Darren Straight's Blog

Now here’s some interesting news about Google!

Web search firm Google has formed a partnership with US space agency Nasa in an effort to harness new technology which could boost the space programme.
Google is to build a new office complex on the site of Nasa’s research facility in California, close to its own headquarters in Silicon Valley.

The two companies will co-operate in a range of areas including IT solutions, data management and nanotechnology.

It would look to “bring entrepreneurs into the space programme”, Nasa added.

A new frontier?

The two companies have signed a memorandum of understanding, although the financial terms of the joint venture were not disclosed.

Google is expanding rapidly and recently raised more than $4bn for new projects by selling shares in the company.

As part of the venture, Google will develop one million square feet of real estate at the Nasa Ames research centre.

The centre, built in 1939, has been at the heart of the US space program for many years, conducting research into the Apollo moon missions between 1963 and 1972.

Nasa recently unveiled plans to make another moon landing by 2020.

Examples of areas of potential collaboration include the development of new types of remote sensors and improving analysis of engineering problems.

“Google and Nasa share a common desire, to bring a universe of information to people around the world,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman and chief executive.

“Imagine having a wide selection of images from the Apollo space mission at your fingertips whenever you want it.”

Scott Hubbard, director of Nasa Ames Center, claimed the partnership could provide a huge range of potential benefits to the space programme.

“While our joint efforts will benefit both organisations, the real winner will be the American public,” he said.

BBC Article

Once again following my recent posts titled “When is Google’s Official Birthday” I have now received an email from Google, unfortunately it doesn’t tell you much more from what I told you in my last update!

Hi Darren,

Thank you for your note. We apologize for any confusion. As you may know,
Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we
celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when
people feel like having cake. For more on Google’s history:

http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html

We really appreciate your support, and we look forward to serving you in
the years to come.

Regards,
The Google Team

Link to Google’s Official Fact page

MSN Messenger 7.5.0306 Released yep that’s right not a lot of changes though, mainly just fixes, here’s a post from mess.be!

dwergs says:

A new build of MSN Messenger 7.5 was released just before midnight (Brussels time). This new 0306 build, which follows the leaked 0303 QFE, consists mainly of fixes. You will not get an auto-update notification immediately (expect one in a few weeks), so download it from here. Make sure you close down MSN Messenger completely before updating.>> Download here (click on the red Get It Free button and then GO). If you want a different language, click MSN Messenger Worldwide first in the menu to the left.

[Reported by: Animefan, Badguytje & dzhStudios]

The Live 8 DVD Site now has their first user sent in images up in galery 1, shame I’m not there yet, here’s a snippetof the email I recieved

Keep an eye out for your pictures
We want to say a big thank you to everyone who has sent in their pictures from Live 8, we’ve been absolutely inundated! It’s taken us a little while to get through your thousands of pictures, and sadly we can’t put them all up – but here are the first crop of the best ones we got sent. Keep an eye out for your pictures, and keep them coming, as we’ll keep uploading them on a continual basis.

Click Here To View Gallery

In other news you can now also pre-order the live 8 DVD by clicking here.

Just a little update from the Live 8 DVD Site about how theres going to be an exclusive Sir Bob Geldof Podcast Coming Soon!

Bob Geldof speaks exclusively to Live 8 DVD

Just to highlight the difference between the first Live Aid concerts 20 years ago and this years Live 8 concert….weve got an exclusive PODCAST by the man behind the whole thing…Sir Bob Geldof! Download the juicy inside stories straight from the man who was pulling all the strings. Geldof on asking Pink Floyd to reform I said [to David Gilmour] ‘Dave you didn’t even say goodbye to people’ but he just wanted to do small stuffso he played me 3 of f the tunes he was doing now and I advised him to take quite a lot of speed.’

Listen exclusively as Sir Bob talks us though the highs, the lows, the headaches and the triumphs as he and his team co-ordinated this historic event. Hear him talk candidly about how he got the worlds biggest stars to unite in the name of Make Poverty History. “The thing [with madonna] is that we went through this long written correspondence about why she should do it.and she wrote back”I don’t mind being flattered and manipulatedbut if I’m going to do it, why should I? over to you’, madonna”. This is the only place, anywhere, where you can hear this podcast. Dont miss it, coming soon.

