On the weekend of the Pac-Man doodle, a friend asked me if I had "Googled anything lately", intending simply to help me discover the playable throwback game (which at the time had sound).
Misunderstanding his request, I prepared the following snapshot of my recent search activity.
Thursday, May 20, 2010 (yesterday) 10:32 PM: "system preferences" network "dns servers"
I was finding out how to use the Google DNS servers, which were indicated on a discussion forum as a way to fix a problem with certain YouTube videos not loading.
3:49 PM: "the band" discography "pepote"
I like to have accurate date tags (for popular music, the year it was on the charts; for classical, the year of debut performance). Here I was filling some missing dates. Many albums such as greatest-hits compilations are tagged with a re-mastering or re-release date, which is meaningless for me.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010 11:26 PM: when the tide comes in all of the boats rise
A metaphor that one of the men in MDI likes to use; he had T-shirts made, and today I wondered where the quote came from. It was originally used by JFK in 1963 when he was promoting spending federal funds on the Greers Ferry Dam in Arkansas.
11:16 AM: Coercive Persuasion "foot in the door" "love bomb"
I frequently look into new ideas and concepts relating to sociology, and one area I often write about is the balance of power between the individual and the group. Here I was trying to find an old reference that I had lost.
1:04 AM: perl bigint
Discovering how to use the Math::BigInt library, which allows arbitrary-precision calculation in Perl.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010 11:53 PM: pdflatex atsutil and MacTeX
I was getting my TEX typesetting system up and running on the Mac Pro.
9:23 PM: Islands of Adventure Harry Potter
Learning about the new theme park area that is opening next month.
5:52 PM: xkcd forum playpen balls
There was an xkcd cartoon in which someone filled their room with those brightly-colored baseball-sized hollow plastic balls, I wanted to find the discussion that would reveal whether such a thing was practical (best price: roughly $8000 for a typical size bedroom).
5:20 PM: sloane integer sequences
I use this site a lot (The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences) and this time I was too lazy to find the link in my bookmarks page, so I did a Google search instead.
2:46 PM: translate portuguese
I used Google to try to figure out how to say something in Portuguese.
2:33 PM: 19111438098711663697781258214361
This number is the first in a set of consecutive prime numbers where the difference between each one and the next is the same number (in this case, 7 primes with a difference of 210), called a "CPAP". It is one of the entries on my numbers page, and I was looking to see if it was still the record-holder for smallest CPAP-7.
Monday, May 17, 2010 5:55 PM: ffmpeg me_method dia_size
Solving a problem with the program I use to convert JPG files to MP4 video for YouTube uploads (mainly for my Gray-Scott simulations). YouTube does not like the format of the ffmpeg output (the atoms are not ordered properly for streaming) and directs users to a help/support page that is entirely irrelevant because it only addresses iMovie, Final Cut, or QuickTime.
2:59 PM: Jefferson Airplane discogs
Finding more dates of old music.
1:54 AM: ezekiel chronology and 360 days prophetic year , etc.
Filling a few details in the entry for 945000 and some related entries on my numbers page.
