I believe that I effect most of the lives of the people I know in a positive way. Tonight I effected someone's life in a negative way. I know the person in question dug himself in the hole. I just happened to be nearby and threw the dirt in the hole with him in it.

I was helping an agent when Joe P (a team lead) came and talked to Joe (the agent). He was in wrap for 12 min. Wrap is a state that you use to finish notes etc. You should have about 20 seconds of wrap per call, but only if you need it. Agent Joe gave Joe P some lip about it, saying he finishing something or another. After I finished helping the agent, I told Joe P that agent Joe was doing no such thing. In fact, I told Joe P that agent Joe has done this type of thing before, and I told him about a few other tricks agent Joe developed for avoiding taking calls. Joe P wanted me to tell Erica (Joe P's boss) about this. I did and she wanted an eye kept on him. So next time I'm down that row, he is pulling one of his other tricks. I tell Erica, who has Joe P monitor agent Joe. Sure enough, agent Joe is up to all his tricks and Joe P is writing down times and gathering facts for Erica. Erica comes over, grabs agent Joe's file and goes to talk to the people services (AKA HR) director. Meanwhile agent Joe is talking to people around him, and laughing it up. I knew it was coming as soon as I saw Erica with the file. Agent Joe was oblivious.

I didn't get to see the takedown, but later on I walked through the row and agent Joe wasn't there. I found Joe P later, and the look in his eyes and the nod he gave said it all. I just pictured agent Joe going back to his family and telling them he was fired. I don't he knew I had anything to do with it. I had previously mentioned to agent's Joe's last team lead that he was doing this. Joe P told me he had a note to file over it prior. Now agent Joe will be looking for a new job.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/MKuf/~3/yllYitDp36g/googles-movie-showtimes-digitally.html

Did you know you can immediately discover movie times and locations by typing a simple search on Google? For example, search for [where the wild things are] and you'll see times and places to watch the film, or try [glendale 18 los angeles] to see movies playing at your local theater. You can also click on the showtimes search result to get more complete movie listings and information.

Today, we're making a few improvements to movie results on Google, including more detailed movie pages, genre filters and a new map view.

Click "showtimes" in your search results for more detailed information.

When you visit google.com/movies, you'll discover a new, more comprehensive resource with all the information you need to decide what movie to see and where to see it:

• Comprehensive movie pages: Deciding what movie to see can take a few searches: What's it about? How are the reviews? Where is it playing near me? Our new detailed layout brings together all the basic information you need with a plot synopsis, trailer, reviews and photos in the same page.
• Genre filters: The new movie pages also give you new ways to explore films by genre and find one you're in the mood for. Sometimes, you might feel like seeing a sci-fi flick or a romance, but you're not sure what's out in theaters. With genre filters you can start browsing right away and quickly find the right movie for you.
• Map view: After you've chosen a movie, the new map view shows you nearby theaters playing that exact film. You no longer need to do a separate search to find out where you're going.

We hope these improvements will help you spend more time at the movies and less time researching. Visit google.com/movies or click through a "showtimes" result to try them out, and treat yourself to a movie!

Posted by Dan Stokeley, Associate Product Manager

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/MKuf/~3/mxECR1CUkiw/googlers-receive-prestigious-itojun.html

Googlers Lorenzo Colitti and Erik Kline have received the ITOJUN Service Award while attending the 76th Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Hiroshima, Japan.

The Itojun Service Award honors the memory of Dr. Jun-ichiro "itojun" Hagino, who passed away in 2007 at the age of 37. The friends of itojun and the Internet Society (ISOC) came together to establish this award last year. The award recognizes and commemorates the extraordinary dedication exercised by itojun over the course of IPv6 development.

Lorenzo and Erik have been the spark plugs and workhorses of Google's implementation of the IPv6 protocol that will help to carry the Internet beyond the anticipated exhaustion of the IPv4 address space in mid-2011. The two undertook, at their own initiative, to analyze the requirements and begin implementation of IPv6 throughout our networking infrastructure. Their leadership has placed us in the forward ranks of companies prepared for this important expansion. They are role models for others around the world, in the spirit of Itojun Hagino who was, himself, a model leader in this domain.

We're all proud to be associated with Lorenzo, Erik and the others at Google who recognized this challenge and took it head on.

Posted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/MKuf/~3/Sq5XifV06Y0/commemorating-veterans-day-at-google.html

Today is Veterans Day, the annual U.S. holiday honoring military veterans who have served our country in the armed forces. It is also celebrated as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day in other parts of the world, falling on November 11, the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I in 1918. We want to take a moment to highlight a few things we're doing at Google to reflect on the service of our veterans.

YouTube has become an important platform for current service members as well as veterans who want to share their stories. Starting today, you can visit www.youtube.com/veterans to hear from these brave men and women. In addition, on the homepage, YouTube is featuring content from some institutions and organizations that have provided much-needed support to veterans. You can read more about how YouTube is recognizing Veterans Day on the YouTube Blog.

