For Christmas I got a Flip MinoHD and I’ve been carrying it around in my pocket in case anything worthy of video happened to me. So I whipped out my Flip and got Al Franken in video. Franken was in public and recording a message to inspire kids to study, so I really don’t think he’ll mind if I post it here:

Al Franken: if you do mind, let me know and I’ll take the video down. It was just a nice coincidence given that I’d been in D.C. for maybe two hours before seeing my first senator. Oh, and that’s not even counting how I saw Barack Obama after I landed at the airport:

I’ll be in D.C. for a few days, so if folks could avoid emailing me this coming week, that would be appreciated.

I’ll walk you through the important features of this badge:
- Each attendee’s first name needs to be large and easily readable. When you’re walking up to someone and they look half-familiar, you want to be able to glance down at their badge and see a first name that will jog your memory or allow you to greet them. The last name and company name don’t matter as much, so they should be smaller to make more room for the first name.
- Make the badge big. Four inches by six inches maybe.
- At every conference, about half the people are walking around with their badge facing backwards so that no one can see their name. That’s why conferences should put the attendee’s name on the front and the back of the badge.
- If your conferences costs hundreds (or thousands) of dollars, throw a little hologram sticker up in the top right to keep people from creating fake badges. If fake badges aren’t a problem, don’t bother.

There you have it. Conferences, please don’t write the name in a tiny 12-point font or put the name only on one side of the badge. See also Mike Davidson’s take on the right way to do a conference badge.

Yes, you really can get plastic surgery on Rodeo Drive:

Here’s a 90210 sign:

What’s unusual about that? Well, I also saw an different 90210 ad with the letters sideways, but it looked like the actors had been photoshopped into the second ad with the same poses. Ah, here we are:

That’s just distracting. They could have at least changed the poses around a little bit. Let’s see, I also visited a book store in Los Angeles. When you buy a copy of Beowulf, you get a script book from the movie:

Fitness appears to be a big activity in L.A. and they offer some exercise workouts that you might not find in other cities:

You have your pick of:
- Indoor cycling
- Pole dance workout
- Yoga
- Abs and sculpt

I also saw a “Stunts Unlimited” sign; that’s a business you’d probably only see in L.A. I headed to the beach and enjoyed walking along the boardwalk when I saw this swimsuit sign:

It says “Come in and having the best price bikini for men and women.” But possibly the sign that took my fancy the most was this one:

It says “Organize a teeth whitening party and get your teeth whiten FOR FREE.” I’ve heard of things like botox parties, but that was the first time I’d heard of a teeth whitening party.

Please don’t take these pictures as mean-spirited; L.A. was a ton of fun and an amazing city to explore for a week. I just took pictures of things that grabbed my eye as I saw them. A few of the other fun things I noticed:

- near the Beverly Center, I saw fruit vendors with vibrant multi-colored umbrellas.

- a huge boat parked on the street with a “for sale” sign in the window.

- L.A. has a ton of Land Rovers compared to Northern California.

- someone wearing a hipster shirt that read “MySpace makes work fun.”

- the funniest street name I saw was Cattaraugus Avenue.

That’s about it. If you want more than that, you’d have to read my twitter-logue of the trip.

While I’m gone, enjoy the Android coverage. Even though I love my iPhone, I think lots of people appreciate the concept of an open phone. To the people that point out potential flaws, I would mention Android’s software will only get better. And I love the ideas behind the Amazon music store where you can buy MP3s and listen to them on any device. If a Shazam-like application is coded for Android, I have a hunch that a lot of people will be impulse-buying music any time they hear a song they like.

Lastly, you should really check out Project 10^100. Also known as “May Those Who Help The Most Win,” it’s Google’s 10th anniversary contest where you can propose ideas to change the world. Google will ultimately commit $10 million dollars to the top ideas. I know some of the people that worked on this, and strongly believe that it’s an important project. You can help by submitting your idea for how to make the world better.

I’ll try to write up a little bit about the trip, but for now I’m gearing up for SES San Jose. Places to find me:

- I’ll be on a keynote panel on Tuesday. By the way, I don’t know who put my title as “Software Engineer Guru,” but it wasn’t me.
- I’ll be at the Google Dance on Tuesday night.
- I’ll be roaming the halls and attending sessions, especially on Tuesday and Wednesday.

If you see me, please walk up and say hello! I’d love to hear your thoughts about things that Google should be doing.

By the way, the LED cube in this image is this project.

Here’s the places I plan on speaking in the first half of 2008:

February 26-28, 2008: Next week I will be doing a couple sessions for SMX West, including a Linking Q&A panel. What sounds even more fun is the trivia-quiz “Search Bowl” that I’m doing with fellow Googler Paul Haahr. It sounds like a fun, casual event to answer search trivia questions. Other search engines will field teams, plus an SEO team will play as well.

