’t bother me or tempt me to be around smokers. I just don’t want them anymore.

Though I’m not bothered by smokers, I have to say that I’m glad that the number of places where its acceptable to light up are decreasing. It is decidedly not cool to smoke in today’s culture. Candy cigarettes aren’t sold any more. This is great. Smoking is a horrible habit and its smart for our culture to reject it.

The other day I was listening to the radio as I was driving, and a commercial came on with a machine voice singing “You don’t always die from tobacco.” It cracked me up. Its funny enough to hold your attention, and revolting enough that you instantly agree with its message. I liked it so much that I had to find it on the web to hear it again.

The organization that put this together, Truth, is funded by tobacco companies. Its poetic justice. Whatever your opinion about attorneys, they did a public service when they squeezed tobacco companies to pay for an ad campaign to alert us about the dangers of smoking.

I just heard last week that the Texas lawmakers are working on legislation to make it illegal to smoke in public. Outside, inside, you just wouldn’t be able to. That would mean that the only place its legal to smoke would be your house or your car. That may be a little extreme in my humble opinion, but I’m glad that the public is becoming increasingly engaged in encouraging people to quit.

Yipee-Kai-Oh

My Dad is the person that introduced me to eBay. He told me it was an online auction site, and it was cool because you could buy just about anything imaginable from regular people. I opened my eBay account in April of 1998, and started buying things right away. And its been shopping nirvana ever since. I’ve purchased just about anything you can imagine on eBay. Guitars, bicycles, stereo equipment, computers, school supplies, web hosting, software, and more. And it has been easy and trouble free.

Until December.

I was shopping for an iPod as a Christmas gift for my brother. I had a solid tip that I was getting something really cool from him, so I wanted to step up my gift giving as well. I got him an 80gb video iPod. I did some shopping, and found them on eBay for a few dollars less than they were going for on Apple’s own website, which is fairly common for tech products on eBay. Cell phones and accessories, computers, iPods, PDA’s, etc. All of these are typically 5-10% less expensive on eBay than they are in retail stores.

After finding my product, I did some research on 2 or 3 different sellers. I won’t buy from anyone that hasn’t been online for at least 2 years, they have to have sold a few products in the same price range as the one I’m considering, and they have to have a 98% or higher feedback rating. It takes no credentials at all to start an eBay account and start selling, so the seller’s history is the only indicator that you have of how the transaction will play out.

I found a seller that met all of this criteria. He had been a member since 2001 and had 100% feedback. I made the purchase and paid via Paypal, because that’s the fastest way of getting the funds to the seller. Plus, if anything goes wrong on the back-end of the deal, Paypal offers some buyer protection (or so I thought).

A week went by with no contact from the seller. No tracking information, not even a note acknowledging the order. I’ve been doing this for 8 years now, so I just figured the seller was wound up with holiday stuff like everyone else, so I sent a follow up email, and also sent it through eBay’s message service.

Another week went by with no contact, so I sent another email and note. This is when I became concerned and looked into Paypal’s protection policy. They only covered $175 of my purchase price, which was alarming.

Three days later I logged in, and his feedback rating had dropped to 4%. 45 different people had left negative feedback for this seller within a period of 3 days. I filed a claim with Paypal immediately and sent emails to the user, eBay and Paypal.

A day later (now 2 and a half weeks after my initial purchase), the seller’s account was closed, so no one could leave feedback for the user.

Paypal never heard anything from the seller, so the claim was decided in my favor, and I received $175 from them. This was significantly less than I paid for the iPod, so this was a net loss for me. Its the equivalent of throwing money away.

Since then I’ve done some research on this, and its a growing trend. What happened, most likely, is that the seller’s account was hacked, and the person that hacked his account listed a bunch of expensive items with no intent of fulfilling the orders. They’re gaining access to an account and trading the good history of the original account holder for cash.

When you know what to look for, its actually pretty easy to spot this. I can spot hacked accounts pretty handily now. If the person has a relatively low number of positive feedbacks, or has sold only a few items, and all of a sudden lists 30 individual auctions for the same product, its most likely a hacked account.

Here’s what really torques me about this. Unfortunately this behavior has become common enough that there are groups of people trying to find them and point them out before someone gets suckered. If individual users can spot these fraudulent sales, then so can eBay. Up to this point eBay’s official response to this has been almost nill, which is very weak. If they want to maintain their good name in the marketplace, then eBay needs to get in front of this and proactively address thie issue.

Second, Paypal, which is also owned by eBay, gives seductively misleading information about buyer protection. The language that appears on most auctions is technically accurate but the truth is that there is a limit on what is covered. This makes it easy for regular folks to get duped into completing a bogus sale. Once the money is deposited into someone else’s account, they can immediately withdraw it, and then its gone forever. This is a pretty painful reminder that Paypal is not a bank, and in my opinion Paypal is a silent accomplice in the matter because they aren’t helping to prevent this.

I say protect yourself. Pay for your auction with a true credit card (not a debit card) so that if you get duped at least the credit card company will refund your money. And if you have accounts with both eBay and Paypal, you would do well to select a different password for each account. If someone hacks your eBay account, at least they won’t get access to your money as well.

And never, under any circumstances log into anything from a link sent in email. No matter how good it looks or how sure you are. The hackers are a shifty lot, and if you mistakenly log into one of their accounts, you can kiss your eBay account goodbye. If you get a note through eBay, you should absolutely not click on that link. Open up a browser yourself and navigate to the site yourself.

Finally, buyer beware. I got harranged for over $100 because I wasn’t careful enough, and I’m an experienced eBay fanatic. I’ll be steering clear of eBay for the next couple of months to see if they straighten this out. If you have to buy something on eBay, be extra careful, and only pay with a credit card.

As much as I hate to say it, eBay is not the same blissful marketplace that it once was.

• Airplane – Somehow a 1950′s era airplane got superimposed on top of some houses in England. I hope no one was hurt.
• B2 Shadow – Closely related to that, yet less definite is the shadow of a B2 bomber over La Palmas de Gran Canaria. This, of course, is not a real shadow, its the result of differences in color quality between the images that Google stitched together. But, it has provided fodder for conspiracy theorists on the web.
• Bug – This is one of my favorites. You think the roaches in Texas are big? Germany has bugs that are several hundred feet long! Either that, or a bug got caught between the plates when someone was scanning these images. It had never occurred to me before, but apparently some of the images that are used to comprise Google Earth were scanned in.
• Buildings – This one is also pretty funny. These buildings are leaning different directions. M.C. Escher would have loved this one.
• Jesus Loves You – I guess people in Idaho think that Jesus loves aliens, too. Now that’s interesting! It raises some interesting questions about theology, to be sure. I can tell you that if we ever start sharing the gospel with extra-terrestrials, I’m going to raise support to be part of that ministry.
• Levitating Car – Over in Perth, Australia, Google Maps captured an image of a car that’s hovering over a lot. I hope the owner has a jet pack.
• Pharaoh Wearing iPod – This one is by far the funniest to me. I can’t tell if this is real, or it someone at Google is having fun with us here. It just kinda adds to it that this is in Canada.
• Star – When the image was taken, whatever is here was reflecting back sunlight. Its a little less interesting, but its still something to see.

There must be dozens of other examples of stuff like this. If you know of any, post them in comments.

A day or so later, I did a search for that term, and came across an excerpt from the late Dr. Carl Sagan’s book of the same name.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Wow. That’s powerful. Yeah, what he said.

For what its worth, you really need to see the photo, its also fantastic. The Cassini space probe captured an image of Saturn eclipsing the Sun.