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Friday, October 31, 2008

Bibi Gaytan










Fotos:
Revistas Teleguia, TVyNovelas y Calendario Energizer

Paul Booth em noite de Halloween

Em noite de Halloween, nada melhor do que apreciar os trabalhos de Paul Booth, o mestre da arte negra.

Seus trabalhos obscuros são reconhecidos em todo o planeta, 100 entre 100 tatuadores reconhecem os trabalhos do mestre das tatuagens Black and Gray.

Após algumas tatuagens, ilustrações e pinturas de Paul Booth, você confere uma das poucas entrevistas (em inglês) com o artista. Você conhecerá um pouco do estúdio Last Rites, alguns trabalhos e comentários sobre Tim Kern, Ethan Morgan, Jeremiah Barba, Dan Marshal e Liorcifer, profissionais do estúdio Last Rites.

Arte de Paul Booth Arte de Paul Booth Arte de Paul Booth Arte de Paul Booth Arte de Paul Booth Arte de Paul Booth Arte de Paul Booth Arte de Paul Booth Arte de Paul Booth Arte de Paul Booth Arte de Paul Booth Arte de Paul Booth Arte de Paul Booth Arte de Paul Booth Arte de Paul Booth Arte de Paul Booth Arte de Paul Booth

What are you going to be for Halloween?

In 2006 it was a pirate. Halloween party-goers donned eye patches, tricornes, and the Jolly Roger, inspired by favorite seafarer Captain Jack Sparrow. And last year the search was on for a lot of blond wigs and microphones à la teen pop idol Hannah Montana.

Halloween being one of our favorite holidays, we couldn't wait to see what the hot getups of 2008 would be. Using Insight for Search we tracked the fastest rising searches related to Halloween costumes for this year's ghoulish festivities.

Here are some of the "costume"-related queries (in the U.S.) that have seen the most growth for 2008 — don't be surprised when you run into some of these outfits roaming the streets on All Hallows' Eve.


If you're like me, you found your inspiration in the past 24 hours. However, it looks like others are more serious — according to this Google Trends graph, searches for costumes have been increasing since July.


Around Google, we've been planning our outfits for months as well. Not even rain could stop us from showing off our fiendish finery at this year's Googleween in Mountain View. And have a scary-happy Googleween yourself!



Feed me! Google Alerts not just for email anymore

This week, our Trondheim-based Google Alerts team launched support for feeds, a highly requested feature you can use to receive alerts via the feed reader of your choice. (Of course, we think the best places to view your updates are iGoogle and Google Reader.) Until now, alerts have been delivered via email only, but those days are over. Now your News, Web, Blog, Video, and Groups alerts are more easily accessible than ever.

Once you sign in to Google Alerts and create an alert, you can opt for feed delivery by clicking 'Edit' next to your alert on the 'Manage Your Alerts' page and changing your 'Deliver to' selection from 'Email' to 'Feed' (click on the image to see larger).



Two other notable improvements to Google Alerts are that we've made them faster (especially News alerts) and are now including — where possible — images in News alerts. It's a busy time in Trondheim these days, so stay tuned for more changes to Google Alerts in the coming months.

Have feedback or a feature request? Send your thoughts our way.

More of Jessica's Ink: Halloween Post


I have featured a lot of Jessica's work before. The previous post here will link you back to earlier posts.

This seemed an appropriate piece for Halloween. It is on the other side of the leg that features Beetlejuice holding a pumpkin. You can see the pumpkin in the photo.

The image is of a child in a ghost costume holding a rock and a paper sack. It's based on a scene from "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown". A bunch of kids are comparing their goodies and Charlie reaches into his bag and sadly proclaims "I got a rock."


Happy Halloween everyone! And thanks to Jessica for sharing her ink!!

Here's a little "I got a rock" bonus:

The Parent Trap II

Gosh, I didn't realize that so many more questions regarding dealing with divorced parents would come in... so this might go on for a few more days. We've been flooded with questions, and we'd love to help, so keep them coming!



Today we'll talk about receiving lines.



Problem:: "Both of my fiance's parents and my parents have divorced and then have remarried - there are just so many people to keep track up it will make you dizzy! Help me with who stands in the receiving line to greet guests?"