We also launched a Google Voice partnership with Blue Star Families, a group of military spouses who work hard to educate civilian communities and leaders about the hardships faced by military families. We're giving priority Google Voice invites to U.S. members of Blue Star Families to help bring them closer to their loved ones during deployments.

Finally, we're commemorating Veterans Day in Google offices around the country with an event hosted by the Google Veterans Network, our employee group dedicated to veterans' issues. The highlight of the event is a fireside chat with Google veterans discussing the values associated with military service, issues they face at Google and in the world in general, their hopes to end conflicts, similar groups at other companies and the company's efforts to support our Googler service women and men.

We hope to make this Veterans Day a memorable one and we want to thank everyone in the armed forces for their service.

Posted by Carrie Laureno, Learning & Development Manager and Founder, Google VetNet

Deck Name: Red Rage

Color(s): Red Black

 

 

 

Creatures: (In order of Mana Drop)

 

4x Blood Seeker-B (2)

2x Child of Night-B (2)

2x Plated Geopede-R (2)

4x Rockslide Elemental-R (3)

4x Vampire Nighthawk-B (3)

2x Hellkite Charger-R (6)

 

Instants/Sorcery/Enchantments: (In order of Mana Drop)

 

2x Lightning Bold-R (1)

2x Vampire's Bite-B (1)

3x Doom Blade-B (2)

1x Shatter-R (2)

1x Punishing Fire-R (2)

2x Trumpet Blast-R (3)

3x Tendrils of Corruption-B (4)

3x Rage Reflection-R (6)

 

Lands/Special Lands:

 

12x Swamps

11x Mountains

1x Piranha Marsh

2x Teetering Peeks

 

Notes: Will trade out for 3 more Piranha Marsh and 2 more Teetering Peeks.

 

So far the deck runs fast and doesn't play like a black deck at all, but a red deck. Rage Reflection and Vampire's Bite beef up my small hitters. Originally I had four Vampire Aristocrats, but replaced them with two Hellkite Chargers and 2 Plated Geopedes. The Chargers come in handy on occasion but the Geopedes have come to my rescue more often.

 

The real saviors of this deck are the Rockslide Elementals in combination with Rage Reflection. That combo has come up again and again in play. The double-strike is invaluable to me.

 

I'm still play testing the deck. I don't think it's tournament worthy at all, but I like it. I want to beef it up a tad, but not sure I want to muck with the balance I have. I have a lot of trouble with mana drop issues and right now, this deck has played fast 10 out of 12 times. This weekend I am going to be playing against stronger decks and would like to come in ready for them. Any suggestions for a side board?(Most likely will play against an all black aggro deck, a green growth deck, and maybe a blue control.)

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If you could only listen to one CD for the rest of your life, what would you choose and why? Submitted By lexxyloser View 1499 Answers

Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder.

When the album was released, I was two. I learned how to talk, read lyrics, and sing from this album.

Songs is a double-album, and it goes through (as the title implies) nearly all the stages of life. As it happens, I bought this album on cassette at my first opportunity (to play on my Walkman, of course); I wore the tape out. I had to buy the dual cassettes again. Then, when CDs became a medium, Songs in the Key of Life was among the first I ever bought. I still retain that copy. It is a cornerstone of my repertoire.

The harmonies will live through me forever.

Tags: life story, music, writer's block

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/MKuf/~3/SP9xJGHBfTA/world-bank-public-data-now-in-search.html

When we first launched public data on Google.com, we wanted to make statistics easier to find and to encourage debate based on facts rather than intuition. The day after we launched, a friend who worked at the World Bank called me, her voice filled with enthusiasm, "Did you know that the World Bank also just released an API for their data?" Excited, I checked it out, and found an amazing treasure trove of statistics for most economies in the world. After some hard work and analysis, today we're happy to announce that 17 World Development Indicators (list below*) are now conveniently available to you in Google search.

With today's update, you can quickly access more data with a broad range of queries. Search should be intuitive, so we've done the work to think through queries where public data will be most relevant to you. To see the new data, try queries like [gdp of indonesia], [life expectancy brazil], [rwanda's population growth], [energy use of iceland], [co2 emissions of iceland] and [gdp growth rate argentina]. For example, if you search for [internet users in the united states], you will see the following chart at the top of the results page:


Clicking on the result will bring you to an interactive chart where you can compare the United States with other regions around the world. We've also added a new feature to enable you to embed these charts in your own website or blog by clicking on the "Link" button in the upper right-hand corner of the chart page. You have the option to either embed the chart with static data, or you can also set the chart to update dynamically when new data becomes available. To give you a sense of what these charts look like, we've embedded the chart below comparing Internet users in the United States and South Korea:



We hope this new data and our new embedding feature will help facilitate quick and easy access to public statistics. There are still many other data sets and sources out there, and we're excited about the possibilities for the future. If you're a data publisher interested in making your data more easily discoverable in Google, please contact us.

