Google rocks my virtual world every day. If it doesn’t do the same for you, it should. I’ve written about this before in the context of knowing how to leverage Google’s advanced search capabilities, but many don’t know that there is much more to Google than searching.

There are so many cool things you can do at Google. Things that will capture your attention and hold it hostage for hours and days at a time. Some of those things are fun, some are serious. All are pretty darn cool. Things like this:

Google Search for Klingons (sorry I could not resist):

Dave has links to a few other “languages,” too.

And then there’s all the cool Google Labs stuff, the latest of which is Google Suggests.

What else can you do at Google? Well – here’s their own list:

Google Services: Use one of our many services to find what you're looking for.

Alerts	Answers	Catalogs	Directory
Froogle	GroupsNew!	Images	Google Labs (tons of cool new stuff here!)
Google Local	Google Scholar	News Search	Special Searches (see more below)
University Search	Web Search	Wireless

Google Tools: We offer various tools to help you get more done.

Blogger	Browser Buttons	Google Desktop Search	Google in your Language
Keyhole	Picasa Photo Organizer	Google Toolbar	Translate Tool
Web APIs

Additionally, you can Add Google to your Browser by making Google your default search engine.

Google Special Searches: Often better than you’ll find at the web sites that are home to the technologies themselves…

	U.S. Government		Linux		BSD
	Apple Macintosh		Microsoft

Nice to see the docs rolling out the door on the black-box stuff in SharePoint Portal Server. Here’s another, covering the syntax used in SharePoint Portal Server’s full-text search – Apparently it’s a preview of the what is to come in the next SDK release…

This download includes a preview of the reference documentation for Microsoft SharePointPSSearch, the SQL Syntax used for Microsoft SharePointPSSearch Full Text Search with Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003. Look for updates to this documentation in the Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies 2003 Software Development Kit (SDK).

If you’ve worked on rebranding (to any significant extent) SharePoint Portal Server 2003, you know how difficult it can be to feel confident in what you’re actually doing, due mostly to the lack of documentation on the subject.

Well, Microsoft has released two papers on the Office Developer Center to help:

• Branding a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Site:
  
• Part 1, Understanding the Use of a Corporate Brand
  Learn what it means to "brand" a SharePoint Portal Server site, and about the different types of branding you can apply to a portal site to reflect an organization's identity.
• Part 2, How to Apply Your Own Corporate Brand
  Through step-by-step examples of the typical tasks involved in branding a Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server site, learn to change the standard banner, introduce a custom style sheet, and enhance the user experience of your portal site through interface, navigation, and page layout changes.

Coming Soon - Oregon’s commemorative state quarter:

Reverse Image: "Crater Lake"
Description: Features a portion of Crater Lake, viewed from the south-southwest rim to include Wizard Island and Watchman and Hillman Peaks on the lake’s rim.

Engraver: Donna Weaver

• Proofs: [Macintosh: 591 KB] [PC TIFF: 591 KB]

Circulation plans, per the Statesman Journal:

General Circulation: June 2005
Five-State Proof Set: January 6
Silver Proofs: TBA

“2004 would be remembered as they year that everything began.”

And the rest will be history…

You need to watch this. Seriously. Thought-provoking.

(thanks to Brandon for pointing this out)

Just when you thought Google was perfect, they've up'ed themselves once again.

On Google Suggest, as you type your search term, Google suggests completions and lets you know how many results there are for each suggestion it presents:

I always wanted to know how to dismantle an atomic bomb, and apparently there are 167,000 ways to do just that. Cool.

UPDATES: Phillip shows off Google Suggest’s top suggestions (and his singing voice) in a video, and davenetics.com looks at top suggestions, too, and points out that Google often gets paid for stuff you click on. Makes me wonder how that fits into what’s suggested by the app. Google’s FAQ about Google Suggest is here.

Nice job, Google people.

[via Slashdot and my friend Mike]

Seriously. My sensibility hurts.

At the invitation of a friend, I went to the movies tonight, and saw The Grudge.

Sheez. Now there’s something like two hours of my life I’ll never get back.

I’m not the kind of person to talk out loud in movies, but this one sucked so hard I couldn’t help myself. It’s was editorial comment after editorial comment. And you know what? I wasn’t the only one. And on top of that, NO ONE complained about the out-loud commentary that was going on. That should tell you something.

I’m not even going to explain why it sucked. That would simply do the film too much justice, and someone might spend enough time reading this to subconsciously convince themselves they should see it. DON’T!

And that’s all I have to say about that…

Coudal.com has perhaps the most useful PDF file of the year available to download…

Do you ever get tired of those idiot people who suck up all the ambient quiet while talking on their cell phones about things that they – well – should probably just keep quiet?

Take action now:

“After reading a story in the NYT, Jim's wife Heidi decided that maybe there was a way to fight back against the obnoxious cell phone users that we all have to deal with in stores, restaurants, trains and pretty much everywhere else. Can design ride to the rescue? Jim and the incomparable Aaron Draplin think it can. So, as a public service, we introduce the reasonably polite SHHH, the Society for HandHeld Hushing.”

