Despite Ireland’s rainy reputation I had plenty of opportunities to take photos, and you can see a picture from the top floor of one of the Google Dublin buildings at the beginning of this post. I also managed to drop my camera, a Nikon D60, lens-first to the pavement. This was right before a trip to Ireland’s beautiful west coast, including Connemara. My 18-55mm Nikon kit lens wasn’t completely smashed, but zooming is painful, autofocus doesn’t always work, and something is out-of-plane because I get annoying directional blur in the sides and bottom corners of most shots.

So I need to replace the 18-55mm. I don’t have a lot of budget for cameras and equipment, hence the D60. I have a few ideas about what I might get, but between the experienced photographers I know and rest of the web I hope to get some suggestions, pointers, and other wisdom.

Here’s what I’m thinking about:

Sigma 18-250mm f/3.5-6.3 DC OS HSM. I keep wanting more telephoto than my kit lens, and I’d like to have one versatile lens that I can leave on the camera for entire trips. It’s got decent reviews, and more importantly, it looks like I can pick it up for under $500, compared to $750+ for the Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G AF-S ED VR II. One drawback with any super zoom lens is weight, and this one clocks in at 628 g. I might also consider the older Sigma 18-200mm is it’s significantly cheaper.

The Nikon 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6 AF-S DX VR ED Nikkor Lens is tempting too, but Ken Rockwell isn’t a fan and I’ve had luck with his recommendations in the past. It looks like I can pick it up for $360 and probably get a lightly used one for even cheaper – this is the kit lens for some cameras so a lot of people sell it when they upgrade. Not as much zoom as the Sigma but also not as much weight – only 420 g.

I’m also really interested in picking up a prime lens at some point. I take a lot of photos of my kid, and she’s moving faster every day. Any recommendations on 55mm vs 35mm? Should I pick up a used 18-105mm and use the savings to pick up a prime lens too, or is buying used a big risk with these kinds of lenses?

Please tell me what you think (or that I’m crazy and should pick up something completely different instead) in the comments below.

Part 1: Giga-what, giga-who?

Most of the time you and I can get by with some pretty small numbers. I might buy a 5-pound bag of flour or ask you to lend me 20 dollars, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you work in science, engineering, economics, or other similar fields you inevitably need to count or measure things that are really, really big, and you don’t want your readers to spend all their time counting digits rather than appreciating your brilliant prose.

This is why we have the International System of Units (SI) and its prefixes. When Doc Brown is pouring pilfered plutonium into a DeLorean to send it to the future, rather than wrapping Marty’s head around 1,210,000,000 watts he can simply exclaim, “1.21 gigawatts!” When Commander Data is downloading MP3s, he can say he’s got 100 petabytes to fill, rather than boring Geordi with 100,000,000,000,000,000.

But what happens when you get past peta- (10^15), exa- (10^18), zetta- (10^21) and yotta (10^24)? Right now you’re stuck. At this point we’re in the range of some ridiculously big numbers, but the universe is ridiculously big. The mass of the Earth is about 5,980,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 grams, or 5,980 yottagrams – but who’s got time for thousands of yottagrams?

Sendek has a solution – add a new prefix, hella-. Now we can say that the Earth’s mass is about 6 hellagrams. Isn’t that better? If you like, you can join the petition at Facebook.

If you’re not from California you might not recognize the term “hella.” No worries, I’m originally from Cleveland, where the only person who ever said “hella” was Mr. T in A-Team reruns, so it took me a while to catch on too.

“Hella” may have started as a contraction of “a hell of a”, as in “we had a hell of a good time,” but has evolved to serve as both an intensifier and a quantifier. For example:

1. That particular flavor of ice cream is hella delicious.
2. Let’s go to that other heladeria, they have hella flavors.

You can read more scholarly research by Bucholtz, Bermudez, Fung, Edwards, and Vargas in the Journal of English Linguistics.

Part 2: Hella isn’t as crazy as you might think

“Hella” is regional slang, and Sendek’s petition is a bit tongue-in-cheek, so why don’t we just dismiss this as a stupid joke? Well, it turns out that not all current SI units – though very impressive and scientific-sounding – have very scientific origins.

Let’s take giga-, for example. From Wikipedia, we learn:

According to the American writer Kevin Self, a German committee member of the International Electrotechnical Commission proposed giga as a prefix for 10^9 in the 1920s, drawing on a verse by the humorous poet Christian Morgenstern that appeared in the third (1908) edition of Galgenlieder (Gallows Songs). This suggests that a hard German [?] was originally intended as the pronunciation. Self was unable to ascertain at what point the alternative pronunciation came into occasional use, but claimed that as of 1995 it had died out.

