If you haven’t visited www.google.com today, I highly recommend a quick visit. Once you get there, turn up the volume on your speakers & hover your mouse over the strings. AWESOME!

As far as I know, they rolled out this changed in Gmail, Documents, and Maps…

…but not yet in Calendar. I doubt that’s the full list of where they’ve rolled it out, but those are the ones that I use regularly and noticed (click for larger image).

There’s another interface change out there that I found to be splashy. WordPress 3.1 released last week (yay!) and I updated this website shortly after. Now, when you’re signed in to your WordPress site and you visit your site, you get an opaque ribbon at the top (similar to Google) of your web page. You can go directly to your profile or dashboard, add a post or page, go to your comments, adjust your menu or widgets, and there is a small bar graph showing site stats. I’m not sure if that’s just for me because I have that plug-in, but it’s freakin cool nonetheless (click for larger image).

“The application Finder can’t be opened.” -10810

I can’t remember what I was doing the first time it happened, but when it happened just now, I was attempting to delete 4 or 5 directories on a shared server. The directories were NOT huge; it shouldn’t have crashed Finder. But it did. I had to force quit Finder and then when I tried to open it again, I got that crappy error message.

But I found a solution via the googler.

1. Open Terminal. For those who are scared to open Terminal, don’t worry I’m in the same boat. I promise it will be okay.
2. Type this in to Terminal:
   System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder &
3. Hit Enter.

Now the first time I hit enter, my Finder window popped open. I was happy, so I closed the Finder window & Terminal. Then I clicked on Finder in the dock, and I got that damn error again.

So, second time through, I started over at Step #1 and repeated the process. The second time that I hit enter (Step #3), the Finder window did not open automatically. But the Finder icon in the dock had the bottom light, so I clicked on it and a Finder window popped open. Phew!

But then I closed Terminal. When you go to close Terminal, it closes your Finder. Boo.

Third time through, repeat all steps. Finder automatically opens when I hit enter this time. Hit up the googler again to find a fix.

4. Type this in to Terminal: disown
5. Hit Enter.
6. Now close Terminal and your Finder should still stay open.

Wow… That was a huge bear. Hope Apple fixes that bug.

Many thanks to this person:
http://www.adeepbite.com/must-know-macosx-tips-and-tricks/the-application-finder-cant-be-opened/,
and this person:
http://utvv.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-to-fix-application-finder-cant-be.html

When you arrived at the Gmail homepage or logged into your Gmail account, all the vowels were missing.

It was honestly one of the weird occurrences that I’ve ever seen. They said that at one of their datacenters:

the frontend web servers in that particular datacenter started failing to render the letter ‘a’ for a subset of users. As error rates escalated, the strain spread to other datacenters. We worked quickly to avoid a cascading failure of the entire alphabet by implementing a stopgap solution that limited the damage to the letters ‘a,’ ‘e,’ ‘i,’ ‘o,’ and ‘u.’ As a result, we’re experiencing Gmail’s first temporary vowel outage. (We’re still investigating whether the letter ‘y’ is impacted and will post an update here shortly.)

They did update that the letter ‘y’ was not impacted straight away and got it “fixed” by mid-afternoon.

Well, checking back on this because it boggled me so much, at 12:01am on April 2nd, they posted the following:

Update (12:01 am): Also, this issue never happened. Happy April 1st.

Damn. That really, really got me. Good April Fool’s.

Also, Google’s new OS is getting a lot of chatter. Check these out as well: Google’s Chrome OS to rival Windows and Google’s Chrome as a ‘shrinking’ OS.