Download this PDF, get out your exacto knife or scissors, and start fighting back (NOTE: The PDF contains a few choice profanities, so if you’re easilly offended, don’t click).

(via Engadget)

For the past few months now I have had Google AdSense ads (four of them in a vertical stack format) way down deep on the page in the right-side nav section of this weblog. You’d be safe to say they were buried, way “below the fold.” In other words, the worst possible place to stick ads that you want people to click on.

I put the ads there after Chris Pirillo pontificated on the wonders of AdSense - on his site, to me in person, to me in email, to me in instant messaging conversations. He groks the stuff.

Yesterday I got a “hey here’s some new info about your AdSense account” email from the AdSense people, which reminded me of that fact that I even had the ads on my site at all (yeah, they were that far down on the page). I’m a little lazy about that kind of stuff. In fact, I had not checked on the stats for my AdSense account in some time, and so I was a bit surprised to find I had almost $80 worth of ad revenues in my account. Hmmm…

So, being the smart guy I am, I decided maybe there actually was something to this AdSense stuff. Late last night I changed my ad layout design from four ads to just two, made it a horizontal layout, and moved them to the top of the page - into a much higher-profile placement.

The results? Well, just today, I had nearly $10 in click-through revenues – and today was a (relatively) slow traffic day on the site. In other words, by simply moving the ads and making them fit in a little better, in just one day I brought in about an eighth of the total ad revenue from the past four months. That’s hard to beat, no matter how you look at it:

• Click-through Rate:   3.4% today     0.2% per day average
• Click-though Count:   36 today       1 per day average
• Daily Earnings:       $9.42 today    $0.43 per day average

Of course, I emailed Chris and told him about my little experiment in ad placement and the results, and his reply was what exactly I expected:

“Told ya so.”

Heh. Yeah, he sure did.

Eric’s feeling pretty smug ‘cuz he posted about the Zoomquilt before I did. Okay, Eric – you win. I didn’t get around to it. 

Zoomquilt is pretty cool. Let it load, follow the simple instructions.

Be visually amazed. Marvel at the detail. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Seriously - it’s hella-cool. Enjoy.

Well, for those who have followed (for some reason) my back ailments here, an update: Surgery will happen on December 22nd.

So, Percutaneous Discectomy it is – removal of some of the material inside the disc at the L5/S1 space to relieve pressure on the nerve root there. The doctor will remove some of the material from inside, the bulge moves back toward the void left by the removal, and the pressure is reduced. Hopefully.

Nice thing is, it’s outpatient day surgery – I’ll walk out and go straight home within a few hours of arriving there. I’ll also be wearing a back brace for a while and will have to do several weeks of physical therapy (whoopee), but in the end I am hopeful it will all be worth it.

I’ve done pretty much everything I can in order to try to make things work without surgery, so this is pretty much it. While I am not big on the idea of surgery, I am very much looking forward to the possibility of some relief and maybe even getting back to where I can physically do the things I used to do.

Most any blog that’s been Googled, Slashdotted, or Engadgeted – or for that matter pretty much anything that drives traffic to a site – has seen the effects of referral spam. It SUCKS. Porn and marketing sites create a fake link to your blog entry, which results in a link to their web site (usually and unpleasant and unwelcome one) showing up in your referral list for that entry. Your readers click a link and get porn tossed right in their faces. Ugh.

With dasBlog, the only way I had to effectively battle this (I am a victim of referral spam for sure) was to turn off referral displays on my blog. I don’t want that, but this is a family-friendly site for the most part, so keeping the nasty out was important.

But last night Scott Hanselman, a friend and co-worker, sent me a new little C# 2005 Express project ZIP file, told me to compile it, and to try it out. He just built it for himself, and passed it on for me to use.

No more referral spam!

UPDATE: While I was able to kill the nasty referrer links, I have again removed referral listings from the blog for a while, because I have one particular weblog entry that has so many hundreds of referrers, it will crash the browser when you try to load it with referrers showing… But that’s a whole different issue…

Since then, Scott has posted the project source file on his blog, too, so any dasBlog users that need it can take advantage. He plans to make it a little more elegant in the future, but this is a great start!

Scott Hanselman, YOU’RE MY HEEEROOOO.

Tariq’s new SharePoint Tools Galore list is a great resource for people who work with WSS and SharePoint Portal Server. He lists a ton of third party and other tools for use with SharePoint. Check it out:

http://geekswithblogs.net/tariq/archive/2004/12/02/16655.aspx

Also – Joris Poelmans updates the list:

http://jopx.blogspot.com/2004/12/sharepoint-tools-galore.html

Not sure if or where this will actually “live,” but it’s a great start.

For my part – I can tell you that TeamPlate for .NET is very powerful and interesting when plugged into SharePoint and elsewhere, and they have a new version about to come out.

I have neglected posting SharePoint links and info recently. Bad me. Good thing there’s other people out there keeping us up to date. For example, Amanda Murphy recently linked to a few interesting nuggets of SharePoint gold, and I thought I would consolidate a couple of the ones that I find most interesting here, as well. Thanks, Amanda!

