Manda QoP

If you're one of those people who uses Google for email, searching for internet stuffs and looking at their house on Google Earth, then it's time to do a bit more wandering around the Google site. Did you know that there are LOADS of other things going on with Google? Have a bit of a browse around their site one evening whilst you're having a surf and you could find all sorts of cool little gadgets. Google have made their code easy and freely available which means there are lots of people are out there creating cool gadgets and applications just for the fun of it, for example, the following: - Kick it old school with a game of snake in Gmail by using a certain ctrl key function. - Move the chat box to the right side of the Gmail inbox - See an email time in the sender's time zone - Enable Mail Goggles to stop you from drunken emailing - Send an SMS using the chat gadget - which I need to test to see if it works in NZ as this could be quite useful dontchaknow All th...

I've been thinking about IT and how it has changed, for most people I guess it's changed for the better, but for some of us it's just not fun anymore. IT used to be about inventing, creating, figuring things out, getting excited about new things and going to work was a great adventure. For fun I'd pick up a new language and figure out writing a little app, like the little game I wrote using SCADA, a chess game in C and a bouncing ball app in Delphi, silly little things but they amused me at the time and I felt as though I was learning something. It was hard to imagine not loving your job and feeling so happy that you weren't in one of those 9-5 trapped in the office jobs that afflicted normal office workers. IT was fun and it stimulated the mind. Nowadays we appear to have ended up as drones, plodding in to 9-5 jobs where the software to create does all the work for us, thinking is optional. I have no desire whatsoever to invent little games anymore because it...