Solution:: Well, first, you don't have to do a receiving line, it does take up a bit of time, and as long as you calculate that into your timeline, and know that this will take away from photography time with your new husband and families, then you'll be good to go. But if everyone wants to participate, here's a sample lineup:



  • Bride's Mother

  • Bride's Stepfather

  • Groom's Stepfather

  • Groom's Mother

  • Bride

  • Groom

  • Bride's

  • Bride's Stepmother

  • Bride's Father

  • Groom's Father

  • Groom's Stepmother

Phew! Is that too long for you? It's okay to simply include your biological parents, or to forgot the tradition all together. Many couples perfer to visit each guest at their table and make some schedule mingle time after they are done eating to make the rounds and welcome their friends and families. Its' a much more intimate and informal way to thank all of your friends and family for attending.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Ana Ivanovic

La tenista serbia Ana Ivanovic de 20 años de edad, fue elegida como la deportista con el mejor cuerpo del mundo, según un sondeo efectuado por el diario alemán Bild, que incluía hombres y mujeres. Ana logró el 51% de los votos. Es una de las mejores tenistas pero la belleza algunas veces es más resaltante que el talento, aqui unas fotos para la revista FHM.





A picture of a thousand words?

(Note: Click on the first result in each of the search results pages linked to throughout the post to see this feature in action.)

A scanner is a wonderful tool. Every day, people all over the world post scanned documents online -- everything from official government reports to obscure academic papers. These files usually contain images of text, rather than the text themselves.But all of these documents have one thing in common: someone somewhere thought they were they were valuable enough to share with the world.

In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn't be sure of their content. We had occasional clues from references to the document-- so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes. We are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that we find stored in Adobe's PDF format. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words -- words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found. This is a small but important step forward in our mission of making all the world's information accessible and useful.

While we've indexed documents saved as PDFs for some time now, scanned documents are a lot more difficult for a computer to read. Scanning is the reverse of printing. Printing turns digital words into text on paper, while scanning makes a digital picture of the physical paper (and text) so you can store and view it on a computer. The scanned picture of the text is not quite the same as the original digital words, however -- it is a picture of the printed words. Often you can see telltale signs: the ring of a coffee cup, ink smudges, or even fold creases in the pages.

To people reading these documents, the distinction between words and pictures of words makes little difference, but for a computer the picture is almost unintelligible. Consider a circle. Should it be read it as a zero, the letter 'O', just a circle, or the ring from my coffee cup? People learn to answer this kind of question very quickly, but for the computer it is a painstaking and error-prone process.

To see our new system at work, click on these search queries. Note the document excerpt in the search results, along with the full text presented after the 'View as HTML' link:

[repairing aluminum wiring]
[spin lock performance]
[Mumps and Severe Neutropenia]
[Steady success in a volatile world]

What we learned from 1 million businesses in the cloud

The reliability of cloud computing has been a hot topic recently, partly because glitches in the cloud don't happen behind closed doors as with traditional on-premises solutions for businesses. Instead, when a small number of cloud computing users have problems, it makes headlines. As with most things at Google, we are fanatical about measuring the availability of Gmail, and we thought it best to simply share our reliability metrics, which we measure as average uptime per user based on server-side error rates. We think this reliability metric lets you do a true side-by-side comparison with other solutions.

We measure every server request for every user, every moment of every day. Any millisecond delay is logged. Over the last year, Gmail has been available more than 99.9 percent of the time — for everyone, both consumers and business users. The vast majority of people using Gmail have seen few issues, experienced no downtime, and have continued to have a great Gmail experience, with exception of an outage in August 2008. If you average all these data together, including the August outage, across the entire Gmail service, there has been an aggregate 10-15 minutes of downtime per month over the last year of providing the service. That 10-15 minutes per month average represents small delays of a couple of seconds here and there. A very small number of people have unfortunately been subject to some disruption of service that affected them for a few minutes or a few hours. For those users, we are very sorry. And for Google Apps Premier Edition customers, we have extended service level agreement credits to them.

So how does greater than 99.9 percent reliability compare to more conventional approaches for business email? We asked some experts. Naturally, the normal caveats apply for on-premises solutions, since each individual business environment will vary, depending on server reliability, staff response time, and actual maintenance schedules for each application.

According to the research firm Radicati Group, companies with on-premises email solutions averaged from 30 to 60 minutes of unscheduled downtime and an additional 36 to 90 minutes of planned downtime per month.1

Looking just at the unplanned outages that catch IT staffs by surprise, these results suggest Gmail is twice as reliable as a Novell GroupWise solution, and four times more reliable than a Microsoft Exchange-based solution that companies must maintain themselves. And higher reliability translates to higher employee productivity. Gmail's reliability jumps to more than four times as reliable as a GroupWise solution and 10 times more reliable than an Exchange-based solution if you factor in the planned outages inherent in on-premises messaging platforms. But this isn't the only way Google Apps helps businesses do more with their resources. Compared to the costs of Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus or Novell GroupWise — including software licensing, server expenses and the labor associated with deploying, maintaining and upgrading them on a regular basis — Google Apps leaves companies with much more time and money to focus on their real business.