April 18-21, 2008: I’m speaking at the Domain Roundtable conference in San Francisco. I couldn’t pass up a chance to attend a conference about domain names when it’s so close to home.

April 22-25, 2008: I’ll speak or be on a panel in the Web 2.0 Expo, also in San Francisco. Maybe I’ll just stay in San Francisco that week and work from Google’s San Francisco’s office.

June 3-4, 2008: This is more tentative, but I’m hoping to make it to SMX Advanced in Seattle. Considering that until last year I’d never visited Seattle, I’ve enjoyed every time that I’ve gotten a chance to visit the city.

You’ll note that most of these conferences are nearby. The wonderful thing about ramping up new conference speakers in webspam is that if I want to ramp down on travel, newer speakers can more than handle the task. I’m really proud of the speakers that we send from Google.

If you’re looking for fun things over the holiday weekend, here are some things I’ve enjoyed recently:

DVD:
- Ratatouille is excellent. It’s family-friendly, but it’s also very clever.

- I played soccer in high school, so I’m a sucker for fun soccer movies (Shaolin Soccer and Bend it Like Beckham come to mind). I really liked Gracie. It’s fascinating to read how the movie is grounded in real life. Gracie is one of the few movies where I’ve watched the movie again with commentary later (provided by Elisabeth Shue and Andrew Shue).

Books:
- Non-fiction, I really enjoyed Rule the Web. I’ll talk about this book more when I do my Christmas gift suggestions, but the short summary is that anyone that touches a computer can find some fun things in this book.

- Also for non-fiction, Founders at Work is interesting. If you have an entrepreneurial bent or have ever thought of doing a start-up, I think you’d like this book.

- Fiction? I genuinely haven’t been reading much straight fiction for the last month or two. If you like comic books graphic novels, I’ve enjoyed Powers recently. The Powers series examines what would happen if lots of regular people had superpowers. I also checked out Shooting War. It’s frigging bleak, but you might like it if you liked Transmetropolitan.

Podcasts:
- The Daily SearchCast has gotten a little sporadic as Danny has been on vacation and doing search conferences. It’s still one of the most enjoyable ways to get your fix of search news though, and it’s much safer to listen to the SearchCast in the car instead of trying to surf web sites on an iPhone as you drive. I’ve got a batch of these to listen to while I’m traveling this weekend. But Daron and Danny: you tweaked the MP3 filenames to include some keywords, but you dropped the date. Bring the date back so it’s easy to listen to them in order!

Web. Some stuff that’s in my browser or otherwise interesting:
- Eric Enge interviews Eric Engleman, from Bloglines. It’s a fun interview, and I’m glad that Bloglines keeps the Google Reader engineers on their toes.

- Sure, you saw Scoble blow off Android. But though I love Robert, he’s not a hard-core developer. He’s a smart guy who talks to techies and developers and neat people. So I’d trust Scoble’s opinion on how compelling the Android videos and demos were, but you really want a developer who digs into the system to give an in-depth write-up. A better view on Android was this article by Reto Meier. I love that Android supports all sorts of inputs, from GPS to compass to accelerometer to cameras.

- This Linux device driver project needs more unsupported devices so that they can write drivers for them. My three requested devices would be 1) full support for *all* of the keys on the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, 2) the Omron HJ-720ITC pedometer, and 3) the Fretlight guitar.

- Gmail has always been pretty open (e.g. letting you download your email for free via POP or easy exporting of your contacts). It’s nice that Gmail added IMAP support, but I’m just as excited that Google has introduced a Greasemonkey API for Gmail to make hacking on Gmail even easier. I was a little surprised that this didn’t get much coverage in search blogs, other than Google OS covering the API.

That’s it for now — enjoy your Thanksgiving, and I’ll see you in a few days.

The only real downside (other than all that flying time) is that I’m several days behind on email now. Not the situation that I’d like when going into a multi-day search conference tomorrow, but such is life. If you see me at the conference, please say hello! Also be on the lookout for several other Googlers who will be presenting or hanging out at the webmaster tools booth.

Last but not least, here’s a really useful piece of advice. If you’re attending the Google Dance on Tuesday night at Google’s headquarters, don’t just spend your time chilling with Googlers, dancing, and drinking. There will also be a “Meet the Google Engineers” room in building 43 where you can ask lots of different questions. There will be folks from search quality, search infrastructure, Google Reader, AdSense, Feedburner, invalid clicks, mobile search, and many more teams. Save some time to drop by that room and meet some Google engineers. I plan to be there too.