I have been in the land of Google for a few days now. I don't know how I ever lived without it.
I am so 'done' with my installation, that this evening I remembered that every now and again, for a newsletter that I write, I want to use a graphic from a series of CD's I bought years ago. The format of all 26,118 black and white drawings is .tif. Photoshop does not play nice with .jpg and .tif together since .jpg files are 8 bit and .tif files are 16 bit. I used to have a converter that converts the .tif file to a .jpg file. Tried to find my registry key for the program and couldn't find it. So ...
... I googled: "how to convert a .tif file to a .jpg file in photoshop"
and found a photo.net forum that discussed just this! One person mentioned going into Photoshop and changing the mode from 16 bit to 8 bit ... but, for some reason - for these ancient files - the option was not available to me. Someone mentioned Adobe Bridge had a batch program that would convert the files. Adobe Bridge comes with Photoshop - so I got in and tried it. I worked great!
Problem is - you had to select the files and mine were spread throughout a complicated hierarchy of folders - and I didn't want to have to go through all the folders selecting files ... I'm lazy that way ...
And then I saw the magic words "I just use XNView and process them all at once ... it is a free program and works great". So ... I Googled: "XNView" and there it was, free and looked safe. Installed it on my old computer ... just in case it was some sort of virulent Trojan Horse and it was wonderful! Also - it let me select the top level folder and it would convert all the files in all the folders below it! With 2 clicks of the mouse - I CONVERTED ALL 21,118 FILES!!!
I am so in love with google right now! So enamoured by it and how easy it has made my life these past few days.
Can't find a feature in Windows 7?
GOOGLE IT!
Can't remember the name of the converter software?
GOOGLE IT!
Need to study up on firewire cables?
GOOGLE IT!
You get the picture. I am in Google Heaven!
And all of a sudden, I wondered ... where in the world did they come up with the word 'google'?
I asked Ryan and he said he thought it had something to do with a really big number ...
... which was pretty close and the word the inventors (or what ever they would be called) thought of when they named it ... although they misspelled it. The word was 'googol' and what they were going for. But THAT word had a history. How do I know this?
I GOOGLED IT!
Here was the answer in 'Yahoo answers' to the google: "were did the word google come from"
"Although it is often stated that the comic strip was not the inspiration for the name of the Google search engine, a linkage is evident and can be traced in a simple fashion:
the word "Google" was introduced in 1913 in The Google Book, a children's book about the Google and other fanciful creatures who live in Googleland.
Thus aware of the word's appeal, DeBeck launched his comic strip six years later, and the "goo-goo-googly" lyrics in the 1923 song focused attention on the novelty of the word.
When the mathematician and Columbia University professor Edward Kasner was challenged in the late 1930s to devise a name for a very large number, he asked his nine-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, to suggest a word. The youth was obviously a reader of the comics page, as he told Kasner to use "Google" at a time when the comic strip was at a peak of popularity.
Kasner agreed and in 1940 he introduced the words "googol" and "googolplex" in his book, "Mathematics and the Imagination". Milton Sirotta died in 1980.
This is the term that Larry Page and Sergey Brin had in mind when they named their company in 1998, but they misspelled "googol" as "google," bringing it full circle right back to Billy DeBeck"
Somewhere else I read he wanted a word for a number that was a one with 100 zeros after it and in his book, called it a googol.
Unlike (probably) you ... I find this fascinating.
I may have a bit too much time on my hands ...
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