We are now extending what we've learned from Gmail to the other applications in Google Apps.

Today, we're announcing that we will extend the 99.9 percent service level agreement we offer Premier Edition customers on Gmail to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. We have been delivering high levels of reliability across all these products, so it makes sense to extend our guarantees to them.

More than 1 million businesses have selected Google Apps to run their business, and tens of millions of people use Gmail every day. With this type of adoption, a disruption of any size — even a minor one affecting fewer than 0.003% of Google Apps Premier Edition users, like the one a few weeks ago — attracts a disproportional amount of attention. We've made a series of commitments to improve our communications with customers during any outages, and we have an unwavering commitment to make all issues visible and transparent through our open user groups.

Google is one of the 1 million businesses that run on Google Apps, and any service interruption affects our users and our business; our engineers are also some of our most demanding customers. We understand the importance of delivering on the cloud's promise of greater security, reliability and capability at lower cost. We are hugely thankful to our customers who drive us to become better every day.

1. The Radicati Group, 2008. "Corporate IT Survey – Messaging & Collaboration, 2008-2009"

The latest on Google Apps for Education

It was exactly two years ago at the EDUCAUSE conference that we first announced our free Google Apps offering for educational institutions. We've kept pretty busy in that time, working closely with thousands of schools to reach 2.5 million students, staff, and faculty actively using Google Apps on campuses across the globe. As part of this mission, we also recently drove our eco-friendly bus (think bio-fuel and solar panels) to universities across the country to hear directly from people using Google Apps. Here's what some of them had to say:



One thing hasn't changed in the last two years: Google Apps still offers academic institutions, from neighborhood schools to international universities, free integrated solutions for email, calendaring, and online document and site sharing. We're glad to be back at EDUCAUSE this week in Orlando to reminisce about how far technology in education has come since 2006, and to look forward toward even more possibilities for innovation.

If you're involved in education, check out Google Apps to see if it can help make your school a more effective learning community. And if you're a student, visit the newly launched Google for Students Blog to find Google-related information relevant to you.

Charlie Honors The Birth of His Youngest Son


A cold and dreary day drove me underground on Tuesday, as I spent some of my lunch hour inkspotting, and meeting some new tattoos.

Since it was Tat-Tuesday, it only seemed fitting that I met a father and son, Amtrakking from Florida up to Boston, who had four tattoos apiece.

I met Charlie first, who had a tiger on his forearm. However, he offered up this piece on his right bicep instead:


As a parent with child-inspired ink, I certainly appreciated this tattoo which honors the birth of his youngest son, Derry.

He wanted to do a tribute, but didn't want to do a portrait, which is a popular method for doing so. Instead, he went for the footprints, name and birth date.

Whereas a portrait is a snapshot in time, footprints and/or hand prints are a record of your child's beginning, and a literal imprint of part of their flesh on one's own. There's something remarkable about the historical record contained therein, like the door jamb in the family home that displays the height-marks of the child, growing over the years.

This piece was inked by "Old School" at AK's N Chevrolets in Hollywood, Florida.


I can't find an active link for the shop, and it appears as it was renamed Almost Famous 2 Tattoos (not to be confused with Almost Famous Tattoos in Miami).

Check back in the coming days to see the tattoo offered up by Charlie's older son Jason, that ties in to this piece as well.

Thanks to Charlie for sharing his little piece of family history here on Tattoosday!

The Parent Trap

Recently we've received many questions in regards to dealing with divorced parents, as if wedding planning and etiquette weren't tricky enough, right!





I know that you have some dilemmas, and I want to help you with your questions. Over the next few days I'll take your heated problems that seem to be causing you quite the drama, and give you some clever solutions to the sticky issues that you are facing.





Let's figure out how to handle things before the wedding, and discuss your decisions with your parents. We know every family's dynamics are different, so feel free to improvise and let us be your sounding board, comment away with suggestions as well!


Dancing Do's and Don'ts


Problem:: "My fiance wants to have a mother/son dance. Am I expected to have a father/daughter dance? Can I dance with my mom instead, since I am not on the best terms with my father since his divorce?"



Solution:: You're under no obligation to do a traditional father/daughter dance. Instead, you may want to consider including both your parents, or having a dance with all of the members of both families to take the edge off. You could have separate dances and songs for each of them in you wanted. Or (my favorite option) choose one tune for a "parent(s) dance" and start out with Dear Ole' Dad, and then half way through switch to your mom, or step dad... mix it up a bit.



Image: K-Gallery

Wednesday, October 29, 2008