I did it!

This past Friday was my last day working for the man. I am now my own boss, full-time!

As my own boss, my first order of business is to take a vacation!

Damn… I love how that works!

It’ll be a working vacation, but a vacation nonetheless. I’ll be taking these next few days to get everything together for my business. Then I’ll be in Chicago from June 27 - July 17 to visit with friends and family and work during the downtime.

Who would’ve guessed that the company that manufactures the machine you make photocopies of your ass on could be the next big thing in search? Or not…

An article in Forbes enlightens us about Xerox:

Researchers at the document-management company’s European R&D center announced Wednesday that they’ve developed a new type of search technology, called FactSpotter, which can handle natural human phrases, and search for related results that include synonyms and pronouns within a document.

I have some news of my own that I will be writing about soon, but due to my lack of time I wanted to quickly point out a few stories that I thought were very, very interesting.

Hated blogger leaves U.S., threatens lawsuits
A failed real estate speculator who created a popular Web site touting his exploits has begun threatening to sue his critics and claims to be in hiding in Australia.

When Google rolled out with their Universal Search model, one of the few noticeable design changes that was made to the search results page was the change in color of the horizontal bar under the search box. The color updated from a light-blue to a nice and clean web 2.0ey light-grey/white gradient:

(Click on image to enlarge)

Well… while I was surfing around Google today, I thought that something looked different… but I couldn’t pinpoint it until now.

During my daily scan through the day’s headlines, I ran across this most-excellent article in the New York Times: Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine.

I thought the title could be a bit better, but I suppose I’m not making the best example with my title either.