New York Times: Google, highflying Silicon Valley Web search company, recently began holding meetings with bankers in preparation for its highly anticipated initial public offering as it still engaged in meetings exploring partnership or even merger with Microsoft; Microsoft, desperate to capture part of popular and ad-generating search business, approached Google within last two months to discuss options, including possibility of takeover; overture demonstrates enormous importance that Google represents as both competitive threat to Microsoft and as Silicon Valley's latest hope for new financial boom.

It will be very interesting to see how Google's stakeholders respond to this partnership (or takeover) offer. I personally would sell the company (yea, $15 billion is a lot of money!), create 500 little companies and invest $20 Million in each and enjoy my life with the remaining $5 billion (or perhaps buy a couple of small countries with the change)!

It's gonna be a very sweet time for Google employees anyways, since they're about to go IPO in a few months according to Google executives. They talked to investment bankers last week to make the company public in a 4-6 month timeframe.

In August, Microsoft dumped LookSmart and looked at building its own search engine to rival Google. In the interim, Overture is providing paid search listings for MSN's portal until 2005.

An interesting presentation on how the get your degree pop-ups work and what they really are. It's a long presentation but worth seeing.

This discussion on metafilter might be interesting to you as well.

Pretty interesting facts about the numbers. Kept me busy for an hour!

Bucket of water sells for £255 on eBay!

"The Ambient Orb Device is a glass orb that slowly transitions between thousands of colors to indicate changes in the weather, the Dow, or if your boss or friend is on instant messenger. It is a wireless device and can be custom configured."

It indicates the stock market value by turning more green or more red and can be configured to show the weather, IM buddy watch or even tracking your own portfolio. The cool thing is that it gets its signal from a natoinwide wireless network and it's all configured through a web interface and simple http "get" calls! :-) This device is way too cool but a little expensive I guess.

Shirin Ebadi, the first female judge in the history of Iranian judiciary system, won the Noble Peace Prize and became the first Iranian and the 11th female winner of Noble Prize.

She has been barred from the bench since 1979, insisting on idea that Islam and human rights can co-exist. She was arrested and accused of distributing a confession video tape in 2000. Ms. Ebadi is a winner of Rafto Prize.

Most of the top links on Damasanj, the Persian link popularity index, were related to Shirin Ebadi. Same for Sarkhat [Persian Headlines], Google News, Yahoo! News, and many many other websites.

Google News | BBC | CNN

Another sweet idea:

WebCollage is a program that creates collages out of random images found on the Web. More images are being added to the collage about once a minute, so this page will reload itself periodically. Clicking on one of the images in the collage will take you to the page on which it was found.

It also works as a plugin to DriftNet to see a collage what other people on your network are looking at. It's all good!

So, keep refereshing; you may see your picture there! :-)

[Download ScreenSaver]

This is so funny now!

"BOSTON . An Internet worm that disabled networks across the U.S. Monday and Tuesday temporarily thrust the nation into its most severe maelstrom of productivity since 1992."

'Our office was working at roughly 95 percent efficiency," said Steven Glover, an advertising executive and creative team leader at Rae Jaynes Houser. "It's problematic to have the rate jump like that.it sets a precedent that will be impossible to maintain once the Internet comes back." Glover said his department failed to reach 100 percent productivity only because employees stopped work every few minutes throughout the outage to see if Internet service had been restored. According to Labor Department statistics, companies affected by the Internet outage generated an estimated $4 to $6 billion in extra revenue.'

Keep reading... :-) Off to the 2nd G&M night now!

Damasanj is a site popularity index. It crawls Persian weblogs automatically in order to find the newest links in them and decides which links are the most popular using computer algorithms. Very similiar to what blogdex does. It helps you save your daily time by not having to browsing through many weblogs if you're looking for the most important news every day.

The idea was given to me by Hoder a few months ago after Sarkhat, the automatic news crawler and categorizer, was launched. Special thanks goes to him for mentioning the bugs, testing the system and coming up with interesting ideas!

Some quick links for this weekend! Have a good one! :-)

A very funny joke:

A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture in Idaho when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Broni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the shepherd, "If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?" The shepherd looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers, "Sure. Why not?" Read on...

A very cool ode to Mehdi Mahdavikia, SV Hamburg's Iranian soccer player. (via Sobhaneh)

Practice Hacking. How many l3vels can you go up? ;-)

The world's worst food!

Damn changes in the standards! I planned to install something on one of my computers and none of my three keyboards I have at home was compatible with its damn port. To make the story short, all my plans are basically ruined! I need to go get one of these keyboard adapters ASAP!

Forbes has published the most recent Forbes 400. Bill Gates is still sitting at the first place followed by Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett and Microsoft's Paul Allen. Wal-mart owners, the Walton family, are following them next.