Tag: google

Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for February 9 2022 – Shavings and Graphite Dust

In this episode, I play a song by Lauren Hoffman; a work table from Home Depot is my new standing desk; Google has a job for me; I wasn’t going to bleed black and gold; I figured out that Google Home and an Echo can both live together in perfect harmony side by side on my piano keyboard; Google consumer products are littered with things I liked and used that were then abandoned; FriendFeed was my favorite social media, with Google Plus in second place; Unchained Podcast really is selling me against NFTs; since last show my Home Assistant Raspberry Pi pooped the bed; I feel ever better that I did not back the Precursor phone; the Erasable podcast sold me several fancy pencil things from Makers Cabinet.

Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, February 9 2022.

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Google Plus

I have a new thing that is killing the mojo that once went into blogging. For a while it has been Twitter and Facebook, but now Google Plus is my main blog-eating time sink. I got in invite fairly early after its creation, so I’ve been using it since early July. It’s not perfect but it’s so much closer to what I want from a social network that after only a week or two of it, I basically stopped using Twitter. That wasn’t hard, any reasonable service that had any decent uptake from my circle of friends would have been sufficient. Google+ (as Huff and Stapes call it, “testing positive for Google”) was plenty good enough.

One thing that I’m going to do to try to bring my blogging mojo back is to periodically take posts I’ve made on Google+ and bring them back over here. That was tough with Twitter because any reasonable thought spanned multiple tweets and then it was just all a mess.

If you want to follow me or in G+ terminology “circle me” and my wagons, this is my profile. It’s similar nonsense as here, packaged in a different way. Welcome aboard.

My Relationship with Google Viewed as Burn Notice

For the longest time I’ve been somewhere between nervous and terrified of the growing influence of Google. Any organization that feels the need to tell me that they are not evil probably ain’t really on the up and up. I used to not want to ever be logged in to a Google account and also search because I feared that they were building a dossier on me. As their toolset grows though eventually they got me, with Gmail and Reader and Analytics and such. However, as a devoted viewer of the best current show on TV Burn Notice, I have come to a realization.

Think of you, me or any other user of Google as Michael Westen. Google itself is Sam Axe. Google/Sam helps us out. A lot. Certainly the relationship is useful, and we/Michael have our bacon saved by them. However, Google/Sam is also keeping tabs on us and will gladly sell us out whenever there is enough to gain from that. We/Michael also know that, and we keep that in mind as we deal with Google/Sam. We/Michael keep the really good info away from Google/Sam out of self-preservation.

So, Google will be happy to betray us and the reason they haven’t is that they haven’t been offered the right price. We know that and can use them for what they are worth. Just watch your back, keep your eyes open, and don’t let them learn the real good information about you that would fetch a nice price. Then everyone can coexist is this stable equilibrium of betrayal. It actually does work out.