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Reposting this writeup from Peiran Guo on the google groups list.

2 min read

Reposting this writeup from Peiran Guo on the google groups list.  It is so true.  I deployed 40 resonators on 1950 Charleston a couple of days ago.  Could've kept going if it wasn't for a meeting.

Bonus: you can piss off TheCurmudgeon.  I hope for the sake of his career that he's hitting his OKRs since it seems like he's playing all the time and all over campus.

I wonder if there's any players in this area who are looking to level up. The resistance at Googleplex is oncall 9-5 on workdays and they respond with an SLA of less than 5 minutes to several of the portals on campus.

If you have a few hours to kill and want some easy AP, then bring about 200-500 resonators of any level, blow up one portal, stand back  about 20-30 meters and tap the deploy button as fast as you can. I've seen people come running out of the buildings to clear your resonators for you like it's some sort of emergency or something. You'll get as much AP as you have resonators. If you find you can't keep up, you may need to slap a bunch of shields on the portal. You might want to find a bench in the shade in case you get tired. You might want to double check that your gps isn't floating too much before you begin. Maybe bring a sandwich or a drink if you think you might get peckish and don't forget to use the restroom before you start.

 

A little late to the party, but this is one incredible album.

1 min read

A little late to the party, but this is one incredible album.

Recorded at the First Avenue and 7th St Entry you'll get plenty of Dick Valentine banter between a solid set of Electric Six classics including this quote:

"Put the two together and you have a kangaroo going down a water slide." 

And what's more you have long-time First Ave stage manager Conrad Sverkerson on the cover.  Read more about it here.

http://blogs.citypages.com/gimmenoise/2012/10/electric_six_release_live_album_recorded_at_first_ave_...

 

It's e-waste day here at Google.

1 min read

It's e-waste day here at Google. Time to ditch all my 16MB video cards, 10base2 Ethernet cards, UltraSCSI HBAs (fast 'n wide) and some old tape backup gear.

I might keep the Pentium 2 just for the bed of nails heat sink. Raj Iyengar snagged the Myspace branded Flip video camera with the dead battery.

 
 

Mike's already picked up on the +1s bleeding through.

3 min read

Mike's already picked up on the +1s bleeding through.

We have an open bug on choosing a URL from the body text.  Another possible solution -- allow posts with links to use full-bleed photos.

Originally shared by Mike Elgan

How Google+ could improve viral G+ marketing for free.

Unlike Facebook, Google+ is a great blogging platform.

Let's say you want to blog about another post somewhere. If you paste in the link, or click on the link icon, Google+ will add a thumbnail from the external post, plus a blurb. 

But this is ugly. Some of the highest-traffic bloggers on Google+ don't use that system, including me. What we do instead is add a big, appealing photograph, the paste in the link in the body of the post. 

The first method links plus-ones on the other post. In other words, when someone plus-ones a post on Google+, the original source plus-one count goes up by one. It's linked forever. If the same user comes back and un-does his plus-one, the count on the source site goes down by one. 

However, if you do the big-picture method, plus-ones on Google+ are not reflected on the external post -- the plus-ones are not linked. 

Here's an example of the problem: Yesterday I posted an item on Cult of Mac using the big-picture method. The post and its comments got well over 2,000 plus-ones. But over on the Cult of Mac site, the post got only 76 plus-ones. 

https://plus.google.com/+MikeElgan/posts/B9VLptUGikF

People always mentally compare the Facebook "Like" count with the Google+ "plus-one" count and Google+ often looks like a slacker. But the reason is that likes for the the big-picture posts on Google+ aren't counted. 

If Google+ had counted the "plus-ones" for my post, for example, the G+ count would have been much higher than the Facebook count, and people viewing the source page would have a more accurate comparison between Facebook and Google+. 

Here's my proposed solution. 

When a user pastes in a URL in Google+, and the system auto-generates the thumbnail-and-blurb thing and links the plus-ones of the two posts, the user should have the option of replacing the thumbnail-and-blurb without de-coupling the linked plus-ones. 

That way, bloggers like me could use big-picture blog posts and still have plus-ones reflected on the source page. 

Is this possible or desirable?