As a non-German I was completely ignorant of Galgenlieder, so I poked around a bit to learn more about the source of our very scientific prefix. It turns out this is a book of literary nonsense poetry, and includes this verse (translated to English):

The Winglewangle phlutters
through widowadowood,
the crimson Fingoor splutters
and scary screaks the Scrood.

So yeah. Given this precedent, it’s safe to say we can pull SI prefixes from whatever source we want. We can continue up the chain. Tera- comes from the Greek for “monster”, meaning every time some programmer talks about terabytes they might as well be saying “it’s like monster-bytes big, yo!” Prefixes come from German, Greek, Italian, even Danish. Given the many contributions to science and engineering by the United States, isn’t it time for a prefix of peculiarly American English origin?

Bonus Part 3: Get a load of this

I’m not quite done yet. Some of our least official-sounding vernacular units actually have extensive literary and historical backing. I’m talking, of course, about the assload. How many times have you heard phrases like, “I have an assload of homework,” or “I have to get this assload of parrots to the recycling center?”

Well it turns out that this unit of measure has a long, established history. In fact, it’s biblical. From Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000), Page 1375:

The homer serves as the standard expression of dry capacity in the OT [Old Testament]. The word “homer” is cognate to “ass” and serves as an approximation to the normal load carried by this animal.

The reason you don’t remember it from Sunday school is that it’s usually imprecisely translated as “measure” in the King James Version. It shows up in Exodus 16:35 and Ezekial 45:11 and probably other places, but those KJV guys took a lot of artistic license in translating units to “a measure.”

Sewing up the argument hella tight

In a sense, this all boils down to prescriptivism vs. descriptivism. Measures used to all be descriptivist like the assload, but now we need prescriptive precision. “Hella” is a prescriptivist’s nightmare, but most modern linguists are descriptivists, so why not? And don’t even get me started on the units that journalists tend to use on TV, where you’re more likely to encounter “football fields” as a measure of area than square meters.

So we have historical precedent for the “hella-” prefix and we’ve incidentally proven that “assload” deserves its spot in the lexicon of quantification. So sign the petition, and if you happen to know any members of the SI committee, please pass this along so we can get this matter settled quickly.

Shortly thereafter, the moderator posted:

To repeat: we welcome your comments, but please don’t post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic — they will be deleted.

If you know anything about the internet, then you know that this message was the worst possible thing Nestle could have posted. It’s the Streisand Effect – if you try to hide something on the internet, it suddenly becomes a lot more interesting, and you only draw more attention to it. This is so basic to the sociology of the web that if I were hiring someone to do social media work or PR, that would be the first question in the interview.

The Salon article catalogues some interesting exchanges between the Nestle admin and Facebook users, culminating in this announcement:

Nestle: This (deleting logos) was one in a series of mistakes for which I would like to apologise. And for being rude. We’ve stopped deleting posts, and I have stopped being rude.

A trip to the fan page now shows nothing but altered logos and calls for boycott. The Salon piece concludes that the real shame of this whole exchange is that the admin acted like a human being, actually talked to people, and is probably in big trouble for it – and if not, Nestle will be less likely to do anything like this in the future, retreating to boring press releases and spokespeople.

I think the real lesson to be learned here is that when you show up to a conversation, you actually need to have something to say.

Nestle is trying to take advantage of the fact that there’s a lot of people out there who really like their milk chocolate, or really enjoy KitKat bars. They’re using social networking sites to encourage people to talk about chocolate and KitKat bars, remember how much they like them, and hopefully buy more. This all makes sense and is a lot more engaging and cost effective than TV ads and the like. But once you start people talking, you cannot control what they are going to say. That’s not how conversations work, even conversations attenuated into new formats like Facebook wall posts.

So no people are accusing you of hating cute orangutans, what do you do? You need to be able to say something:

• We didn’t know, this is what we’re doing to fix this.
• This isn’t true, here’s why.
• There’s no other suppliers, but here’s what we’re working on to substitute or work around the problem.

Hell, if you think you can get away with it without losing more customers, even saying “Who cares about monkeys, we gots to have our delicious sugary snacks!” is better than saying nothing or trying to edit the conversation in progress. Having some kind of ethics really matters here.

