Almost eighteen months ago, I found the Google Street View guy near work and followed him for a bit trying to stay in view. For several weeks following I checked the location online nearly every day and eventually gave up. Thanks to a commenter on my original post I checked again and we are there. They removed the frames of us hanging out the window talking to the driver, but there I am in the driver seat.
Click here to see us on the map. My original post is here.
A few weeks ago on Father’s Day, we took Rhonda’s dad out for brunch at Fado’s Irish Pub in Buckhead. We had a great meal and after getting back home Rhonda realized she didn’t have her phone. We called her phone hoping we would hear it somewhere around the house, called her parents hoping they somehow had it, called her sister hoping the same, and eventually called the restaurant to ask them to look for it; nobody had it. When trying to think where else it could be Rhonda screamed “Google Latitude!”
Google Latitude
You see back in February when Google Latitude was released I signed us both up on our Blackberries and shared our locations with each other. Since then it was mainly used for jokes that we were stalking each other or manually setting my location to random places to see if she would notice. It soon lost its cool factor but it earned it all back when we pulled up Google Maps on my phone and could see her phone was still at the restaurant as of a couple minutes before. I’m not sure what the hostess thought when Rhonda called her back and told her she knew it was there and could prove it, but she hopped in the car and went to pick up her phone.
I’ve been running my own email server for several years now and the biggest issues have certainly been dealing with spam. For the longest time I just put up with it and filtered manually. Then about 2 years ago I put in place an anti-spam gateway using OpenBSD and the excellent guide over at flakshak.com. This worked great. I was able to configure the anti-spam settings using SpamAssassin and tweak to my heart’s delight.
The biggest issue with this was managing the box(es) running the anti-spam software. We (I was running a hosting company at the time with two other people.) ended up filling up the various disk partitions with either massive email log files or SpamAssassin data as we added more and more users to the server. If we didn’t keep an eye on it, the disk would fill up, and the server would then die in strange ways. (Fortunately, we were running redundant OpenBSD servers with pf and carp so we often didn’t notice the server had died until we tried to login to it later.) Anyway, after shutting down the anti-spam servers and moving my personal server I had to figure out another way to deal with the spam.
I ended up using the same email server software as before and setup some forwarding rules following Using Gmail as a Spam Filter. This worked great as well but sometimes caused a delay in getting emails and given my setup I had to reconcile email in both gmail and my mail server. That is, marking items as read in my email server didn’t mark them as read in gmail as well, so I had to do it in both places…not a big issue but mildly annoying.
Fast forward a year or so and I’ve now moved my email hosting to Google Apps entirely. The process was a piece of cake though not as fast as I would have liked. After signing up, you have to prove that you own the domain you’re wanting them to host, either by uploading an html document that they specify or creating a sub-domain on your DNS server that they specify. This process seems to take about 30 minutes to an hour for them to verify though they claim it can take 24-48 hours. After this you have to enable E-mail for your domain which again takes about 30 minuts to an hour as they enable their email servers to accept email for your domain. Once this is done you just need to change your DNS settings so that your MX records point to Google’s servers. The process takes a couple hours, but it’s mostly waiting.
I left the email server running on my personal server for the next several days so that I could still get email while the DNS changes propagated out to everyone. About 7 days later I was still getting email to it, but when I checked who was sending it was mostly spam and the number of emails had dropped considerably. I decided to go ahead and shut it down and not worry about any other email coming in.
All in all, the setup process was painless. I no longer have to worry about running my own email server or dealing with anti-spam software. It’s no wonder why Google provides this, they now gets tons of information about me as they offer ads based on the content of my email. I may be paranoid, I don’t like Google knowing so much about me (certainly a topic for a future post), but they’ve made their services so enticing that it’s difficult to justify running my own server or paying someone else to do it.
I saw the Google Street View guy over my lunch break the other day. We pulled up next to him at a stop light and chatted for a couple minutes waiting for the light to turn green. There was a large computer screen attached to the dash and we could see my truck and my co-worker hanging out the window. After the light turned green I paced him for about half a mile trying to stay in the shot before having to turn off. I’ll be keeping an eye on the spot for the next couple months hoping to show up.
Google Street View Car