* Complete list of World Bank indicators currently available: CO2 emissions per capita, Electricity consumption per capita, Energy use per capita, Exports as percentage of GDP, Fertility rate, GDP deflator change, GDP growth rate, GNI per capita in PPP dollars, Gross Domestic Product, Gross National Income in PPP dollars, Imports as percentage of GDP, Internet users as percentage of population, Life expectancy, Military expenditure as percentage of GDP, Mortality rate, under 5, Population, and Population growth rate.

Update at 11:26am: We've updated this post to include a better example.

Posted by Chung Wu, Software Engineer

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/MKuf/~3/gVYqznS2JTU/locking-safesearch.html

When you're searching on Google, we think you should have the choice to keep adult content out of your search results. That's why we developed SafeSearch, a feature that lets you filter sexually explicit web sites and images from your search results. While no filter is 100% accurate, SafeSearch helps you avoid content you may prefer not to see or would rather your children did not stumble across. We think it works pretty well, but we're always looking for ways to improve the feature.

Today we're launching a feature that lets you lock your SafeSearch setting to the Strict level of filtering. When you lock SafeSearch, two things will change. First, you'll need to enter your password to change the setting. Second, the Google search results page will be visibly different to indicate that SafeSearch is locked:


Even from across the room, the colored balls give parents and teachers a clear visual cue that SafeSearch is still locked. And if you don't see them, it's quick and easy to verify and re-lock SafeSearch.

To use SafeSearch lock, go to the "Search Settings" page on Google. For detailed instructions, check out this video.



We hope you and your family find exactly what you’re looking for in Google search results — and nothing more.

Posted by Pete Lidwell, Product Manager and Aaron Arcos, Engineer

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I've been getting lots of crap from the commenters on BrianMadden.com accusing me of ignoring Sun's desktop virtualization offerings. And these people have a point. I have been ignoring Sun. I just don't "get" why anyone would use Sun's solution and I haven't had any hands on experience with Sun over the past few years. So let's change that today. In this article, I'll give a quick overview of where Sun is today, and I'll provide an opportunity for...

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Photograph shows a U.S. airman comforting an injured Iraqi child.

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/MKuf/~3/MtV96hoUvQY/twice-storage-for-quarter-of-price.html

(Cross-posted from the Google Photos Blog)

People today have more personal data online than ever before. More and more people are starting to move the bulk of their data off the desktop and into servers "in the cloud," where it's accessible from any computer or mobile device and easily shareable with friends and family. At the same time, digital photo technology is making it easier and cheaper than ever to take a lot of pictures, and client software like Picasa 3.5 makes it easier than ever to move photos from your camera to the cloud. That's why we've always given you lots of free storage in products like Picasa Web Albums and Gmail, and why for the past two years we've offered additional storage you can purchase if you need even more space.

While the cost of hard drive storage has continued to drop in these two years, we've also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce your costs even further. Today we're dramatically lowering our prices to make extra storage even more affordable. You can now buy 20 GB for only $5 a year — that's twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price, and enough space for more than 10,000 full resolution pictures taken with a five megapixel camera. Since most people have less than 10 GB of photos, chances are you can now save all your memories online for a year for the cost of a triple mocha. If you need more than 20 GB, plans range all the way up to 16 TB, which is enough room for 8 million full resolution photos! And Google paid storage offers an extra level of security, protection and accessibility that you can't get with an external drive — at a similar cost per gigabyte.

As always, extra storage acts as an overflow that you only start using when you reach the limit of your free storage, and people who have extra storage will be automatically upgraded. So if you need more space for thousands of photos of your toddler, or if you're running out of room in your overflowing inbox, visit www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage to see all the plans and to buy more storage.

Posted by Elvin Lee, Software Engineer

They apparently use snails to deliver email. I got an invite from sungazing to be their friend on Facebook. It was delivered today, Nov 10th, 2009. The invite date on the body of the email says the invite date was Sept 13, 2008. It took over a year to get to me. I think it should have been covered in virtual stamps and postmarks.

I cannot get the song Sheep go to Heaven by Cake out of me head. It popped in there during a meeting we had today at work our Marc, our General Manager. Agents will be seated on the call floor based on their issue resolve score. So we're back to segregation! I just watched the video, and it's about a social outsider who goes crazy and kills a bunch of people. Hmm, I could see something like that actually happening at work.

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What do you guys think about Faerie Macabre?



Had a pretty cool play involving this character the other night.
I target Opponent's Yosei in graveyard with Withered Wretch to remove it, tapping my last mana. Opponent responds by playing Betrayal of Flesh on Yosei, to reanimate it.
I pitched Faerie Mack to remove the Yosei (and another card) in response.

... You know, it doesn't sound that cool reading it, I'm sure; but it's one of those "you-had-to-be-there" kind of things. Everyone else playing went "OH!" when I dropped the Mack on Yosei. Just the surprise factor, I guess.

Faerie Macabre is probably only sideboard-worthy material for most constructed formats. In our EDH meta, it's been long considered one of those "kind of cool cards you'd like to run, but just don't know what you'd cut for it" kind of cards. Until recently.

A Wydwen deck emerged, and it runs Faerie Mack, and I've started using it as well...

What do you guys think of the card?

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