LASHDOT points to a laughable patent, which is mentioned in the New Scientist. Coffee beer might soon be no weirder than ice tea or even my odd adaptation to concentrated coffee.

A drink somewhere between coffee and beer could soon be on the menu. Nestec, part of the Nestlé empire in Switzerland, has filed patents in every major market round the world on a “fermented coffee beverage” that pours and foams like beer, but smells of strong coffee and packs a concentrated caffeine kick.

Only two days ago, the guys at the gym were joking about Starbucks and coffee junkies. “Give me 5 shots of latte!”, they said. Will that joke become a reality shortly?

Other items on coffee:

• Concentrated Coffee
• Coffee Leads to Stress
• Mister Coffee

Letting that pet go loose

ECENT observation of Google’s moves has led to the accumulation of several remarks. Hereby, I would like to list a few of them, getting them off my chest for what it’s worth.

• Google Base. For those who do not know, Google have just launched a new services that awakens the desire to stand up and shout “All your bases are belong (sic) to Google”, which is a phrase that goes far back in time. For those unfamiliar with the phrase, it stems from poor translation of a computer game and its rapid spread is primarily attributed to UseNet. Google Base, as the service was entitled, appears to be eyeing that gigantic, non-profitable Craig’s List, intending to use that new platform for embedment of yet more targetted ads. This argument is nothing beyond speculation nonetheless.
• Literature domination. The highly controversial book scanning initiative (Google Print), supposedly to be followed by Microsoft rather soon. Where there is potential evil, there must be a Microsoft stampede.
• Updates with personality. Google are naming their updates, e.g. Bourbon and now Jagger (due to complete at the beginning of next month). That naming convention is reminiscent of that which is ascribed to hurricanes. Do they have a list of names queued up for future assignment?
• Indexing Obsession. Google have declared their desire to crawl and organise the entire human knowledge. They also said that indexing may take 300 years (a wild speculation by their CEO), but should they not understand content rather than simply index it all? I have recently proposed an alternative, which relies on semantics and factual data.

Now that my rants have been voiced, I feel surprisingly relieved. I like Google and often rave about their search performance. All in all, I hope my criticisms are all constructive rather than unnecessarily excruciating.

CORRECTION (29/10/2005): the current update was dubbed “Jagger” by WebmasterWorld.

Windows XP in AJAX

F Windows is ever to be used, it should be standards-compliant and perhaps, just perhaps, CSS-based. Have a look at the link. It’s worthwhile, I promise you. Try clicking the “Start” button, then navigating through the menus.

That site is an invaluable resource by all means. 5 years down the line when dual-boot no longer is a necessity to most, we will still be able to recall the days when a different operating system prevailed in this world. Since it’s Web-based, no bytes will be consumed on local storage either.

A week or so ago I notices a small swelling at the back of my neck. Such things are rather common, even among the healthy population, but they tend to draw my attention more than they should. This was not as worrying, however, as a similar tiny swelling near my bottom, which had me see my GP several months ago (in vain of course).

I came to the conclusion that I am overly obsessed with my health, even if all that there is are puny swellings that quickly fade away. Recently I was more paranoid about that abnormality near my neck, which has just disappeared. After all, unlike the other occurrence, it resides next to my second most-valued organ! [pun]

OR the sake of some short comical relief, use this neat on-line tool to generate cyborg-like images from your first name.

Shown below is the image that got bound to “Roy”.

Other fun tools worth mentioning:

• Polaroid Images
• Name Popularity

ULTIPLE sources I have come across are citing the same article from Reuters (first John Dvorak, now Slashdot). The facts are truly unbelievable. If it had not come from Reuters, I would not have quoted it. Judge for yourself:

An Australian man built up a 40,000-volt charge of static electricity in his clothes as he walked, leaving a trail of scorched carpet and molten plastic and forcing firefighters to evacuate a building.

…

“We tested his clothes with a static electricity field meter and measured a current of 40,000 volts, which is one step shy of spontaneous combustion, where his clothes would have self-ignited,” Barton said.

“Googlebombing” is the term used to describe a situation where inappropriate SERP‘s get returned due to intentional (hence unnatural) intervention with the Google algorithms. Anchor text of links (text in the vicinity of a hyperlink) gets heavily used for classification of pages and this observation can lead to overt misuse.

I can recall that in the past, due to large amount of poker-related spam, bloggers decided to link en masse to the Wikipedia page on poker, which in turn made it a prime search engine result for the term “poker”. Therein, poker and gambling were discouraged as well as the practices they use to promote themselves, destroying cyberspace in the process.

More recently, there has been a lot of talk about binding between the term “failure” and the White House, in particular George Bush’s official page. The voices of witnesses have grown loud enough to justify a post in the Google Blog.

If you do a Google search on the word [failure] or the phrase [miserable failure], the top result is currently the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush. We’ve received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part. I’d like to explain how these results come up in order to allay these concerns…

My vague recollection tells me that several years ago, Google humour got involved when searching for the term “weapons of mass destruction”.