Check out Trisha’s smile and story of being a happy Google hire.

Yeah, it’s a feel good story and some might not care for it, but who can ignore a pretty lady with a pretty smile working for a company with a pretty looking stock?

(GOOG closed at $417 Friday)

Come to think of it, Marissa Mayer won’t hurt your eyes either. How long will it be before Playboy does a Google piece?

Speaking of pretty ladies, I was watching Larry King the other night do an interview with Leeza Gibbons and my wife walked in behind me Googling her pics. Owned!

It’s dog house time.

Every once in awhile at the local Best Buy I see this tapper cabinet that costs a couple hundred bucks. Problem is we don’t drink enough so that even the smallest keg would likely go flat.

I might be more interested in such a device though, if it was powered by the Kegbot.

custom software for an attached Linux computer that can look up drinkers in a database and post their pour total to the Web. According to Kegbot, each approved drinker gets a digital ID button with a unique 64-bit code. You need this to pour a drink. A microcontroller reads the code and sends it to the Linux computer, which matches it to your entry in the database and checks any restrictions on your drinking.

Neat idea! Just imagine a stats counter powered by the Kegbot. This would be really neat for a beer site/blog. Imagine Budweiser using something like this for a corporate blog?

Perhaps something that monitored hydration (water consumption) would be more useful in our household, however, I keep getting drawn back to that study that said 14-28 drinks a week can improve brainpower.

Today Samsung showed off a 7-inch flexible LCD screen:

… the plastic LCD module is designed to maintains its thickness uniformly even when it bends as well as enabling higher-definition quality than the firm’s five-inch products, the biggest one up until now.

The idea of wearing a computer might seem super geek, but with the advent of Tablet PCs and thinner and more flexible screens this really isn’t that futuristic or cutting edge any longer. Before wearing full blown computers, how about LCD shirts that can change information from: “I’m blogging this” to “Not blogging this.” Beats changing shirts at events.

Scientists have been slicing, dicing and studying worms trying to figure out what allows their ability to regenerate and have made at least a small breakthrough: smedwi-2. That’s the name of the gene that when silenced, doesn’t allow the worm to regenerate. There’s more, but beware it’s kind of brainy for first thing in the morning:

Elimination of smedwi-2 not only leads to an inability to mount a regenerative response after amputation, but also to the eventual demise of unamputated animals along a reproducible series of events, that is, regression of the head tip, curling of the body and tissue disintegration. These defects are very similar to what is observed after the planarian stem cells are destroyed by lethal doses of irradiation.

In other words, not only does the silencing of this smedwi-2 gene stop regeneration, it also kills the worms with the silenced gene that weren’t cut on. Already, people with amputated limbs are being helped by robotics, but wouldn’t it be cool if it would be possible to regrow these limbs organically? It’s coming someday. Wonder if I’ll be here long enough to see it happen?

Don’t laugh, at the end of those study findings it indicates that genes similar to smedwi-2 are found in humans.

A couple weeks ago my friend Lestat got a new LCD monitor and said he had problems with ghost images. He asked if I had experienced similar problems with the Westinghouse LCD I recently purchased. I did have some LCD ghosting issues, particularly around the Windows shortcuts, but it wasn’t such that it bothered me much. Text seemed to be OK.

Turns out that Lestat did some research and discovered this somewhat common problem was called image persistence and the solution he found was to create a white GIF image and use it as a screensaver.

Last night I was reading Scoble on ClearType (here is the ClearType Web interface) and decided to try that out as well.

First I downloaded the ClearType PowerToy and then ran it. Here are before and after shots of the difference in the readability of the fonts in the PowerToy window when enabled and disabled (note: the images are compressed for the web, so the effect isn’t as sharp as actually seen, but you can still see a difference):

Before ClearType

After ClearType (enabled)

With the tip Lestat offered and ClearType enabled the faint ghost images around the Windows shortcuts on my desktop disappeared. Also, the text on the LCD monitor was noticeably sharper and easier on my eyes.

Thank you Lestat and Robert Scoble!

A few years ago we bought one of those fake trees that we’ve put up during the holidays.

We used to cut one down and bring it home, but I don’t think our youngest child minds the tree being fake:

I’m curious what kind of trees, for those who celebrate, you put up? Fake or real?

One thing that sucks about having kids is what they bring home from school. The flu is moving around right now and it wore me down yesterday and is kicking my butt today too. I’m still getting some things done though. Early this morning I setup IIS and ASP.net on my Tablet PC with my friend, Forser’s help. I’ve had Visual Studio there for some time, but chose not to install IIS locally. Rather than dig through documentation I asked one of my programmer friends. We documented the whole experience with pictures and hopefully will be sharing during this Friday’s radio show as I’m sure there are others who use Visual Studio but didn’t install IIS and ASP so they can work with these new gadgets.

One thing to those writing gadgets for Windows Live, don’t forget to add live.com to your trusted zones in IE. The instructions say “start.com” but they should also say “live.com.” That tripped us up for a minute.

The anti-M$ crowd has made an appearance already:

I wouldn’t write a “gadget” for your stupid web site if you put a gun to my head. Good luck conning some spotty teenagers to waste time on your lame-ass competition - you think any real programmer is going to enter? I’ll just buy one if I want one and I don’t.

Sorry, Sho, I’m a “real programmer” and I’m thinking of creating and contributing a few gadgets. Not because I want to win an Xbox 360 (I’ll be there buying at least one on launch day), but because I’d like to get familiar with the process. Most serious programmers I know aspire to keep expanding their knowledge and learning new things. That includes trying out these widgets, gadgets and new programming languages as they become popular, experimenting with APIs, etc.

Microsoft is a long way from dead.

There is some flu crap going around so I didn’t go into the office today. No sense in infecting everybody else.

So I’m sort of slow getting up and around to things … at least here at the Hmm blog anyway. Already updated my Mac blog three times which was a daily post record for that blog. Also updated a few other blogs that haven’t been updated in awhile.

But let’s get to the important stuff: it’s new DVD day!

Before you go out today to pick up Episode III [Hmm review] on DVD, I just know all Star Wars saber hounds are going to have some cereal with the Jedi master himself: Yoda!

Yeah, I did too.

At midnight server time last night, Hmm turned scary, hairy orange. For those terrified by the color scheme, don’t fret, it’s merely a one day illusion.

For those reading this in their RSS aggregator then they are missing on all the holiday frights and frills (boo hiss!). Today, every post will have some trick or treatish wording/slant/content. Next to Christmas, Halloween is my 2nd favorite holiday of the year.

Why? Why! Why arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Because it reminds us all how human we are and that some of us actually enjoy being scared. It’s a very real time.

(insert creepy Halloween music)

Something I never thought we’d own was a fog machine, but what Halloween-inspired consumer could resist? I checked online for fog machines via Amazon (affiliate) and there are lots of even fancier ones, but no time to order online for tonight, just hit your local Walmart and be one of the most ghoulish spot in the neighborhood for the kids to trick or treat at tonight. Don’t forget to buy enough candy for the candy-seeking squirrels.

Fire up the badboy.

Our kids enjoyed pressing the button to totally fog up the room. This will be great for trick and treaters tonight … open the door, creepy music playing in the background, evil cackling, muhahahahahaha!

Happy Halloween readers