Richard Lack's Blog

A new thing I can't live without...Google Desktop search

Losing things drives me mad. Last weekend I lost my car keys for the duration of the afternoon and my life was put on hold. Wouldn't it have been great if I could have pointed Google search at the problem? Up on the white board in the kitchen it would have displayed:

"Searched 11 rooms for car keys in 0.24 seconds. Results: 1 set found including 7 keys: Kitchen floor>by fridge. 3.56pm"

We just got one step closer to this with the launch of Google Desktop search. If you've ever lost a document, or an email or tried to locate the web page from 2 weeks ago for that Cassoulet recipe then this is for you. Put simply - it's a small application (400kb) which installs on your machine and indexes every document, email or web page you've ever viewed. If you need to find an email from 6 months ago from somebody whose name you don't remember that was about 'wedding plans' then just do a search on the Google Desktop browser and the entire contents of your hard drive will be searched in under a second. You'll see a threaded list of all e-mail neatly arranged alongside and web pages or office docs you might have created or been sent.

Simple, neat, usable and stunningly fast. Requires no further explanation here. Now where was that link I downloaded it from?

Hang on a sec........
1 result stored on your computer
Google Desktop Search: 1:52pm http://desktop.google.com/

Things to cross off the list

It occured to me today that there are 2 things that I really ought to have done when I had a chance.



1: Lunch at the top of the World Trade Centre

2: Take Concorde to NYC



Proof positive that sometimes you should just blow the expense and do it anyway. It doesn't look like there's much prospect of anything along the lines of concorde going into production for a very long time. The avionics industry is going backwards for the first time ever.



It's sad to see the end of the irrationally exuberant and optimistic era of our history when we'd build passenger planes that flew at twice the speed of sound, buildings that reached the clouds and lunar craft that touched down on the dark side of the moon. When did we stop striving?

If it please your Honour...?

Today is a celebration of that dissapearing species, a man described in most of the papers this morning as a 'British Boffin'



I've been part of the campaign for 6 years to get Tim Berners-Lee knighted. He's an extraordinary man; who besides inventing the web and making this blog possible, has been odd among the digerati in never seeking to profit from his invention. Tim didn't file patents, incorporate start-ups or license the technology of http and html to the NASDAQ luminaries. Were it not for Tim's philanthropic vision of shared learning the world would be a very different place. It's a tribute to him that he never climbed inside the bubble which would burst so spectacularly 8 years later.



A knighthood for a man such as this, or Martin Evans, the brilliant stem cell pioneer - means so much more to me than the myriad honours doled out to the assorted showbiz has-beens for Services to Entertainment (...and Never Getting Caught Doing Coke in the Service of Panto).



Though I think it's fantastic that the Rugger team got a boot in on the honours...and still no rumours of spit roasting; I can't help feeling it premature, impatient even. They are somehow less formidable on the pitch for all their medals. I imagine Jason Robertson breaking into a fast pelt down the wing and legions of Aussie backs genuflecting and declaring sarcastically: "After you Mi' Lord"



The honours used to inspire us by lifting up the people the Establishment wanted us to become. Lately the emphasis has changed such that it's a way for Tony to show our Monarch that we'll choose our own heroes. Lollipop ladies and Milkmen. People that are demonstrably straight kind of guys. I think this often misses the point of the excercise and does a disservice to those that have bothered to go out and acheive real and inspirational greatness.