Kevin’s Blog

Well, it’s my birthday today. I’m turning 21.

My plan? Go to as many “free thing on your birthday” places as possible.

Google recently launched a theme option for the google.com/ig personalized homepage.

I like it.

The theme I chose changes based on time of day. As you can see, it’s approximately lunch time.

I participated in a search engine usability study today.

Google Code Search was supposed to be the crappiest among the given search engines - the Raphael said he would probably need to assist me during the tasks since they were known to trip up previous participants.

During the trial I discovered the trick to making Google Code Search work. Type in “test” after your query. This brings up test suites related to your result, which means you can figure out how to use the resulting APIs by example.

“You are by far the fastest Googler I have ever seen.”

My prize? $30 Amazon gift certificate. Yummy.

There’s a new startup called Jott.

Basically, you call a number, they transcribe what you say and then send it to you in an email. Unfortunately, the messages you leave are transcribed by humans! (privacy, scale issues)

Here’s what Jott’s CEO has to say about it:

jotts are completely anonymized to transcribers. They do not know your account name or other information.

Thanks,
John
CEO, Jott.com

Perhaps they should just reroute calls through Vista’s voice recognition. It’s probably the first widely available voice recognition implementation that’s up to the task.