Nigel Bridport’s SharePoint User Manager v1.0
http://weblogs.asp.net/nigelbridport/archive/2004/11/30/272173.aspx

“Not sure about other people, but I find it quite time consuming when trying to manage users inside of Windows SharePoint Services sites, especially when the sites in the hierarchy have their security inheritance broken.  A number of customers end up breaking security inheritance at every opportunity and then hit this problem.

“So, I am in the process of writing a SharePoint User Manager Windows Application in order to help out in this area!”

Stramit’s Granular Backup Manager for WSS v1.0
http://blog.spsclerics.com/articles/434.aspx

“Granular Backup Manageris a tool which allows you to create back up file and/or .bat file to make this file for a global hierarchy of WSS site. Its internal is based on the sMigrate.exe of the SharePoint system. the back up file are just Web Package. Each sub site of a WSS collection can have its own web package directly with this tool

I made this tool to make easy the back up operation in the case in large WSS collection with document library. Using granular back up file allow you to restore just little site for recover a document instead of the all collection (less time, less space, just the site).”

Jan Tielens’ Smart Part for SharePoint v1.0.0.0
http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2004/11/23/268644.aspx

Finally I’ve managed to finish a new release for the SmartPart for SharePoint; version 1.0.0.0. This release has some really cool new features, but I'm really excited about the first one: connectable web parts with ASP.NET user controls!

• Create connectable web parts
  In SharePoint you can connect web parts, so they can exchange data. For example you could create a web part that displays a list of invoices, and another web part that displays the details of the selected invoice (master/detail view). Normally you’d have to create your Invoice and InvoiceDetails web parts by hand, implementing the ICellProvider and ICellConsumer interfaces (see Patrick’s excellent article about this topic). With the new version of the SmartPart you can do the same, but instead of coding everything by hand, you can create ASP.NET user controls! Just implement the ICellProviderUserControl or ICellConsumerUserControl on your user control, and you’re done.
• CAS Optimization
  Maxim Karpov did a great job on fine-tuning the Code Access Security for the SmartPart. For running the previous versions of the SmartPart, you’d had to increase the trust level in the web.config to WSS_Medium. In this version this is not required anymore. Of course if your user controls require a higher trust level, you can raise the trust level as usual.
• Hiding the user control selection
  Once you’re finished building your user controls, maybe you’d want to ship the finished web parts/user controls to a customer for example. In that case you don’t want the user to select the user controls from the dropdown listbox of the SmartPart, or filling out the user control name by hand. With the new version of the SmartPart you can create a DWP file which contains all the settings for an instance of the SmartPart showing a specific user control. The nice part is that you can hide the dropdown listbox or textbox for selecting the user control by adding the following node in the DWP after you’ve exported an instance of the SmarPart:
  <ShowUserControlList xmlns="SmartPart">false</ShowUserControlList>.

Got Windows XP and/or Media Center 2005? Then you’ll probably want to get the new Holiday Fun Pack for Windows XP.

There’s lots of cool stuff in there. Note that one thing Microsoft does not make very clear up front is any of the details about the Tweak Media Center 2005 power toy that’s included. Check out this article on Sean Alexander’s digital media blog for some more info in that regard.

If you’re visually motivated and into the winter thing, I don’t see why you would want to skip this download…

Download the Winter Fun Pack 2004 now! Spice up your music, photos and more with amazing holiday visualizations, skins, powertoys and other fun add-ons. There’s something for the whole family!

The Winter Fun Pack 2004 includes:

Stunning Holiday Vizualizations for Windows Media Player 10
Ring in the holiday cheer! Give your desktop the Holiday touch with three cool seasonal Player Visualizations. Enjoy the HOT new WhiteCap Holiday Viz with nearly 20 holiday images that explode in vivid color including a snowman, candy cane, shooting star and more. Cool down with the chilling Ice Storm Viz, then warm up next to the fire place with the Yule Log Viz.

Amazing Holiday-Themed Skins for Windows Media Player 10
Give your Media Player a wintry makeover with 5 skins for Windows Media Player 10 including Frostbite, Ice, and Ginger man and Ginger woman skins. Also, take Windows Media Player 10 to the next level with the hot new Halo 2 skin, which is sure to be one of the hottest selling games this Holiday season. [Ed: Halo 2 skin and Holidays? Uhhh… Ok…]

PowerToys for Windows Media Player 10
Let Windows Media Player 10 take the pain out of your holiday parties with Holiday Auto Playlists (including Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and Christmas). Personalize your email or blog by showing the song that’s playing on your desktop. And for power users, easily export your media library information into Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access and others.

Photos, Media Center and More!
Get into the holiday spirit and transform your desktop into a winter wonderland with new captivating desktop wallpaper images from Corbis. Get more out of Media Center 2005 with the new TweakMCE 2005 powertoy. Download Kris the Holiday Dancing Elf, Photo Story 3 for Windows, and more!

(via Sean Alexander)