Storage R Us

If you haven't played with it yet: Google Maps really is one of the better interfaces out there. Smooth zoom, and clear detailed road layout with a preload, clean recentering, and smooth dragging makes this all pretty nice. Of course it is rather US centric, and if you zoom on the default map you'll find that the coffeyville country club in kansas is the center of the world! The relevance of results from their local search is a little funny if you don't have an exact business name .. for example a search for "thread stores" in Soho gave us things like "The MoMA design store", "the Apple store" (presumably matching on store), and KidRobot .. none of which carry any sort of thread. A search on just "thread" seems to yield much better results.

Overall with google, I guess Sergey Brin and his team seem to be setting a number of standards. I do remember his geeky face from many late nights in the old WAM labs - hacking on the old NeXT black boxes. I do appreciate their initial work they did back at Stanford on deterministic relevance. It's a pity that they haven't developed a better business model, and seem to have forgotten most of their academic roots. It's nice that the ads are a little less intrusive looking, but just like Red Hat, motives often become questionable when you cross over into that corporate realm. Good to see his dad still teaching math at UMD though. I guess the contributions back into academia are probably key for real innovation and growth .. funny how much you can lose focus when you put on the million dollar corporation hat (and yes i know it's ironic writing this on a sun blog .. i guess i'm just jealous i don't have the $4B and my stock [of which i have admirably fewer shares] are at 1/45th their value with worthless options i can buy at 10x our current price)