Marc’s blog is dead.  Since he won’t allow comments there, I’m commenting here…

As far back as I can see, all Marc’s posts are just advertisements for Ben’s blog.  Ben’s a smart guy, who I respect a lot, for a whole bunch of reasons.  And he probably writes better than Marc does by a mile.  But his blog is so droll!  I can never get through the first paragraph or so without falling asleep!  It’s a compilation of self-help articles for entrepreneurs.  Blech!

Marc – write!  Don’t get our hopes up with this boring Management-101 crap from Ben!  Hmm… wonder what he’ll say about my crappy blog…

Conan O’Brien was here at Google last week.  In his opening remarks, he said,

You call yourself ’Googlers’? Is that it? Let’s address that.  We can do better than ‘Googler’.  Ok.  We need something cooler.  Especially for the guys when they walk into a bar.  ‘I’m-a-I’m-a Gooooglgllgleeer’ [you have to Conan’s voice]

Conan is right.  “Googler” is a goofy nickname.

Microsoft does it too.  Inside of Microsoft, they call each other “Microsofties”, or sometimes just “softies”.

What is it with tech companies needing diminutive, feminine, metro-sexual identities?  Is it part of being in some sort of cult?  I guess every successful group has to identify themselves somehow.

Conan did offer some suggestions (you can hear them in the video).  They weren’t very good either.

Anyway, from this point forward, I’m not a Googler anymore.  I still work at Google, but “Googler” is gone from my vocabulary.  Thanks Conan!

From Gary Varvel:

Since Obama wants to increase investment in Social Security, I’ll blame him!

I never really understood YouTube.  It’s neat, I guess.  But frankly, its mostly junk, and I hardly ever use it (I don’t even have a YouTube account).  However, over the last week I’ve really started to notice Hulu, a completely different approach to online video.  Unlike YouTube, Hulu could be the Comcast of the future.

Hulu does not have any home made videos (which are usually low quality).  Rather, they license high-quality movie and television content that you’d actually want to watch.  Maybe it’s because I don’t have cable at home, or maybe its because the video is actually really good quality – but this is a service I like.  I watched the movie “Spy Games” with Robert Redford & Brad Pitt the other night, and it was great.

Advantages of Hulu:
* High-quality video.
* Content that you’ll recognize and want to watch.
* They do include advertisements during the video, but they’re usually 15-30s, and quite minor compared to cable television.
* They even offer some custom content only found on Hulu such as Crawford and Dr. Horrible.

Disadvantages of Hulu:
* Limited selection of content.  (But improving all the time!)
* You are required to login to view much of the content.  (Not too bad though)

When I was a kid, everyone used to say I looked just like this guy.  I still sometimes get strangers saying so.  I was never very fond of the shows he did back then, but finally my clone has done me proud.

This year, Valentine’s Day landed on Thursday.  Valentine’s Day is a day where we buy lots of perishable presents – flowers, candy, etc.  So of course, the stores have all the Valentine’s Day items at 50% off even today…  they don’t save until next year.

By celebrating on Friday instead of Thursday, we had the luxury of going out on a weekend night instead of a weekday night.  But I also saved 50% on the gifts.  Totally cheap?  Probably; but I bought twice as much stuff…. I think I’ll do it again next year.  Unfortunately, Feb 14, 2009 is a Saturday.  So I’ll have to come up with a new excuse for waiting an extra day…

As politically incorrect as it is, I finally got around to doing my google search for “Osama Obama” today.  It yields some very funny stuff.