But if you can’t say any of these things… well, just shut everything down. Stop trying to build equity in your brand and concentrate on making the cheapest candy because your company obviously doesn’t understand the point of building a brand or cultivating passionate customers.

Three weeks ago I found out I had a time bomb in my gut. The timer on this metaphorical bomb wasn’t set to an exact hour, and there were no ominous red digits ticking down, but my viscera were rigged on a hair trigger. My gall bladder was filled with stones, and it was just a matter of time before they would be ejected, painfully squeezing down my bile duct. With luck they would jam their way through and into my duodenum, but some could back up into pancreas, causing pancreatitis, or create a blockage and infection, cholangitis.

This was actually a good thing. After an all-night stomach ache over the weekend I went to work on Monday and met my wife and her brother (an NP and MD, respectively) for lunch. They noticed that I was turning yellow, eyes-first. Something like this:

Turning yellow isn’t all bad – I could defeat the Green Lantern in a super hero battle and as my friend Jessica pointed out on Facebook, I no longer needed to use the sepia filter in Photoshop to make myself look old-timey. Jaundice has a number of possible causes, and gall stones are definitely one of the more agreeable ones. An ultrasound turned up the stones in my gall bladder, a series of blood tests helped rule out other causes, and an MRI found the stones already stuck in the biliary duct.

A quick word about the MRI, since I had never had one before – getting an MRI is like being stuck inside a particularly tedious Atari game. The sounds are straight up Yar’s Revenge, though instead of flying a spaceship you are stuck in a tube. Something like this:

I had an ERCP and a laparoscopic gall bladder removal scheduled for the following week. As surgeries go these are very agreeable. Unlike my father 30-some years ago, I would not need to have my abdomen cut open for a cholecystectomy, but instead they would make three small cuts, insert instruments, and pull out my gall bladder. Something like this:

So, back to that time bomb. I had an ERCP scheduled for Tuesday and the actual removal for Friday. My job was to eat small, extremely low-fat meals so as not to trigger the release of bile and otherwise wait it out hoping to make it to the first procedure before the timer ran out. My life was becoming the most boring season of 24 ever conceived.

How had I gone so long without symptoms? It turns out, I hadn’t. For a few months I had been getting stomach pressure and pain, but it always cleared up within 20 minutes of taking normal, over-the-counter simethicone so I didn’t think it was a big deal. I already eat a diet pretty close to what they put me on while waiting, very low fat, usually small meals, lots of veggies and grains. On an average diet, I guess I would have been in pain constantly. I had been getting spells of fatigue as well but tiredness is a hard thing to pin down – tired after lunch at work? Must be low blood sugar. Tired in the morning? Must not have slept well.

On Sunday my time ran out. I started to feel the same kind of pressure I had the week before and called the on-call GI doc. He said to give it a little while to see if it would die down. It didn’t, so he got me pre-admitted and my wife drove me to the hospital.

There’s one thing I will never understand about hospitals, and that’s why they are so universally difficult to navigate. Stanford is a prime example, starting with finding your way to the right parking lot and entrance. Between the two of us we could not find the way to admitting. We ended up going to the ER (that was well marked, at least) to ask directions to admitting. I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about the usability of websites, but what about the usability of street signs and floor plans?

By this point I was in the worst pain of my life, and about to confront another thing I will never understand – the entire legal profession. As I sat in a wheelchair, shaking from pain, the (otherwise very nice and helpful) woman at the desk started handing me forms to sign. At that point, I would have signed anything! The Declaration of Independence, my own death warrant, hell, if she would have handed me a 1951 Bowman rookie card I would have signed “Mickey Mantle.” How could that possibly be considered necessary or valid?

Once in the hospital, everything went smoothly and I really am doing well in recovery. Sitting in the bed between procedures my anxiety about my gall bladder was put in its place – both of the roommates I had were in much worse shape than I ever was. So though I felt like I was walking around with a time bomb, and I wouldn’t wish gall stone pain on anyone, and surgery is never fun to look forward to, I spent a few days mostly feeling thankful I didn’t have something much worse.

Which brings me to my final two points, which are probably more interesting to the regular readers of this blog than my personal episode of ER:

First, this whole episode has really reminded me how connected we all are. I sent out status updates here and there via Twitter, Facebook, etc. and got back a lot of great replies from friends and family. It’s the same thing we discovered when our daughter was born- with social networking it’s remarkably easy to let a lot of people know a little about what’s going on in your life.

Second, some things about working at Google still astound me, even after two years. When you see Google on TV you hear about the food, the dinosaur, the marble track, but you miss out on the most important difference working at Google compared to other companies – people actually want to be there.

