i’ve just finished reading this intriguing story about how 2 very clever university students came up with a better idea to search the internet, and turned it into the world wide webs most powerful brand. the book covers everything from the tech side of things to how they got funding from early investors right up until their historic ipo.

so, what did i learn – quite a bit actually. the googleplex sounds like one of the most satisfying places to work, a great deal of thought has gone into providing the best possible working environments for it’s googlers. you can type a mathematical equation into the google search engine and it will solve it, for example 16 + 105.

fancinating stuff, not quite as good as ‘boo hoo‘ which was written by the owners point of view – but this is pretty close.

i would safely guess that every technology blog and news site on the world wide web is currently reporting on apple’s announcement of the long awaited iphone. it looks like an amazing device that i’m already adding to my wish list, and not only is it a phone, but a widescreen ipod (4gb & 8gb) with full screen video and a pretty nice internet communicator with email and web browsing with safari. possibly most impressively is that it runs apple’s own opperating system – os x, for ‘desktop class’ applications.

there’s a whole load of information at apple.com/iphone where you can also watch steve job’s keynote speech.

monoface is a great little flash widget type mini site from minnesota based design company mono-1. 15 faces, split up into head & shoulders, mouth, nose and 2 eyes which when shuffled gives you 759,375 to work your way through!

i’ve decided that i like to take photos. we were purchased a digital camera for christmas and ever since it has been out and about with me and i’ve already taken some quite pleasing photographs, i’m so pleased with the results i’m even going to show them off! i don’t think i’ll ever be prolific or indeed as talented as many photographers that i’ve seen and indeed worked with during my day job – but it’s definitely a new fun hobby that i’ve adopted.

you can view and download my collection of photos on my flickr and stock.xchng.

for those of you lucky enough to be using a mac and to use safari as your browser of choice (like me!) then i can’t recommend this plug-in highly enough. it’s a brilliant update of the default search box. it’s like spotlight – but for the web – so it brings up search results as you are typing based on what it thinks you are going to finish typing. you can customise which search engines to use, google, wikipedia and even amazon! download it here, www.inquisitorx.com.

did i mention that it’s free? spread the word of this mighty fine tool!

some would call his work graffiti or even urban terrorism, although i’m not quite sure that he’s extreme enough to be a member of the space monkeys from fight club. i’d definitely go as far to consider his work as art – and art with a sense of humour!

check out his portfolio of work here, www.banksy.co.uk.

so, the big night and the chance to celebrate the end of one year and the start of another. our plans were to jump on a plain and travel to dublin, ireland and have a night out before flying back home on the 1st. these went out the window when we both pretty ill, so after a few phone calls we managed to postpone the hotel reservations and alter the flights to the end of january.

so last night was open book and you know what? we didn’t do anything at all – the night is such an excuse to go out when sometimes your not in the mood, you usually end up spending a shed load of cash at a club you wouldn’t usually visit, but to make it into a proper big night it will cost even more as every bumps up their prices.

so, for next year – and this is my only new years resolution – i’m either going to dj so i can control how new year is celebrated or i’m going to find a really good club that completely ignores the midnight countdown and just gets on with things. rant over!

i hope everyone had a proper good night out and all the best for this year to come. bring on 2007!