Google Chrome; Hello Advertising
September 04, 2008

So, I seriously gave Google Chrome a try last night while browsing the intarwebs and concluded that there's one serious barrier to adoption of Chrome by FireFox users: annoying advertising. FireFox itself is superb at blocking popups and when combined with the Adblock extension and disabling of Flash, annoying advertising blocking reaches almost 100%. While browsing with Chrome last night I was incredibly annoyed by having to step backwards in time to a day when you actually had to *view* annoying advertising. I keep saying annoying advertising, because I don't mean things like Google text ads or Yahoo Content Match. I mean, jumping dancing poodles dancing across your browser window to lower mortgage rates.

Chrome's interesting, and it certainly blends into Vista nicely - but until there's ad blocking I think its going to be incredibly difficult to get FireFox users to seriously consider it. Internet Explorer users are a different story since IE doesn't really know too much about ad blocking and still displays epileptic fit inducing banner ads.

Google Reader; RSS At It's Finest
October 19, 2006

I've floundered around this great web for quite some time, and have a large wealth of sites that I visit regularly. For the last year or so I've been playing around with lots of different RSS clients and came to one earth shattering conclusion I hated them. I've hated them on two levels; looks and functionality.

I'm an aesthetic person, I'm sure you already knew that. I like things to look neat, clean and attractive - or I don't really care to view the information presented. It's pretty simple. All of the RSS readers that I had tried either had terrible design or made the articles look completely wrong.

The second point, functionality is something that's a specific flaw in my usage patterns. Most people use one computer all the time. Me? I used somewhere around five or six in the course of a day. Keeping that many computers' RSS feed lists synced was a pain in the ass -and I always ended up missing out on some great news.

Here's where Google Reader comes in. First off, it's a great looking program. Now, it's not all fancy looking with lots of blinking widgets - it's simple, clean and attractive. It's everything that I like. Where it really shines though is the functionality. The main interface is surprisingly slick - displaying a listing of all of the new articles posted since your last read. As you scroll down and mouse over each of them - they're marked as read. Cool! My favorite feature though, is ability to only list updated feeds. So, if you've got a list with 20 or so infrequently updated feeds - you're not inundated with all of them unless they've actually been updated.

If you combine Google Reader with the Google Reader Subscribe Button recently linked to on LifeHacker - you'll be in heaven as you browse the web and have one click feed additions.

Why Does Google Think My Blog is About Sushi?
July 27, 2006

So, I made a single post about Sakura's tasty sushi awhile back and now Google thinks that my blog is entirely about sushi - as can be seen by the sushi advertising on my sidebar. I am slightly baffled, because I don't even show up on the first three pages of searching for "St. Cloud Sakura".

On the flip side I have been making some tasty sushi lately and will have to post pictures soon. It's so amazingly simple, tasty and fun. Also, the Sushi Video on google video is a must see.

Now google will have no choice but brand my blog as a sushiblog!