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I’m really enjoying Google Chrome, Google’s new fast web browser. It seems pretty fast, although I wonder exactly how it renders because certain “hacks” can be made that trick the user into thinking that things are happening faster (see the trick where you decrease the start menu fly-out delay time to make users think their computers are faster).

I certainly miss my Firefox extensions, namely my delicious bookmarks.

There’s also some ways in which it handles certain actions (when I type “restaurants” in the location bar, do I want to go to restaurants.com or do I want to search for restaurants? That makes me pause every time).

Separate processes definitely is a good thing and the way things are going. I also managed to crash a tab by opening a PDF document with Adobe Reader (argh I hate Adobe Reader). It wasn’t as graceful as I hoped…eventually the tab made the “sad face,” but for about 30-40 seconds before that all of the Chrome window was unresponsive…and then finally all my clicked events went through at once. 

I like the new tab default page. Whoever thought of that is very smart.

Now that school is starting back up again I’m looking at cutting out large wastes of time. One of those wastes of time is *A PART OF* Twitter (not Twitter entirely!). I’ve noticed that when I check up on Twitter lately, there are quite a few people that I’m following that I just skim over or just skip altogether. This is interesting because…I can just unfollow them! And so I’ve been trimming up my following list on Twitter. I used to think it was pretty neat to keep up with the “net celebrities” on Twitter…but if the updates aren’t interesting, then I’m not going to bother.

Now I did say it was just *a part of* Twitter that has become a waste of time. In the past month a few more of my friends and family are actively using Twitter and I’ve really enjoyed staying in touch. So, I’m cutting out the fluff.

Google Chrome

Just read the comic introducing Google Chrome, Google’s new web browser. It definitely looks very interesting, from both a user’s and developer’s perspective. Chrome is designed from the ground up to work with online web apps faster and more safely. There’s supposed to be a public beta later today, so I’m looking forward to trying that out.

Status: Married

Well, almost everything about getting hitched went on without a hitch. There was a small problem, I didn’t get the programs and directions to the reception to where they needed to be, so they didn’t get passed out. Oh well. Our bro-in-law came through by setting up online video streaming of the ceremony…awesome stuff! Too bad I didn’t know sooner or I would have advertised that a bit more. The reception was a lot of fun. And we had a great time in Oklahoma City, walking through Bricktown and eating at some nice restaurants. We couldn’t have asked for better weather while we were down there…very unusual for the month of August. Now Sarah and I are back in Stillwater and school has started…back to the hustle and bustle!

I’m about to get married in an hour and a half. You can see streaming video on our wedding website here.

Mark Hurst echos my comments on storing your data in the cloud.

Some big and little things:

  • Getting married next week, trying to finish up a few things. We’re doing a lot of stuff ourselves. Right now I’m working on designing the program.
  • Finishing up my internship at ConocoPhillips. Friday is my last day, and I’ll be sad to leave. It’s been a great summer.
  • Looking up great deals. You may have noticed I like the site DealNews for good deals, but a friend pointed me to the FatWallet Hot Deals Forum. Lots of good deals, but if you’re buying more stuff than you normally would, but it’s such a great deal, are you saving money? Maybe, if you would pay full price for it down the road. And some deals are very hard to pass up.
  • Reading Sophie’s World. I’ve had this book for a while but never have gotten around to reading it. And it’s pretty good, expect a short review when I finish it.

Haha, DealNews

I found this amusing post on DealNews. It’s a great deal:

Oil fell to $118 a barrel yesterday. That’s $30 off its mid-July peak and the best deal we’ve seen on oil in three months. Features include light, sweet crude.

This doesn’t come around often, and it’s how I got my tablet, which I love. Dealnews link.

Cloud Computing

There’s an article from one of the authors of the site Lifehacker on how the editors, separated by vast physical distances, work with each other to keep Lifehacker going. Everything they use to collaborate is web-based. Three of the seven tools are from Google. In “cloud computing,” users no longer have their data tied to their local machine. The data is stored up in the “cloud” somewhere, and users can access those documents anywhere there is a network connection. And it’s getting better and better all the time. Aside from Outlook, I hardly use Office anymore because Google Docs takes care of all my word processing/spreadsheet needs (A neat feature that is especially useful in a Google Docs spreadsheet is the ability to pull down live/near-live stock data!).

But there’s a big problem with cloud computing: eventually it rains.

Don’t get me wrong, I love using the cloud. I use Google Docs all the time. Every aspect of my upcoming wedding is in spreadsheets on Google Docs. It’s especially useful when I go back and forth between multiple computers, or multiple operating systems even. Everything is always exactly the same, perpetually available to me.

But what if that company failed? Or decided that Gmail was no longer profitable? What happens to all that data? Like the Lifehacker editors mentioned above, if Google was somehow down or they were locked out of their accounts, or Google just decided to axe Google xyz…work would grind to a standstill. Even worse, do you have a recent backup of the cloud? What is your recourse for getting your data back?

There are all sorts of things that could happen. Companies get bought and sold all the time and you might never be certain who could “own” your data at some point in the future (This is one of my big hangups with Mint.com, which stores your banking username/passwords. They may guarantee the best security possible, never to maliciously use that data, but what if they get bought? That policy may go right out the window, or the new owner could not maintain security standards, etc…).

I’m not sure what I’d do without my del.icio.us bookmarks. I do have all my original photos uploaded to flickr. Twitter isn’t really that important. Facebook does have a lot of data, mainly photos and things. Pretty much all important email I’ve received in the past few years is on Gmail. Google Docs has all my important documents as well.

I’m not sure what the solution to this problem is. There are some improvements, such as Google Docs now has the ability to cache documents to your computer and work on them in offline mode. There are ways out there to back up your Gmail account. There almost needs to be some way to export this data in a format (XML?) that could be used in other programs or even better… other websites. Then we can easily move between providers, and the market has great competition.

So as much as I love using all these products and services, I try to take note of what I’d do without it.

Update: Ironically, I wrote this post last night and this morning I can’t access Google Docs.

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