Dan Hauk's blog and online portfolio

Have you seen the new iPods? Personally, I think they’re sexy as hell, and cheaper always helps too. The “new” design is kind of a throwback to previous generations of the Nano. I like the long, thin design rather than the square shape. But with the new design it’s not a flat, stale rectangle. Rounded sides are supposed to make it more comfortable and ergonomic.

Looking at Apple’s site (don’t forget to check out the demo video while you’re there), it seems they’ve added a bunch of features to the new Nanos. They’re incorporating a lot of stuff from the iPod Touch and iPhone. You can turn it on its side and the screen turns to widescreen display, the new Genius feature as seen in iTunes 8.0, physically shake the iPod to shuffle to a new song, and even games you can buy/download from the iTunes store.

Being an aesthetic person, I really like the rounded edges, and the fact that they changed the wheel to dark gray on the silver casings. And with a price at $150 for 4GB capacity, I may have to get on that.

“Don’t Be Evil” — The motto of Google, the multi-billion dollar company that turned 10 years old this week. *Sniff* They’ve grown up so much.

I was listening to NPR the other day on my way home from work. I think I’m getting old. The only people I know who listen to NPR and other talk radio are my dad, future father-in-law, and future grandfather-in-law. Oh well, just the price I pay I suppose. Anyway, one of the stories on there was about Google and how they turn 10 this week.

Apparently it’s really hard to find out which exact date they began operations from their garage in California. Some say September 4 while others say September 7. The reporter said he couldn’t find the information, even by Googling, so he did the old fashioned thing and used a telephone. Archaic, I know. Being the humble folks they are, they told him they claim the entire month of September.

He included interviews with people in his report. In these interviews people were talking about how they don’t remember too much about “life before Google,” name-dropping less popular, out of date, search engines like Lycos and AOL. They are still around though.

Google went public back in August of 2004, which subsequently made co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin multi-billionaires. From that little garage, they have built an empire with web apps for email, maps, and everything else you could imagine, a huge campus in Mountain View, California, and giant computing centers as big as football fields. The campus is so big that workers are issued electric scooters to get around.

They have also worked hard to reduce their carbon footprint, which is wonderful for the environment. Big chunks of the roof on their campus buildings have solar panels, installed in 2007, help power everything. These solar panels also charge the hybrid electric company cars.

So here’s to you, Google. Congratulations on all your accomplishments, including getting into Webster’s dictionary. Happy Birthday, my friends.

In case you didn’t notice the top bar, there’s some text there that might not be familiar. It’s called Twitter, and it’s a cool little tool. Basically like a nano-blog to keep people updated in a sentence or two. Much faster than a full blog, and you can update from your cell phone if you want. For a little while I didn’t use it much but lately I’ve been using it more, though not constantly. It will stay up there as a way to keep you up to date one what I’m up to at the moment.

You can go make one over at Twitter.com if you’d like, but be warned, it can become addicting.