It sounds simple but it has strange effects. I have never been out sick for this long in my life, but have had absolutely no pressure to return to work from my managers or co-workers. No ticking clock of sick-day PTO hours, no calls, no expectations of keeping up with email, just good wishes and advice to make sure I’m really recovered before I head back. And yet here I sit, really wanting to go in tomorrow so I can work on X and Y and see what’s been going on with Z.

In a sense I feel a little bad for the folks who go to Google straight from college, if only because they don’t have anything to compare it to. In other jobs you might be wary to even mention the nature of any health problems you’ve had, coming in sick to not risk adverse consequences. Here, I’m writing about surgery for the world to read. I got to watch the recent health care reform vote out of policy interest rather than, as so many others must have, watching in the desperate hope of getting coverage. I’m pretty damn lucky.

You can probably imagine how you would feel if this was happening to you. Does Google hate me? Was my site hacked? What do I do, and how much will it cost to get this fixed?

I will answer all of those questions, starting with the first:

My site is falling out of the index, does Google hate me?

Probably not. My situation is actually pretty illustrative – I’m pretty sure Google doesn’t hate me and isn’t unfairly slapping my site down because, well, I work at Google.

That’s right, Google was kicking pages from one of its own employees out of search results. I’m sure I’m not the first. Google doesn’t treat my site any differently than anyone else’s. BTW, standard disclaimers apply to this post.

So I knew there was probably a logical reason for the dropped pages, which brings me to the next question:

Is Google dropping my pages from search results because my site got hacked?

This is a very, very good question to ask – hacking is unfortunately common. This very site has been hacked before. I don’t want to go into a lot of detail on how to tell if your site was hacked in this post, but the Webmaster Central Blog has some good pointers.

Really, this is part of a broader question – what has changed with my site? In my case it wasn’t hacking – it turns out out that Google was getting tons of crawl errors over the past couple weeks. As Googlebot tried to recrawl my site looking for new content, it kept getting network unreachable errors. After days and days of this, Googlebot figured I had closed up shop. We don’t want to send searchers to pages that have disappeared.

Why all the errors? Here’s where I had to do some digging – I have a multi-site account with a web host. It turns out my site had exceeded my bandwidth quota. The worst thing is it’s not the max quota I paid for, but just the amount I had portioned off for my blog. I didn’t think I’d ever get enough visitors to worry about it. D’oh.

What do I do, and how much will it cost to get this fixed?

If your site starts disappearing from Google search results, how can you figure out what’s going on without access to all the uber-powerful, super-secret Google tools that I used?

It turns out I only needed one Google tool to diagnose the problem, and I’ll let you in on the secret. In fact, I’ll leak the url (SEO bloggers get ready to tweet!):

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Yep, good old Webmaster Tools. Between the reports there and my own host’s dashboard, I was able to figure out and fix the problem in less than 20 minutes. Googlebot will take longer than that to reindex everything but I noticed progress almost immediately:

I looked under Site Diagnostics -> Crawl Errors to see all the pages that Google couldn’t reach. After I fixed the bandwidth cap on my side, I noticed that under Sitemaps, my sitemap status had a little red “X” as well. I logged into to my blog and regenerated the sitemap, checked that it was there, and clicked “Resubmit” in Webmaster Tools.

Voila! Total cost: $0.

Bonus Question: This sounds embarrassing, why are you sharing it with everyone?

Having my own site start disappearing from my employer’s search engine isn’t exactly something to brag about. It’s doubly embarrassing to admit how long it took for me to notice what was going on, though I bet a lot of other site owners are in the same boat, to busy doing their day jobs to constantly check search rankings.

I wanted to share my story because #1, it might help someone figure out what to do if they have a similar issue, and #2, it illustrates a bit about how Google tries to do business.

Everything is set up to give users the best results we can, and to cope with all the spam and abuse on the web. Sites that are irrelevant, unresponsive, or violate the webmaster guidelines might not end up in front of searchers, even if it’s my site. Heck, even if it’s Google Japan.

2. Use the cache.

Cookies aren’t the only thing your browser downloads and keeps around, and for good reason. Logos and other images with stable filenames don’t tend to change very often, so instead of re-downloading them each time you revisit a site your browser caches them on disk. Other external files like Javascript can also be cached. This makes surfing the web a lot faster for everyone.

