Love the story here, as well as the effects! Keeping up with my munchkins is tough enough as it is for me right now - haven't gotten enough time to start photoshopping them. :)

There you go - another example of how you never know exactly what secret sauce Google uses to calculate PageRank. They're not /supposed/ to use noFollow links, but I've noted the same thing -- a volume of noFollow links can still seem to generate PageRank in some cases.

OK - just tried wi-fi scanning, and no luck thus far. It's apparently supported by the HPLIP package, but xsane doesn't recognize it, and having trouble configuring it. We'll see if I can achieve success, as I would indeed like the use of my scanner back.

Indeed, it is a wireless printer. I've not yet tried scanning over wifi yet - not so sure if the SANE/TWAIN drivers have received as much attention as the printing subsystem has, but I'll give it a go.

Darren - thanks for the reply. Yes, on the z-index of the shadows, that would help - as I do have a big concentration of icons in one spot, and it makes the map a bit difficult to use. The sets issue is not as big of a deal, though I still (one day) would love to be able to see a perfect visualization of a large number of flickr images - little dots, or a heat map, or something.

Very agreed. At the very least, I'm a big fan of, in UI design, if you have anything at all that pops up (even if temporarily) it should have a close button. Close button presses can then be tracked, and the UI designers can then tell if people are always closing the annoying little thing.

That's the wonderful thing about web UI design, is that unlike a product like Quicken, you can then track everyone's every movement through the app.

Matt - thanks for the data. I assumed that LA still wasn't working as the transit layer doesn't appear on Google Maps. But transit directions certainly do work, as do they for Boston and New York. So, indeed, DC is still the bizarre holdout, trying to get Google to pay them for the data or some other odd arrangement.

Mr. Perkins: definitely understood, and I posted this more recent article here on the matter.

I'm 100% on your side, and it's indeed 100% in the court of the transit agency to be able to provide information to other private-sector agencies and companies such as Google so that useful products can be made thereby. Just check out what was able to be done by BART with their data being made available, and they basically were able to get millions of dollars worth of free development work done, all aimed at increasing transit ridership.

You stated it well in one of your 2008 articles on the subject: Google makes websites and web properties, and WMATA operates the second-most-used transit system in the nation. I think WMATA should stick to trains and busses and let Google and other such companies do what they can to help people use the Internet to their advantage.

Nice - I'll have to try that.

Will - thanks, and agreed. Oddly omitted is any information lately on Yahoo!'s core search product. We hear about them making home page updates and reworks of their mail offering, but nothing on their search engine -- which has been the mainstay of their business. Odd as well, is that when you do the same search mentioned in this blog post on that Dianetics DVD, you get _no_ blog results, whcih I find curious. Makes me not want to use their search engine -- not as I'm biased, but as it makes me think they're shutting me off from relevant results.