Holiday obligations, insurance, penny horders, and how to wrap a cat
Just because everyone is buying the boss a gift, pulling names off the giving tree, and organizing an office potluck for the holidays doesn’t mean you have to participate. While it’s probably not a wise career move to completely withdraw from office festivities, don’t feel bad about bowing out from some things. The Chicago Tribune gives some advice on how to gracefully decline office holiday obligations.
Well, if you do decide to go to the office holiday party, remember they can be a minefield of faux pas. Prepare yourself with some simple tips on how to survive the office party and come out clean.
And what if that holiday party continues on into your home, or the boss invites you over for some celebrating? Alcohol, ice and snow can combine into an accident waiting to happen. And I hate to say it, but what about theft? All of this is leading to: this is a good time of year to review your home insurance policy.
Google is investing in affordable housing near it’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA. But before you think, “Gee, how nice of them,” realize it’s a tax write-off.
Did you know it’s illegal to melt down old pennies for their copper? That’s not stopping people from hording them, waiting for the day pennies go out of circulation. ABC has an interesting article on some patient savers. It gives new meaning to “a penny saved is a penny earned.”
And it’s a little early for 2011 top ten lists, don’t you think? Regardless, Time has already put out their Top 10 Everything of 2011 master list.
And finally, how to wrap a cat for Christmas.
Exotic Locales, Elegant E-mail Signatures, and Energy Efficiency
We’ve been enjoying the New York Times series “House hunting in …” In several installments we have learned about the real estate market in Austria, Switzerland, Madrid, British Columbia, and this week, Antigua. It may never happen for us, but it sure is fun to imagine!
Forbes offers a treasure trove of intriguing content, from outrageous home amenity slide shows to stealthy green cars, but this week 12 Housing Markets Moving in the Right Direction caught our fancy. The picture of Seattle does not do it justice, in case you were wondering.
Speaking of cars, Yahoo! shares some stealthy cars that thieves don’t want; whether you can afford a BMW 5 Series or Audi A6 is another story.
Good thing we are all saving money by being more energy efficient, since the cost of certain foods is rising.
E-mail signatures often become unwieldy. Chris Smith gives some tips on streamlining your signature.
Last week we shared details on Google’s push in the social sphere. In the company’s eternal quest to take over the world, this week it acquired Zagat. Mountain View, California sure smells like Pinky and the Brain these days…
On Friday I received an invitation from a colleague to Google+, Google’s new social network. I signed up and wanted to share my initial thoughts.
For those of you that haven’t heard, Google+ is the search powerhouse’s latest attempt at social networking. Google’s previous attempts have crashed and burned – wave and buzz both come to mind. Google+ so far seems to be better positioned to survive. Set up was pretty easy. I created a profile, uploaded a picture, and sent off invitations to friends who requested them.
What’s the same/what’s different
Google+ appears to be an amalgam of Facebook and Twitter in that you can do all the usual social media stuff (status updates, pics, likes, etc) with your friends and colleagues, but you can also follow people or add them to any of your ‘circles’ without having to ask permission. This is not only for the famous, like Mark Zuckerberg, but any hipster who’s bothered to sign up and create a profile. You can block unwanted followers, but that is an extra step. Another difference from Facebook is that you have much less control on the privacy of your information even though it may seem you have more. Sure you can select which ‘circles’ see your posts, photos or updates, but what is visible to the whole world is already pretty broad. And if you don’t remember to change your sharing setting after each post, things could get ugly. My motto is assume whatever I post is visible to everyone, including my dead grandmother. Right now I only have links to 23 people. As this grows, we will see how things will work.
What’s new
There are some new features in Google+. First of all, Google+ adds the ability to follow topics of interest to you through its Sparks application. Leveraging on its search and indexing power, Google will provide a continually updated stream of articles around your interest from the web. If you’ve ever subscribed to RSS feeds via Google Reader or My Yahoo!, these feeds will be familiar to you. It could also be considered similar to following hashtags(#) on Twitter though with a bit more curation in content. I added ‘Chicago’, ‘Cycling’, and a few others to test it out.
Google+ also has a feature called the Hangouts where you and your friends can go to video chat together using Google’s video and phone service as its base. Facebook and Skype are starting a similar service, though whether there is demand for either of these has yet to be seen.
Bottomline
There’s lots more to explore and I’ll update as appropriate. For now though while promising, I’m not sure that Google+ offers enough to make me want to switch out of Facebook, or even taking the time to update my status. While all my friends are on Facebook, only a few have made the jump to Google+. I can see maintaining two broad social networks for now, but at some point that could become burdensome. Add in the more specialized LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr and there just isn’t enough time for all of these.
CNET has a good intro video on Google+.
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Positives
Streamlined interface
linkage to other Google resources – email, photos, etc.
RSS integration/Sparks
Sorting contacts into different ‘circles’
no farmville or other games – though I bet this will change
Negatives
privacy concerns
thin user base
no killer app to drive people to use it
