Brain on Fire » Blog Tim McCormack, distilled

Amazingly, people are still looking for free GMail invites. (You'd think there'd be enough floating around, but apparently not.) There are several sites that accept invites and spool them back out to anyone who asks, my favorite of which is ByteTest. Sending invite after invite to ginvites@xn0.org is not my idea of fun, but I still like the anonymizing effect of the spooler, and I wanted to help. So, I hacked together a clod of javascript to automate the process.

When I heard the news that Google was hiring Doug Bowman as a design coordinator, the first thought that came to my mind was, "Who is Doug Bowman?" (Like myself, you may know him better not by name, but as the founder of Stopdesign.) The second thing I thought of was Apple's success at maintaining product design consistency. They manage to keep their operating system, their gadgets, their programs, and their web sites sleek, trim, and clean. I imagine an entire department of design coordinators working around the clock at Apple HQ, comparing iPods to iTunes to MacOS, making sure nothing breaks out of the image they've built up so well.

Google traditionally kept to the server-side applications until a few years ago, when they began exploring the thin-client web apps (e.g. Google Calendar) and client-side server apps (e.g. Google Desktop). With the advent of new products, they must have realized that their branding had to consist of more than just colorful letters and replacing an "o" in "Google" with a relevant round object or symbol. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin started the company, it wasn't even a consideration. (Check out their original site -- complete with the ubiquitous "BETA"!)

I think Doug will do an excellent job, if his work at Stopdesign is any indication. Watch out, Apple!

I've been on a quest for a good calendar/appointment/todo system for a few years now, but no system I've encountered has had the flexibility I want for my schedule. When I heard that Google had released a Calendar service, I felt compelled to give it a try. I found it to be no better than my current system, Ximian Evolution.

Sure, it's got all the features you'd expect, like multiple color-coded calendars, shareability, subscription feeds, and simple recurring events. But Ximian Evolution, Microsoft Outlook, and every other large-scale scheduling system has those too.

What I need is a little more flexibility in scheduling recurring events. For example, I eat lunch and dinner at the Kittredge dining hall (instead of Lowry) on weekdays, when it is open. Except Kittredge doesn't have dinner on Friday, so I have to go to Lowry. Also, I exercise at the normal dinner time on Thursdays, so I eat later at Lowry. Events can already be uncoupled from specific dates, so why not from specific times? ThursdayI want the ability to create a "dinner" event, with one recurrence at 17:30 Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday at Kittredge, and another recurrence for 19:00 Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at Lowry. That more adequately reflects my typical schedule.

I'm not asking for infinite flexibility, here. I'd just like scheduler systems to acknowledge the reality of recurring exceptions.

Just a quick thought: Imagine if I set up an unsecured WiFi point near a coffee shop, and modified people's Google search results to include my own advertisements.

Or what if I started an advertisement referral program? People with unsecured WiFi points could install a program that would refer Google searches to my company's servers, which would modify the results. People would get a kickback for the number of referrals they got, as measured by my servers.

You could even use the same kickback system that adware companies currently use.

I think this underscores the importance of using secure protocols like HTTPS.