Whatever Google is putting in their employee’s water cooler, they definitely need to share it with the rest of the world. The search engine king has announced their commitment to bring users real-time instant live stats of stock quotes, free of charge and free of delay.

(Google Blog) As a result, we’ve worked with the SEC, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and our D.C. trade association, NetCoalition, to find a way to bring stock data to Google users in a way that benefits users and is practical for all parties. We have encouraged the SEC to ensure that this data can be made available to our users at fair and reasonable rates, and applaud their recent efforts to review this issue. Today, the NYSE has moved the issue a great step forward with a proposal to the SEC which if approved, would allow you to see real-time, last-sale prices across all Google properties including Google Finance, Personalized Google, Mobile, and of course, Google.com. It won’t matter if you’re on Wall Street or Main Street — you’ll have free, easy and fast access to real-time prices from NYSE on Google.

When it comes to innovation of information, Google is serious about change. This may put many expensive stock software companies out of business, but it will empower the consumer to track their own portfolio.

My cat is sick

Apparently their is a site stealing content from one of my weblogs, Inside Orkut.

I am not going to mention the site here (or the host) but I hope to resolve this issue privately in order to spare the hosting company bad media that can be picked up by the ever vigilant Google bots (aka Google spiders).

I’ve ran into this problem before, but thankfully the person in question last time apologized and complied (in essence, removed the offending posts as well as the site).

Hopefully a peaceful solution can be found as I have better things to do than dealing with content theft.

Update (1/11): Problem was resolved. Thanks Mr. [Host Company]!

PostHuman Blues (who previously nominated Colony Worlds as a blog of the day) links to what may be this bloggers very last post.

Various medical authorities swarm in and out of here predicting I have between two days and two months to live. I think they are guessing. I remain cheerful and unimpressed. I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying.

Please pardon my levity, I don’t see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd.

He’ll be in my prayers.

(Hat Tip: Webmaster World, registration required)

I think I finally took care of that annoying Firefox leak that kept consuming my computer’s resources, slowing everything down.

Hopefully this problem will not pop up again (as the last hack should have taken care of this problem).

For those looking for a quick solution, simply follow these steps.

1. Open a new tab in Firefox
2. Type in about:config inside your address bar (and hit enter)
3. You should see the DNA of your browser. Scroll down until you see browser.cache.disk.capacity
4. Right click on it and select modify
5. Change the number to 5000 if you have less than 512 mb of ram, or more if you have a gig
6. Restart Firefox

Firefox feels a heck of a lot faster already. Hopefully I will not have to attempt to try and fix that again.