Computers, Google, and Work

Pathetic calls for computer help:
Why do you turn off your computer by going to “start”?
I can’t see the cursor through the smoke.
Is it safe to use a fire extinguisher on a computer?
My laptop was working before I went through the car wash.
Do you remember that Trojan horse you warned me about last week?
My thingy is broken.
I thought that drawer was a hideaway cup holder.


Ten Google Tricks
Within quotation marks, type your phone number (use dashes, not periods) and hit Enter. On the resulting page, select MAP, and presto, you know where you live – and so will everyone else who knows your phone number.
Wildcard - When you place a * (asterisk) in your query, Google will match any word in between. For example: apple * player matches apple ipod player, apple mp3 player, etc.
Fuzzy Search - Search for ~music player, and Google searches for music player, mp3 player, audio player, and other words that have similar meanings to music.
You can find synonyms of words. E.g. when you search for [house] but you want to find “home” too, search for [~house]. To get to know which synonyms the Google database stores for individual words, simply use the minus operator to exclude synonym after synonym (they will always show as bold in the SERPs, the search engine result pages). Like this: [~house -house -home -housing -floor].
A quote/ phrase search can be written with both quotations ["like this"] as well as a minus in-between words, [like-this].
To see a really large page-count (possibly, the Google index size, though one can only speculate about that), search for [* *].
You can use the wildcard character without searching for anything specific at all, as in this phrase search: ["* * * * * * *"].
Google has a lesser known “numrange” operator which can be helpful. Using e.g. [2000..2005] (that’s two dots inbetween two numbers) will find 2000, 2001, 2002 and so on until 2005.
Google’s define-operator allows you to look up word definitions. For example, [define:css] yields “Short for Cascading Style Sheets” and many more explanations. You can trigger a somewhat “softer” version of the define-operator by entering “what is something”, e.g. [what is css].
There a “sport” called Google Hacking. Basically, curious people try to find unsecure sites by entering specific, revealing phrases. A special web site called the Google Hacking Database is dedicated to listing these special queries.




Work thoughts
Productivity drops after the first ten hours of a working day.
So does judgment. That’s why people who work really long hours won’t (and can’t) admit that their productivity has dropped.
When one works that much, the rest of the world fades away. One acquires a pathologically narrow perspective.