I won’t be doing many (any?) posts over Thanksgiving — my grandfather’s birthday is this weekend, and I’m spending the time visiting with family. On the bright side, I wrapped up my logistical project today, and I’m looking forward to blogging a little more after Thanksgiving. I also taped three videos when I visited the webmaster console team in Kirkland a few weeks ago, so we might be able to get those up too.
If you’re looking for fun things over the holiday weekend, here are some things I’ve enjoyed recently:
DVD:
- Ratatouille is excellent. It’s family-friendly, but it’s also very clever.
- I played soccer in high school, so I’m a sucker for fun soccer movies (Shaolin Soccer and Bend it Like Beckham come to mind). I really liked Gracie. It’s fascinating to read how the movie is grounded in real life. Gracie is one of the few movies where I’ve watched the movie again with commentary later (provided by Elisabeth Shue and Andrew Shue).
Books:
- Non-fiction, I really enjoyed Rule the Web. I’ll talk about this book more when I do my Christmas gift suggestions, but the short summary is that anyone that touches a computer can find some fun things in this book.
- Also for non-fiction, Founders at Work is interesting. If you have an entrepreneurial bent or have ever thought of doing a start-up, I think you’d like this book.
- Fiction? I genuinely haven’t been reading much straight fiction for the last month or two. If you like comic books graphic novels, I’ve enjoyed Powers recently. The Powers series examines what would happen if lots of regular people had superpowers. I also checked out Shooting War. It’s frigging bleak, but you might like it if you liked Transmetropolitan.
Podcasts:
- The Daily SearchCast has gotten a little sporadic as Danny has been on vacation and doing search conferences. It’s still one of the most enjoyable ways to get your fix of search news though, and it’s much safer to listen to the SearchCast in the car instead of trying to surf web sites on an iPhone as you drive. I’ve got a batch of these to listen to while I’m traveling this weekend. But Daron and Danny: you tweaked the MP3 filenames to include some keywords, but you dropped the date. Bring the date back so it’s easy to listen to them in order!
Web. Some stuff that’s in my browser or otherwise interesting:
- Eric Enge interviews Eric Engleman, from Bloglines. It’s a fun interview, and I’m glad that Bloglines keeps the Google Reader engineers on their toes.
- Sure, you saw Scoble blow off Android. But though I love Robert, he’s not a hard-core developer. He’s a smart guy who talks to techies and developers and neat people. So I’d trust Scoble’s opinion on how compelling the Android videos and demos were, but you really want a developer who digs into the system to give an in-depth write-up. A better view on Android was this article by Reto Meier. I love that Android supports all sorts of inputs, from GPS to compass to accelerometer to cameras.
- This Linux device driver project needs more unsupported devices so that they can write drivers for them. My three requested devices would be 1) full support for *all* of the keys on the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, 2) the Omron HJ-720ITC pedometer, and 3) the Fretlight guitar.
- Gmail has always been pretty open (e.g. letting you download your email for free via POP or easy exporting of your contacts). It’s nice that Gmail added IMAP support, but I’m just as excited that Google has introduced a Greasemonkey API for Gmail to make hacking on Gmail even easier. I was a little surprised that this didn’t get much coverage in search blogs, other than Google OS covering the API.
That’s it for now — enjoy your Thanksgiving, and I’ll see you in a few days.


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