First of all, I apologize to everyone that’s been waiting for my return to update this blog. Well, I am back now, but got some bad news, as some of you have figured a long time ago, is that I will stop updating Googlified.

“OMG, Haochi, why are you doing this?!?!?”

Well, I love this blog and I love doing this very much, albeit I don’t love/like/admire Google anymore - the bigger reason behind this whole thing, plus that life sucks (and wonderful at the same time - which I am learning to appreciate it) that wouldn’t allow me to have 48-hour days. Life gets overwhelmed at times and sacrifices needed to be done so that’s that, there aren’t a lot to be said.

So What Now?

The Internet without Googlified will still be the Internet, there are many great blogs and communities that talks about Google on the Web. I will still participate in the discussions, just not publishing them on this blog, that’s all. I do (shamelessly) admit that there are many great things about this blog that you will miss, but well, c’est la vie I guess.

I am not sure what to do with this blog yet, but one thing I am sure is that I will keep this blog online for another couple of months and wait till then to decide. As for the OVER NINE THOUSAND unread items in Google Reader, I will just “mark as read” them all. :D

Also, I have a personal blog, if you are interested, go ahead and subscribe it. :)

And for those who have never seen a photo of me, see below, I am radiating love and peace.

Due to the mountain of school works and (final) exams I am having toward the end of this school year, I will not be able to update this blog this week. In the mean time, you can checkout the blogs on the right (click here if you are reading this in a feed reader).

Also, I got into a car accident today, but I am fine, still in one piece, no scratches or anything. Thanks for asking. And yes, I am blowing soap bubbles in the above picture (outside of school), and yes, it is fun.

The Google LatLong Blog announced several updates to the images of Manhanttan used in Google Street View. Among the updates, I find their new move to blur out people’s faces to be quite interesting.

We’re also taking this opportunity to test our new face-blurring technology on the busy streets of Manhattan. This effort has been a year in the making — working at Street View-scale is a tough challenge that required us to advance state-of-the-art automatic face detection, and we continue working hard to improve it as we roll it out for our existing and future imagery.

They are probably putting Neven Vision (an image recognition technology Google acquired two years ago) in use. Pascal from the GoogleWatchBlog said that the pictures are “a bit out of focus, even if there are no people,” and those new images are indeed a bit blurry when zoomed-in, despite Google claiming that they are now “sharper.” (I am probably comparing apple to orange, so please correct me if I am wrong.)

May 12, 2008 - a sad day for the whole community of Google Street View Stalkers (G.S.V.S) that will always be remembered.

Today’s Mother’s Day (in the U.S., and many other countries) and well, you know what to do (and it’s never too late). Orkut also have a special logo to celebrate the holiday.

In the U.K., Google’s celebrating the birthday (May 12) of Florence Nightingale, who is known as “The Lady with the Lamp”.

Florence Nightingale, who came to be known as “The Lady with the Lamp”, was a pioneer of modern nursing, a writer and a noted statistician. [Wikipedia]

[thanks to Pascal]

Last week, the Google Mac team released Vidnik, a “simple program for using the built-in camera on your Mac to create movies and upload them to YouTube.” It’s pretty easier to use and offers many functions like using the program to record video (or just drag & drop existing videos) and upload them as video comments.

Mambo on the Google Blogoscoped forum commented that, “I’ve just tried it out. To be honest, I think iMovie ‘08 does a much better job. It’s just as easy to use, but offers more flexibility, and flawless YouTube integration.”