gPhone
In the wake of Apple's iPhone, rumor is Google developing a cell phone to be supported by ads (as recently reported in Wall Street Journal, then other news sources).

Amazonian Tree of Services
I am developing greater respect for Amazon. A9.com and Mechanical Turk are two sub-corporations of Amazon. Yet, there is little media buzz surrounding Amazon's branching reach (besides Bezos' space endeavors).

• A9.com is tempting to be my search portal of choice (or 2nd) because it is a search aggregator allowing simultaneous search with multiple and specialized search sites. You can choose to include Wiki to less common/more specialized portals like German, Japanese, programming, or law. Yes, it is annoying for it's lack of Google searches among all the searches they offer to aggregate. Another feature I have yet to find on A9 is a news aggregator.
  
• Mechanical Turk uses what Jeff Bezos calls Artificial Artificial Intelligence (hmmm... clever name). As Wiki tells us it is computers outsourcing tasks to humans regarding tasks that humans do faster.
  

In other search explorations, Microsoft's Live.com has become oh so similar to Google.com. Consider the minimalistic interface, map search (note Virtual Earth's nice new Bird's Eye view), Academic search (like Google Scholar), and most telling, the caching of web sites.

I've resisting but I've decided to add Google Desktop to my growing list of Google tools after seeing it's usefulness on other people's computers. Aaaahh can't resist further integrating with the Googopoly collective of information.

I attended the wonderful annual Christmas concert at the Moody Church. It was so uplifting and a chance to rest in the peace of God. God is the God of all comfort.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. (2 Corinthians 1:3-4)

Ate dinner at O'Brien's Restaurant, a place for steak with the usual expected high steak prices. The meat was decent. The priciest menu item, rib eye steak ($41), was well seasoned. The prime rib ($26) had some flavor, but some cracked black pepper would have definitely helped. I'm not sure if I would return, but I'm not a big steak person. After dissecting all the fat off I was left with ~2/3 meat. My friends say Japanese like fatty meat. Wish they had sauteed mushrooms as a topping option, but it seems the selection of side consists mainly of potatoes. I can't complain about the service, though metromix.com reviewers repeatedly panned O'Brien's for horrendous service.