I must remember..

mVertexBuffer.setPosition(0);

Weather? Yes, we have weather.

Denver weather is weird. Yesterday morning's icy Northerly wind, bearing aloft the scent of Elk poo, foretold of a frigid day with possible snow or at least freezing rain, but by late morning the temperature was in the 70s with clear blue skies. Of course, by 4pm the clear blue skies had given themselves over to a full blanket of cloud, but no precipitation was to be experienced.

Google broke search

I have to say I'm not a big fan of the new search-as-you-type feature, particularly when I get the following after typing in my query and hitting enter, as my fingers are hard-coded to do.

Alexei's World

Things found on Alexei's walk tonight:

1. Two blue rectangles of some spongy material.
2. A medium-sized, but self-contained cactus, possibly a prickly pear.
3. Two dead rabbit's feet. Presumably, the luckless rabbit is also dead.
4. ..and the grand prize, a rather nice golf club and ball, located about 60 yards from each other. Owner presumed frustrated with the game, or possibly just at trying to putt on a piece of land where the average grass height is "calf-high" and the average grass type is "coarse and prickly".

All but the golf equipment was left in situ; I played a few holes before retiring to the 19th for a few cocktails.

Powerless in userland (revisited)

Much <3 to Brett for getting this issue resolved and the account re-enabled. In deference to Brett I cannot divulge too much about the cause of the disablement; suffice to say I sent an email from the account, next thing I knew it was disabled.

Powerless in userland

While I would never say I had the power to fix a lot of stuff at Google, I always felt like we behaved ethically towards our users - Don't Be Evil wasn't just a motto, it infused everything I and my colleagues did:

"Let's put this in here, that way the user can.."
-"No, that's evil, well, slightly evil. How about instead we.."

..and I never gave much thought to what went on outside my sphere of influence, since I considered that whatever it was, it was being looked after by competent, capable, ethical folk who also wanted nothing more than the best experience for their users.

Until tonight.

I have had an internet domain registered in my name for the past nine or ten years. After moving to Denver, and having no 'net-facing servers any longer, I decided to put my domain in the (so I thought) capable hands of Google Apps For Your Domain (GAFYD) - a service provided for free by Google that allows a domain administrator to manage users with their own email, web sites, calendars etc.

Apparently, however, not content with the ad revenue generated by such domains, Google decides that it wants a piece of the management pie too.

One of my accounts was disabled tonight for the laughably inaccurate and misleading complaint of "abuse". I, as domain owner/ administrator, have exactly zero power to address this situation in any way - the relevant link from the administration page directs me to an external to Google support forum, of all things, which hardly seems like a professional, caring way to support your users - presumably the other forum members have little power to address such problems themselves. Indeed, the suggested fixes have failed to provide any sort of solution.

So I am now at the mercy of whoever it is at Google that watches the support forums, or who monitors the abuse@ and support@ addresses for my domain; hopefully, that person can restore the account, but I don't hold much hope at all. After all, there must be thousands if not tens of thousands or more such instances daily.

Presumably, the process by which my account was disabled was automated in large part, which means the algorithms being used are, well, suspect, but more importantly, the folk in charge of providing their users with the best possible experience have failed - forcing a reliance on external support forums to even register a complaint?

That's just evil.

Notes From A Sunburned Hotel Room

Since embarking on my new career as a hotel-room-based contractor, I've noticed a few things despite it only being a couple of weeks:

1. I didn't notice how institutionalized I became at Google - the casual expectation of a comfortable life was too easy to get used to.
2. Google does a lot of stuff really well, and some other things, not so much.
3. "Don't be evil": evil has many grades.
4. I miss working with my friends :(
5. Seriously, the best thing about Google was the people, particularly the ones I worked with.
6. There's a whole world of stuff out there.
7. There's a lot of cool things being done in the real world.
8. A lot of folks are using Google stuff; I recently converted my domain over to GAFYD, and it's pretty neat.
9. Working from a hotel room is not as confining as I once thought.
10. But I still miss my friends.

I'm sure I'll have more to say on these (and other topics) as time goes by. For now, though, it's enough for me to know that the end of my Google career was possibly one of the best things to happen to me.