Any time someone is able to send you a file that sticks around, though, they’ve got a way to figure out if you’ve been there before. And as Josh Duck outlined in his blog post, Abusing the Cache: Tracking Users without Cookies, it’s not too tough to embed a tracking code to track your user sessions whether or not you clear your cookies.

This isn’t too terrible – users can always clean their cache, and this is generally most useful for tracking individual users visits to a single site. If you could convince enough site owners to add your widget to their site, though, you might be able to get more interesting data.

3. Check which links the user has visited.

This isn’t a new technique, at least by web standards, you can see examples as early as 2006 by Jeremiah Grossman. CSS gives you the ability to set up custom styles for links – the default style, the style when the user hovers or clicks, and most importantly for this hack the style after the user has visited the link. Browsers styled visited links differently even back in the ancient days of the web, turning blue link text to purple to help you navigate.

Any site can create a list of links to other sites and, with a bit of Javascript, tell if you’ve visited those sites in the recent past. The list of links can be hidden from the users view, so they might not even notice what’s going on. Spyjax is one example implementation with source code.

This is limited since you have to explicitly check for each potentially-visited site. So you might be able to check to see if they’ve been to Facebook, but not get the list of every social networking site they’ve ever been to. On the other hand with browsers like Chrome and Firefox getting faster all the time, checking lots of links by brute force is more possible. Users can always limit or clear their browsing history to make this technique less effective.

Should I panic yet?

Not quite, but it’s always a good idea to be on the lookout for things that undermine the assumptions of privacy and anonymity that people tend to have while surfing the web.

We’ve looked at clever ways to track a user from visit to visit, from site to site, and to get information about other sites they’ve visited. But each can be defeated, so if you want more anonymity you can still have it. To be honest I worry more about malware stealing passwords, phishing sites tricking people into giving away bank account info, and companies that have lots of sensitive info being hacked or ordered to divulge info by government. None of those problems rely on new Javascript hacks or can be fixed by clearing the browser cache.

Found a new clever hack for tracking users? Got even more important privacy concerns that I missed? Please post in the comments below.

It’s important because it illustrates a key cultural and technological underpinning of the Internet: anonymity. The second reason it’s important is that it’s so old, printed in the New Yorker in 1993, which is basically old testament times in Internet years. So for decades, the web has allowed people to browse without telling or proving who they are. Though many sites would love if you created an account and logged in, the vast majority are perfectly happy to serve up pages to you without even knowing if you’re a person or a dog.

But there are many reasons to want to track a user from page to page or from site to site, and there are various ways to do it. The most common way involves cookies. Web developers need a way to create user sessions or else things users like (shopping carts, preferences, the ability to update your profile picture) are impossible to implement.

Cookies are pretty well understood, and users can turn them off or clear them out if they really want. Google Chrome, for example, has “Incognito Mode” which allows you to surf without saving cookies, history, etc. from session to session. Even with cookies off, though, maintaining a user session within a particular site by passing around a session id isn’t too hard. It’s trivial to do in PHP for example.

Most users are pretty comfortable with this state of affairs – Facebook knows who I am because I logged in, but I trust them. Amazon knows who I am but that’s cool because I’m shopping. Some other site doesn’t know who I am, but it knows that I’m the same person who clicked on the widget to change the language a couple minutes ago.

People start getting uncomfortable when you start tracking them across sites. People become even more uncomfortable when they no longer have control over their anonymity. Three recent techniques violate both of those comfort zones in limited ways.

1. The EFF’s Panopticlick project.

Follow the link above and click the “test me” button. Is your browser silently betraying you? This is a very clever hack based on the fact that browsers almost always send some information to web servers in http headers (the user agent, what type of content the browser is willing to accept, etc.). People have been misusing user agent headers to try to get Javascript working in multiple browsers for years. Panopticlick also checks for available plugins and fonts. Adding all this data up there’s enough variability from one browser to the next that you can apparently reliably identify individuals. The EFF has a great post on the information theory behind the project.

This doesn’t mean sites will know who you are, but they could use this information to know that you visited web page A, B and C whether or not you want them too. An ad network could use this info to track you across many sites. An unscrupulous site could sell this info, giving your browsing history away for cash, and if you log into a site that has personally-identifying info about you (email, shipping addresses, etc.) the history could potentially be tied back to a person.

Next post, I’ll talk about another way to track users without cookies and a way for a site to tell if you’ve visited other sites in the past. I’ll also tell you why you shouldn’t panic, though I admit a better writer would have told you that first.

