I saw this in a recent BYU Police Beat:

April 8: The father of a student called BYU police when he had not heard from his daughter for four days. BYU police called the student and told her to call her father.

Four days! What will happen to this father guy if the girl ever leaves on a mission for 18 months?

A while ago, I found myself needing to upload many document files into Google Docs. I saw that Google had a new API for doing such, so I decided to write a quick little app for the Mac to do just that. Just drag and drop documents onto the icon, and away their uploaded.

I had never written any sort of real Mac application, so I just kind of glued something together out of Python, applescript, and a couple of helper apps. I threw the source up at Google Project Hosting, which has been good, because otherwise I would have been supporting the thousands of downloads.

Recently, my little droplet app became more famous. It was featured on lifehacker.com as a featured Mac Download. My favorite line from their post was, “Gdocsuploader is still new and a bit unpolished.” I think it should be considered more than just a bit unpolished. They should have said, “this thing might work, and is about as unpolished as lava rock.”

There have been a multitude of other posts about my little project:

• Web Worker Daily claims it could save you a bit of friction.
• VinodLive says it shines with some cool drag and drop options
• i use this shows 2 people are using it. I wonder how many people use i use this.
• samjones jaiku’ed it saying it saves time. Erik also jaiku’ed it when he added it to his del.icio.us bookmarks.
• Geekout.tv actually mentioned me by name! Thanks to them for the nice personal reference
• It hass even gone international at macworld.idg.se. I don’t know what they’ve said, but I hope it is nice.

Thanks to everyone who wrote something nice about it.

The Boston Globe is reporting that Hillary Clinton is in Pennsylvania campaigning before tomorrow’s primary election:

Hillary Clinton came to her ancestral home of Scranton this morning armed not with a stump speech, but with a simple declaration: I understand you, because I’m one of you.

Who is Hillary and where is she actually from? This whole “I’m one of you” lines, it seems to me as if she used it in New York, in Arkansas, and probably other places as well.

It seems to me that the only place Hillary can claim to understand the people, would be a room full of politicians. She is a full blown politician, and to say that she can associate with any group of real people would be a mistake.

Wondrous words never knew where
They floated along, without any care
Blind and mute, they were so naive,
Now the emotions, together they weave.

If I were to write a poem with one word,
some people would think the author absurd.
The word with friends might make a sentence,
Yet alone is the word, it doesn’t make sense.

So the wondrous words somehow found friends;
Even punctuation, they found at the ends.
They made apple pie and shared a good slice,
Because friends are found, when words are nice.

Dear Google Adsense,

I find myself logging into the AdSense site frequently, just to see how much money I’ve made by publishing your advertisements. It would be very convenient if you would place much of the Overview information into a Google Gadget that I can have on my iGoogle page.

Dear Google,

I think I have some good idea for you. So I’ve set up a new column on this blog so that I may suggest a few to you.

The first is that you should take a few weeks off. I’m sure that you don’t believe that Microsoft buying Yahoo! is a good thing for anyone. Unfortunately, the main drive behind Microsoft’s bid is competition from you, Google. Microsoft’s bid is also lower than Yahoo! would like, presumably because Yahoo! is struggling with a smaller market share, especially when compared to you, Google.

My suggestion is for Google to take a couple of weeks off. This would make Yahoo!’s stock soar out of the reaches of Microsoft, putting an end to the bid that would do no one any good. Now I’m sure that you probably don’t want to take a couple of weeks off, but you might be able to find other solutions, to help the situation, like placing Yahoo! advertising on your search results rather than your own. Whatever you can do to help Yahoo! look strong over the next month or so, might just be enough to discourage any takeover bid by the evil empire, Microsoft.

So until I write another Dear Google letter, I wish you the best of days.

A Cnet News blog claims that Yahoo! might be bought out by Microsoft this week. If this happens, I am prepared to cancel all of the Yahoo! services that I currently use. I have little or no faith that Microsoft’s management of Yahoo! services will be satisfactory, so upon any sort of merger announcement, I will start looking for replacement services that I believe will better serve my interests.

As a developer, I currently trust the openness of Yahoo! developer APIs, but I would have serious concerns if I could depend on a Microsoft Yahoo for continued support of these APIs.

Some reports say that the Microsoft bid is simply to buy Yahoo!’s user-base. I refuse to be bought like that, and will remove myself from the user-base when it comes time.

I have a friend who is trying to sell her 2004 eMachines computer. Please comment on how much you think this would actually be worth. After a few answers, or in a day or two, I’ll post how much she actually wants for it. Here are the brief specs that she’s posted:

-2.70 GHz Intel Celeron processor
-40GB hard drive
-Read/Write CD drive
-512 MB of Memory
-internet ready (LAN and Modem)
-Intel Extreme Graphics 3d video card
-Windows XP installed (I have the OS disc, and can reinstall a clean copy for you)
-Microsoft Office Student edition (I can leave it on the computer, but I can’t give you the install CD)

So how much is this worth, with accompanying keyboard and mouse? She also is selling her matching 15″ monitor, so she says.

I spent a little time tonight getting the audio and text from the last General Conference linked into ScriptureCast.net. This service allows people to podcast the scripture or general conference at a custom rate. You can read more about the update on the ScriptureCast.net blog.

Google should provide an option to allow projects hosted at Google Code to display and profit from Google Ads. Project owners who would opt into the ads would benefit from the revenue they collect. Google would benefit as well by collecting their share of the advertising revenue. Users might benefit because they can perhaps find other advertised services similar to the project they might be currently looking at.

Recently I’ve decide to open source some more code and templates that I’ve written. I could either share that code from my own website, or I could share it on Google Code, being able to make use of some of the other features they have there. The biggest advantage to providing the code from my website is that I’m able to collect on any advertising revenue, which in the past has been around a dollar or two per thousand views. If Google could provide me a way to generate similar revenue by hosting my code on their site, not only would I consider hosting my code their, but I would find more incentive to write open source code projects.

The only major problem with this might be abuse. If I wanted to make a few extra bucks, what is stopping me from “forking” someone elses project just to host their code under a slightly different name on Google code and profit from the visitors I would have stolen from the more legitimate site.