Live 8 DVD Site

Following my blog post yesterday titled “When is Google’s Official Birthday” I sent an email to Google asking them this very same question, bellow is a copy of it:

Dear Google,

I myself and many others are confused to when Google’s Official
Birthday actually is, I thought it was Wednesday, September 07, 2005
as people believe you were founded on September 7, 1998 however it
appears that today you are celebrating it via your Blog and Google
Birthday Logo.

But then if it is today why did you create this page:

http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=4866&topic=367

—————————————–
When is Google’s official birthday?
Google’s official birthday is September 7, 1998. If Google were a
person, it would have started elementary school late last summer
(around August 19), and today it would have just finished the first
grade. In other words, we’re just getting started. To discover more
about Google’s history, please visit
http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/history.html. To learn about
our mission, please see

http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/index.html

—————————————

Which you have actually now removed and all that appears now is a
quickly made error page:

—————————————
Document Not Found
Sorry, the document you requested is not available. You can return to
the refering page,

or You can visit the main page.
———————————-

Which actually has the word “referring” misspelled!

I have written a Blog Article about this here:

http://www.darrenstraight.com/blog/2005/09/27/when-is-googles-official-birthday/

So I would be very happy to get an un-automated response from
yourselves to when Google’s Official Birthday really is and why all
the confusion.

Yours sincerely
Darren Straight

I still have not yet received a reply from Google, but I did notice that they have now uploaded there Fun Fact page again, the one that used to say:

When is Google’s official birthday?

Google’s official birthday is September 7, 1998. If Google were a person, it would have started elementary school late last summer (around August 19), and today it would have just finished the first grade. In other words, we’re just getting started. To discover more about Google’s history, please visit
http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/history.html. To learn about our mission, please see

http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/index.html

Now says:

When is Google’s birthday?

Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake. For more on Google’s history:

http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html

Chek that page out here.

I wonder if they uploaded that page again because of my email I sent them and I wonder why they haven’t replied yet and will they, I hope they will!

Today was the first official day of the 2nd Annual MSN Butterfly Tour in Redmond, Washington, United States.

I originally found this out from the msn messenger personal message box of Nadia the MSN Beta Butterfly Queen!

I then went to search on the net for some more information about the MSN Butterfly Tour 2005 and I came across some interesting links, check them out bellow:

Link 1
Link 1

Restart steam and see the update for yourself!

Steampowered News
Hallife2.net News Post
HL2world.com News Post

Check this out Mess.be has an exclusive download of the Brand New Messenger Plus! 3.60, this is completely exclusive to Mess.be as part of their 4th Birthday celebrations; they are also giving out around 250 Web2Messenger Invites throughout the entire day!

dwergs says:

Our first big birthday gift to the Mess.be fans comes from Patchou: the exclusive pre-premiere of Messenger Plus! 3.60, scheduled for release tomorrow!!! 

Not only did Patchou give us a 24 hours head start on the new version, he also created a Special Mess.be Edition solely for us (find the easy easter egg!).

UPDATE: While the Mess.be server is getting hammered, let me give you a few reasons why you should install Messenger Plus!: long anticipated tabbed chats, 100% MSN Messenger 7.5 compatibility, improved custom sounds, redesigned file sharing with triggers, better logging, new plugin function and registry settings, open a http link in nicknames or personal messages, etc.

>> Download Messenger Plus! 3.60 (Special Mess.be Edition).

>> Check out the Changelog.

Well apparently Google’s Official Birthday is today Tuesday, 27 September 2005 thats why they have a new Google 7th Birthday Logo on their Homepage but is it really Google’s Official Birthday today because I clearly remember celebrating it on Wednesday, September 07, 2005, lets take a look back into the past and present and see what we can find out about when it really is, fist stop Google’s Official Support Page!

Google first says it’s September 7, 1998

When is Google’s official birthday?

