Once again, we wish you a happy holiday season! If you didn't recieve our holiday card this year, here's  quick look at some pictures from it. Below the card is a special collection of haiku, one for each month, composed by yours truly. Enjoy.

Warm January!

Four weeks in the sun. Alas,

It ended too soon.

 

Julenna needs help!

January to Taiwan

Poor Andy alone

 

Jan's thirty years old

Let's throw a blowout party!

Shhhh! Crabby neighbor

 

Shooting video

For IJ's interior

Design lawsuit launch

 

Renovations abound!

New water line in the front

New porch in the back

 

Yellow Fish launches

Newborns, Weddings, Senior shoots:

Jan does it all!

 

Trip with Jason, Jay

Pitchfork fest, fancy hotel

Chitown style pushups

 

A week in DC

Filling in for the bossman

Eight days in the 'burbs

 

Team Soell goes to Maine!

Kayaking, fireside reading,

And Lebowskifest

 

Another big month:

So You Think You Can Dance Live!

Chicago Weekend!

 

Five kilometers!

Who knew Andy could do it?

Next: Half marathon.

 

Holiday shopping

Planning for California

Happy Twenty Ten!

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I'm about a week late in delivering this report, and for that I apologize. The truth is that, after spending a week without Google I had about 5,000 news items in Google Reader to comb through, a backlog of YouTube videos to watch, and some Gmail messages to respond to. Oh Google, how I've missed you.

In all seriousness, I did manage to keep to my self-imposed Google fast fairly diligently.  I removed Gtalk from my instant messaging application, changed my web browser's default search engine to Bing, and even blacklisted Google's IP address from my iPhone so that even Google maps embedded in applications wouldn't show up.  Finally, I exported all of my RSS feeds from Google Reader and instead used the stand-alone NewsFire application to keep up with my news.

What happened next was quite surprising.

I fully expected to miss the vast array of services that Google offers; There probably isn't a single day that goes by that I don't pop open the Google-powered Maps application on my phone to check out an address or get quick directions, or that I don't look up a picture on Google's image search engine.  I figured these would be the niche-areas that I would miss and not know how to replace.  And that was definitely the case, but it was still surprisingly easy to replace those. When meeting up with friends for breakfast one morning, I actually printed out directions from Mapquest for the first time in years. It felt like I was living in the 20th century again.

But what really surprised me was finding that the biggest area where I struggled to not return to Google was in the area of search.  I've kind of always been under the assumption that "search is search," and that Google's search algorithm, in practice, wasn't really much better than what anyone else had. I was downright wrong in that assessment.  For the duration of my experiment, I found myself constantly frustrated at Bing's search results and how it constistantly returned sites that had nothing to do with what I was looking for.  After a week without Google, I have come to really appreciate how they're able to point me toward what I'm looking for, and almost always in the first page of results.

The one area in which I didn't miss Google at all was my Google Wave account.  For all the hype around this service, nobody's really using it. In the two weeks since I wrote my first entry about Google, I hadn't received a single "Wave" and I've been unable to give out even one of the 17 invitations I have at my disposal.  So, if you've been looking for an invitation, please, let me know. I've got plenty of them.

Google, let's never fight again... How did I ever live without you?

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This morning, I read a really disturbing interview in The Register with Google's CEO Eric Schmidt on the topic of Internet privacy.  You can read it yourself, but the gist of it is that his stance -- and by extension, Google's stance -- is that the only people who should be concerned about privacy on the Internet are people that are doing something they should be ashamed of:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

It's the old "If you're not doing anything wrong, you shouldn't care" fallacy.  When Google was first created, they operated under a unifying standard of "Don't Be Evil," and I've kind of always trusted them.  Microsoft and other tech giants have never specifically operated under ethical credo like this, so I tended to give a little extra trust to an organization like Google that would go out of their way to say "we're going to be socially responsible with your information."

As a result of that, I've bought into their services in a deep, deep way.  There's not a day that goes by that I don't use many of their services: Search, Maps, News, Video, Bookmarking.  Google has a ton of information on me related my information consumption. And no, there's nothing there that would bother me if people knew, but it's still a staggering thought in light of Google's flippant attitude toward my privacy.

So, beginning today, I'm going without Google for a week.  This includes Google Search, Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Reader, YouTube, and all other Google-related services including their Chrome web browser.  I have a few caveats:

• Work-related Google Docs. We do share a handful of spreadsheets and documents on Google Docs, and I can't really ask my coworkers to take part in this experiement with me en masse
• Work-related YouTube videos. A lot of the work we do at IJ to raise awareness of our cases is done through YouTube videos. This morning, for example, I helped out in uploading and annotating this video for our latest case for the Texas Eyebrow Threading case.
• My personal email addresses. I host all of my domains' email with Google Apps, and switching that somewhere else for just a week would involve an entire day of lost productivity.

Apart from these few things, I'm avoiding Google until next Monday.  I've blocked Google's in my computer's host file and changed my default search engines to Bing (on my desktop) and Yahoo (on my iPhone).  I'll check back in next Monday to let you know how it goes.

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Thanksgiving is over; The leftovers have been eaten, the wishbone has been cracked, and the more adventurous of us have braved the crowds of Black Friday bargain seekers. With this major holiday behind us, we're officially free to begin looking forward to what we've been waiting for all year: California.

Last January, we were fortunate enough to have been able to spend a month outside of the frigid midwest in sunny Los Angeles.  It was without a doubt one of the biggest highlights of the year, and we've been apprehensively hoping this past year that we'd be able to pull it off again.  I'm happy to announce that we're going back!

Our plans last January kind of came together at the last minute; Around the middle of December, January had the brilliant idea to see if anyone on Craigslist was looking to sublet their place for a reasonable price.  Things quickly came together and three weeks later we found ourselves in a tiny one bedroom apartment two blocks from the Venice pier.  This year's plans shaped up just as quickly, but a little further in advance.  We'll be staying in the same general neighborhood, but a little further back from the beach: eight blocks as opposed to two.

Shortly after New Years, January, Gus and I will hit the road westward! We're planning to take our time and do a little sightseeing, so be sure to check back for updates.  We can't wait to get out there, and we definitely can't wait to share some pictures along the way.

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