I wanted to add three things:

1. I work for Google fighting abuse, but I’m not involved in this so I can’t tell you anything more than what you see on the blog. If I was involved, then I definitely couldn’t tell you more. Standard disclaimers apply.
2. I am very proud to work for a company with such a commitment to openness and free speech.
3. I’ve worked with some folks from our Beijing office, and in my experience they are smart, capable people committed to serving users and helping people get the information they are searching for. I hope everything works out for them.

The way I did it was… not optimal, to say the least. I wrote a bunch of PHP code, spaced out participant sessions, etc. to make sure I could get results back. Google tries to make sure that spammers aren’t scraping search results to generate webspam, so any kind of scraping with cURL, Beautiful Soup, etc. can result in a big pile of failure.

The way I did it wasn’t the right way or the easy way, so when I got the job I made a mental note to ask around for the best way to get search results. Then I forgot all about it until an email exchange with Gary Warner of CyberCrime & Doing Time fame.

It turns out Google has a great University research program and API. You have to apply for registration and let us know who you are, what school you’re affiliated with, and what you plan to study. Assuming everyting checks out you’ll get access to a pretty nice API. There’s a some example Python code but you could just as easily use PHP, Java, or whatever to consume the XML responses.

And that research I was doing? I recently noticed that my paper has been cited 7 or 8 times, according to Google Scholar. I used to joke that I had written the least influential paper in the history of academic publishing, but I guess I can’t claim the title anymore. Scopus only shows 4 citations so I will remain humble anyway.

If you’re like me you’re probably tired of hearing about how every new phone is or is not an “iPhone killer.” To be honest, I really like the iPhone — I used to have one and my wife has one now. I’m not on the Android team, but I doubt they’re trying to “kill” any other devices – most Googlers like any mobile device with a full-fledged web browser.

That said, if you’re wondering which phone to buy, I think the Nexus One has the edge. Here are five reasons why:

1. The screen is really, really nice. This might sound a bit superficial, but the truth is I spend much more time surfing the web and reading than I do actually making phone calls. In my experience the higher the resolution, the less eyestrain. I also often use my phone to show people photos, and the Nexus One screen really does the photos justice.

I remember getting my iPhone and being amazed by the 480 x 320 pixel screen at 163 ppi. The Nexus One has a slightly larger screen, but much higher resolution, 800 x 480.

2. Voice input is awesome. Every time you need to type something, whether it’s an email, text message, or blog post, you always have the option of saying it. Today I texted my wife to let her know I was running late as I walked down the stairs from work – no need to look at the phone or spend time tapping out the message. That’s a pretty trivial example, but I find myself using it more and more in lots of situations just like that.

3. The video is actually adequate. This is the mobile phone I’ve seen that produces video that’s good enough to share with others. Here’s an example, and note that the lighting wasn’t exactly optimal:

We have a Canon video camera that we almost never use because it’s yet another device to lug around and getting videos off of it is a huge pain. I always have my Nexus One on me, and I can upload the videos directly to YouTube right after I take them. This means I’m getting a ton more video of my 1-year-old daughter and sharing it with family all around the country.

4. The photo gallery is nice, with great Picasa integration. I mentioned that showing off photos is a big use case for me, and the photo gallery is easy to navigate, fast, and looks cool too. It’s pushing me to use Picasa more even though I still prefer Flickr.

5. Multitasking is more useful than I thought. When the iPhone came out, I dismissed a lot of the criticism that it didn’t allow multitasking. How many different things do you expect to do at the same time on a small device? But as time went on, little task-switching annoyances started to add up.

I won’t run through all the possibilities, but my friend Wysz has a pretty good demonstration – he was able to get turn-by-turn GPS directions while listening to MP3s and streaming live video to the web. All on one phone. That’s pretty amazing.

Anything else? The Android Market is really starting to fill with cool apps, though it’s not quite as extensive as the iTunes App Store. I expect that to change as more people get Android phones. I wish I could write more about how developer-friendly the Android OS is, but I’m a bit ashamed to admit I haven’t made time to write a single line of code.

So, if you’re looking for a new phone, I completely recommend the Nexus One. If you really prefer a physical keyboard, take a look at the Droid, which has comparable specs to the Nexus One in a lot of ways. And honestly iPhones are still pretty cool, too, and I wouldn’t mind playing around the Palm Pre for a bit. This is the great thing about competition – right now we have a bunch of great mobile devices and mobile operating systems to chose from, and each is pushing the others to do better. If only we could say the same thing about the carriers.

If you have any Nexus One or Android questions, feel free to ask in the comments below.