Google’s official birthday is September 7, 1998. If Google were a person, it would have started elementary school late last summer (around August 19), and today it would have just finished the first grade. In other words, we’re just getting started. To discover more about Google’s history, please visit
http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/history.html. To learn about our mission, please see

http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/index.html

But unfortunately this page has now been removed and all that you will receive is the following error message if you try and view it:

Document Not Found

Sorry, the document you requested is not available. You can return to the refering page,

or You can visit the main page.

Ok so do you notice how this doesn’t look like a normal Google Error page and that they have even misspelled the word referring now don’t you think that is just weird considering not long ago Google were saying it was the 7th of September, you can view a cached page of it as it was on the 15 Sep 2005 03:46:08 GMT here

Next stop Matt Cutts Blog, Matt Cutts is a Google Engineer:

Happy Birthday!
September 7, 2005 @ 12:24 pm • Filed under Google/SEO

I think Google turns seven today. I recently ran across an email from our second birthday in 2000. Here it is:

From: Matt Cutts
To: (most Googlers)
Date: Thu 9/7/00 9:51pmIn celebration of Google’s two year anniversary of September 7, 1998, there’s a bunch of donuts tonight in the Soul Calibur room.

Matt, Lxxxx, and Dxxx

Krispy Kreme had just opened a store up in Mountain View barely three minutes from Google. Before that, you had to drive to Union City to get your donut fix. So three of us made a donut run and got 2-3 boxes of hot glazed goodness. The email was sent out at 10 pm because a bunch of us were working late. Back then, everyone was in one small building. The biggest room served as a conference room, and in the corner was a TV and a Sega Dreamcast. I’m sure it could play other games, but you only saw people playing Soul Calibur back then, so people called it the Soul Calibur room.

This morning as I walked in I passed a large meeting room. The Lxxxx from the email above was teaching an orientation class to a new group of engineers. I watched him for a minute and saw new engineers soaking up Google infrastructure and Google culture at the same time. It energizes me to see great new people join Google and start pushing to make the web and the world better from their perspective.

The past several years have been something to see, from Raging Search to Scientology to Deja and everything else. When I look back, the wild thing is that I’m more excited about Google now than I was back then. I get to work with amazing people on things that I think will improve the web. I’m honored and grateful to work with the people I work with because they’re so damn smart, capable, and they care about what they’re doing. Happy B-day, Google.

Ok so even a Google Engineer is saying he thinks Google’s Official Birthday is the 7th of September 2005 but why are Google now saying its the 27th of September in their Google Blog and they have a Google Birthday Logo to celebrate it!

Lets check that Google Blog Post out!

We wanted something special for our birthday…
9/26/2005 09:14:00 PM
Posted by Anna Patterson, Software Engineer

Google opened its doors in September 1998, and we’ve been pursuing one mission ever since: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. For our seventh birthday, we are giving you a newly expanded web search index that is 1,000 times the size of our original index.

I’m proud of everything we’ve accomplished in the years since Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up the first Google data center in Larry’s dorm room at Stanford. Today, along with web search based on Larry and Sergey’s original BackRub search engine, we offer specialized search for everything from satellite images to academic papers, local business info to your own computer. We’ve also built software for email and mobile services, photo management and computer-to-computer voice calling, to name just a few things.

But search remains our heart and soul, so I’m especially pleased by this latest expansion of our index, which makes Google more than 3 times larger than any other search engine. See for yourself how effective the new Google search index can be. Come up with a search query that’s special to you (your name, your elementary school, and your favorite animal, for example) – a combination of words that is likely to exist on just a few web pages out of the billions we’ve indexed, a few needles scattered in the Internet’s endless haystack. Ready? Let’s go.

Permalink

Ok so are you confused yet I certainty am, the only reason I can see for them saying their birthday is today is because they have removed the index size number from their home page and they thought today would be a good day to celebrate it, though thinking back to the 7th of September 2005 why didn’t they have a Google Birthday Logo then, I do remember people questioning it at the time, I think the best thing to do is to see if I can get in contact with Google about this and see what they have to say about it, I just hope I get a nice un-automated reply from them!

For now check these other two articles out and compare the dates yourself:
Happy Birthday, Google! from Search Engine Watch
Google’s 7th Birthday, Schmidt Says Index 3 Times Larger Than Others