Nelson's Weblog

This year, for the first time in a while, I’ve been celebrating each night of Hanukkah. No presents — just lighting the candles. My sister gave me a nice stone menorah from Israel earlier in the year, which I’ve been itching to put to good use. I decided to search for [Hanukkah] to see if there was any relevant news. And then, I noticed dreidels along the right hand side, next to the ads. Super cool, so I decided to tweet about it.

Then, I refreshed my Google search results and whoa!! There was my tweet. I don’t know which was more exciting, seeing the dreidels or seeing my tweet in the search results for [Hanukkah]:

This is awesome! Happy Hanukkah, everyone.
(There are also Christmas lights, too, if you search for [Christmas])

Inspired by Mike, I just added my current Google Latitude location to my site: http://www.nelsonbradley.com/location/

There’s also a small version on my about page if you’re interested. I’m not sure if I’ll keep it around forever, but it was really easy to add using the embed code from here. I used to be paranoid about people knowing exactly where I was using Latitude, and I still am to some degree. But, I think it’s too cool not to have. Plus, there’s no reason to stalk me when it is just as easy to stalk Mike Leotta!

Last Friday was my 25th birthday. Yay. Three days earlier though, Gmail introduced a new labs feature that two of my friends quickly put to good use:

On the subject of Gmail labs, if you’re not using them yet, you should click the * in Gmail, wade through, and add a bunch — they can make a huge difference in your email productivity and enjoyment. I use 23 of them right now. My current favorite is Search Autocomplete, which will finish a lot of the searches you make within Gmail. If you’re like me and your memory is only as good as your ability to search your inbox, it’s really useful. It comes in especially handy while searching your email for those sent from a friend whose username you always blank on or when you don’t know the exact search operator to use. Autocomplete is also great when you’re just too lazy to type everything out!

*note: if you don’t have labs enabled, you might have to go enable them in settings first before you’ll see the green flask ()