I held off this long but now I’ve joined the
tablet owning part of the world. I brought home my new and shiny Nexus 10 yesterday (purchased in the US, it is not yet available to buy in this dusty and dark corner of the world).
Android 4.2 on a 10 inch 2560×1600 screen is a lovely experience. It is the 16GB wifi-only version. Did I mention that the screen is awesome?
Recall my present from Google. Here’s what I spent the gift codes on (they were only valid in google-store.com):
A red fleece for me, and then “softshell” jackets for my whole family.
I got the package today. The stuff matched my expectations in appearance and feel and my kids just loved these “extra Christmas gifts”.
Believe me, this kind of seemingly random act of kindness warms up even the most seasoned and cold hacker’s heart. Look at this excerpt from a mail I received:
From: Stephanie T <…@google.com>
Subject: 2 Googlers would like to recognize your hard work on cURLHello Daniel,
As you know, we here in Google’s Open Source Programs Office are always interested in learning about new projects and people in the open source community. To that end, we asked our co-workers to help us by nominating people outside of Google that they thought were doing great things in the world of open source. This information helps us determine which organizations to fund and which projects to select for the Google Summer of Code and related programs.
Chris C and John M (Googlers) believe your work on cURL deserves to be recognized. To show our appreciation for this work, we would like to send you a special thank you gift and 2- $175 USD gift codes (totaling $350 USD) to the Google online store so you can pick out tee shirts or other gifts for yourself and loved ones.
[snip]
Thanks a lot!
(The names of the persons in the mail have been shortened by me to reduce their exposure here.)
If you click the image you’ll see a full-resolution screendump for my recent search for “libcurl” on google. Where did that (image of a) girl come from? Judging from where it appears on the results page right next to the information about the cURL project you can’t but assume that she’s somehow related to the project.
That’s of course not true. When moving the mouse over the image I get a tooltip with a funny “hair curling” URL and that’s also where a click on the image takes me.
A mighty weird way of presenting a search result if you ask me!