The map from this month’s issue of The Atlantic is the most disturbing thing I’ve seen in quite a while. The Oasis Of The Seas casts shadows on 20-story buildings, makes more than nine elephants worth of ice cubes every day, and produces enough electricity to power all of the homes in Utah’s second-largest metropolitan statistical area!? Is this really necessary?
"Hope Floats"
I am becoming increasingly concerned with the Real Fruit From Real People slogan adorning each additional bottle of Tree Top apple juice that I consume. The superior taste of Tree Top as compared to the store brand apple juice makes me wonder if I should be paying attention to the writing on the wall bottle. What does this slogan even mean?
According to the company responsible for this mistake, this “refreshed identity … reinforc[es] the Tree Top brand promise” (a real person in every sip?) and “connects with the underlying motivation of target consumers” (to disintegrate others in a large and powerful blender?). At last the truth comes out: Cannibals, not families with small children, are the target market for 100% juice drinks! 
Signs that your company clearly sucks at life:
So I’ve been playing with Google Latitude recently and it’s both interesting and creepy. Primarily designed to be used on mobile phones, the service can also be used on laptop computer; it detects your approximate location and lets you share this information with friends, optionally with status updates. The idea of adding a geographic component to a friend status list à la Facebook/Twitter sounds like the next logical step.
More interesting, though, is the data required to drive such a service. Google Latitude is powered by the Google Gears browser plugin, which also facilitates offline access to Gmail and a variety of other web enhancements through its in-browser database component. Vaguely mentioned in passing is another, lesser-known feature of Gears: Google’s WiFi location database. Essentially, Google has wardriven major cities in the US and other countries, searching for wireless networks and plotting each wireless router it finds on the map by the geographic coordinates of the drive-by vehicle that detected the wireless signal. With a large enough database, this allows Google to pinpoint most laptop computers on the map by looking up the hardware address of the wireless router they are currently connected to and determining the approximate position on the Earth. Scarily awesome!
Welcome to 2009! If you haven’t joined the revolution, now is the perfect time to switch to Gmail. With the best spam filtering in the industry, instant search, built-in video chat, intuitive message organization using labels and conversations, free POP and IMAP access, and virtually unlimited storage, why use anything else?
Unless your using Yahoo Mail span (sorry!), you can even forward your old e-mail address to your new Gmail account and to move your existing and new e-mail messages all over to Gmail. This means you don’t even need to send friends one of those annoying “I changed my address” messages; it will all be automatic. If you’re still not convinced, consider this: Gmail users are younger, richer, good in bed and have higher credit scores.