12 Days of Google (Day 8 - Google SketchUp)

Need a bigger house to hold all those holiday gifts? Design it in Google SketchUp – a free 3D design tool http://sketchup.google.com/index.html

12/20 - 12 Days of Google (Day 7 – Googlepolls)

Find out what people are thinking – do a Googlepoll! Enter the beginning of a sentence, such as “If I only had a…” and see how people complete it.

Some others to try:
"If only I could"
"and then he said"
"my mother always told me"
"if I had one wish it would be"

Post your favorites on the blog!

12/14 - 12 Day of Google (Day 6 - Google Translator)

Let’s have fun with Google Translator! Click on “Language tools” next to the Google search box. Enter any English text you like into the Google translator. Translate it from English to French. Now copy the French translation into the box, and translate it to German, then translate that result back to English.

Recognize this Christmas carol?

SuSur The roof, reindeer Break
Breakthrough jumps good old Santa Claus
Down By The Journal chimney with lots of games
The young Toussaint, the joys of Christmas
Ho Ho Ho! Who would not?
Ho Ho Ho! Who would not?
On the roof, click, click, click
Down By The Journal fireplace with a good Saint Nick

12/10 - 12 Day of Google (Day 5 -Dig a very deep hole)

Is there anyone out there who didn’t try to dig a hole to China when they were a kid? Well, thanks to a Google mashup you can now do it online, without getting dirty at all!
http://map.talleye.com/bighole.php

12/10 - 12 Day of Google (Day 4 - Google Calculator)

Day 4 – Google calculator

Need to add up all the money you are spending on Christmas gifts for little Bobby or the number of calories in that plate of cookies you just ate? Using a new recipe and can’t remember how many cups in a pint? Just google an equation (75+89+56 or 200*20) or a conversion (cups in a pint)!


And for the Douglas Adams fans – google calculator can help you find the “answer to life, the universe and everything” (just google it and see!)

12/10 - 12 Day of Google (Day 3 - Net Disaster)

Day 3 – Net Disaster
Stressed out after a long day trying to find a parking spot at the mall? Take out your aggression on Google (or any other web page you desire – except MINE!) with Net Disaster (the text sucker was one of my favorites). Another addicting time waster (Ginger, I am talking to you!!).

Make sure you try the demonstration effect on other websites too (CNN worked well). No idea how this is done, but it is cool! ;)

12 days of Google (Day 2 - Google image quiz)

Day 2 – Google image quiz
Take a break from addressing Christmas cards and play the Google image quiz. Try to guess the word that was googled by the images shown (said to be addicting – fair warning, Ginger!)
http://www.gamesforthebrain.com/game/imagequiz/

12/7 - The 12 Days of Google (Day 1 - egogoogling)

As a holiday gift to my favorite ponderers, the ponderings fairy is proud to present the 12 Days of Google - excerpts and adaptations from 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google. (I am starting early since we will be out of town for a few days and I am likely to forgot on a few others ;)

So to kick it off - what better place to start than with oneself! Let's go egogoogling! Guaranteed to be tons of fun for all of you office-bound folks on a Friday in December ....:)

Google: your first name followed by the word is in quotation marks, i.e. “Donna is” or "Boris is"
Some of the hits I got were:
Donna is very personable with her tunes
Donna is operating under confirmation bias
Donna is being excessively polite here
Donna is a fantastic candidate
Donna is a complete artist in her own right
Donna is frequently sought out by the media, educators, policy makers

Please post some of your favorites on the blog!

Happy Googledays!

12/6 ponderings on forgetting

If human beings were computers (which we aren’t) we might compare our memories to hard-drives which slowly but surely fill up with old files and file fragments as we get older. And the older we become, the more difficult it gets for us to process new knowledge and experience. Older people remember events of thirty years ago more clearly than those of last week. The American writer and psychologist Lawrence LeShan observes that, for the first fifty years of our lives, we remember the details of the tasks we have to perform. But after about the age of sixty we see the world differently. We focus on relationships and meanings. Our memory becomes more selective. Instead of remembering the names of the people we have just met, we focus on the emotional tone of the meeting. Instead of facts, we remember meaning. Instead of width, we remember depth. We lose the sharp edges of our memory, but that just makes us wiser and more able to put things into perspective.
Living is forgetting and forgetting is selecting. We come into the world as a blank page and leave it fully written. For most of us, absent-mindedness and oblivion are probably all we have to look forward to.
Don’t remember where you put your keys? Don’t worry. Think of it as your contribution to the advance of human civilization.
~ Louise van Swaaji and Jean Klare, The Atlas of Experience

12/5 - Happy Birthday, Uncle Walt!

We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. ~ Walt Disney (born December 5, 1901)

12/4/07

On Tuesday, she woke up and realized she had forgotten the definition of the words “Impossible.” She decided it must not have been important. ~ Monique Duval, The Persistence of Yellow

12/3/07

…in my journalistic travels, as in my personal wanderings, I’m a sucker for detours, back roads, tourist traps, scenic views, and historic landmarks. Invariably, these side trips enrich the journey, and every now and then they lead to an important discovery. ~ Miles Harvey, The Island of Lost Maps