One of my favorite features of Gmail is how easy it is to search through your e-mails to find what you want/need.

Sometimes, though, you need to be really specific. Google has some search tips that let you quickly narrow your search down to just a handful of results.

I don’t delete e-mails. I also don’t download them to my PC. I let all 12,000 conversations in my Gmail account just sit there, taking up some 1.2 GB on Google’s servers.

Why? So they are always stored in one, searchable location: the cloud. This way, I have access to every single e-mail from just about any device I might have.

This would be a pretty useless endeavor if I couldn’t search through them quickly. For the most part, I can.

If I need to find an e-mail from a particular person, I just type that person’s name, and every e-mail that person has sent me shows up. Even if that includes dozens or even hundreds of e-mails, chances are I can find the exact one I need pretty fast.

According to The Official Gmail Blog, the real power of Gmail lies in search operators. Search operators help modify a query and narrow down the results.

“Search operators work pretty much the same way within Gmail as they do for Google. So, if I want the e-mail Lisa sent me with her flight information so I know when to pick her up at the airport, I type from:lisa SFO.

You can limit the scope of your search to a particular subject (subject:) or label (label:) as well.

If remembering operators isn’t really your thing, that’s OK. There’s a ‘Show search options’ link to the right of the search bar at the top of your in-box.”

That lets you set parameters of a more advanced search.

I tried these out, and they really do help a lot. Remember, search operators = cool tool for searching Gmail.

Alexander Graham Bell (March 3, 1847-August 2, 1922) was a Scottish scientist and inventor who immigrated to Canada.

In celebration of his birthday, Google has put up a colorful tribute logo:

I think it’s awesome how Google does these creative themed logos to help remember various people, places and things.

Today, Bell is widely considered one of the foremost developers of the telephone, together with Antonio Meucci, inventor of the first telephone prototype, and Philipp Reis.

Six years after having obtained his telephone patent, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

In addition to Bell’s work in telecommunications technology, he was responsible for important advances in aviation and hydrofoil technology.

When it comes to creative logo design, you can always count on Google to come up with something cool and funky for various holidays and special days of the year.

Check out the Google tribute logo for Leap Year 2008:

So what is leap year some people might be wondering… well thanks to a little research here is a semi official explanation:

A leap year (or intercalary year) is a year containing one or more extra days (or, in case of lunisolar calendars, an extra month) in order to keep the calendar year synchronized with the astronomical or seasonal year.

For example, February would have 29 days in a leap year instead of the usual 28.

Seasons and astronomical events do not repeat at an exact number of full days, so a calendar which had the same number of days in each year would over time drift with respect to the event it was supposed to track.

By occasionally inserting (or intercalating) an additional day or month into the year, the drift can be corrected. A year which is not a leap year is called a common year.

Leap year has always boggled my mind. What happens if you were born on a leap year? You would technically only have a birthday every 4 years… or do you celebrate it the day before or after?

Side note, I’ll be updating Planet Sean on a more regular basis again. I’ve had a few major projects keeping me buried for a little bit but things are calming down now.

Let’s say you’re a Google shop. You run Google everything, including Mail, Chat, Apps, Calendar, and so on.

You recently caught wind of unified communications services and how they consolidate a lot of your, well, communications, into one place. Cool, right?

A new offering from Voice Mobility lets you integrate those unified communications telephony services into your existing Google Apps set up.

This is a great little deal. First, you get your enterprise communication and productivity apps from Google for free or nearly free. Then along comes Voice Mobility and ramps up the usability by offering a ton of integrated communication services.

Microsoft Exchange server? Don’t need it. Active Directory? Skip it. Office Communications server? Not necessary.

Voice Mobility’s UCN Vmerge is integrated with the Google Apps solution suite–including:

• Gmail
• Google Talk
• Google Calendar
• Google Docs
• Contacts
• Mobile apps

All using the workplace or campus domain. It brings unified communications to complete messaging, collaboration, calendaring and presence functionality.

Enterprise clients want the ability to enable their enterprise voice and fax communications to work seamlessly with Gmail.

UCN Vmerge allows full on-premise or hosted enterprise PBX integration with a hosted personalized Gmail service.

“By integrating UCN Vmerge with Google Apps, workplace and campus customers have price-effective options for collaboration functionality. No longer are customers forced to utilize expensive on-premise solutions from providers like Microsoft for collaboration functionality.”

– Mike Seeley, Voice Mobility’s VP of Global Sales

Well said, Mike.

Here’s a run down of some of the functions offered:

• Send and receive voice and fax messages from Gmail
• Record and deposit voice conversations in Gmail
• Manage live calls from the desktop
• Click-to-dial internal and external numbers from any Google application
• Import Google Contacts into UCN Vmerge for remote access
• Utilize least-cost routing available from the enterprise PBX

Not a bad list of features. Granted, it isn’t as robust and complete as other offerings on the market. But it’s not a bad start.

People are still looking to Google to roll out its own services that cover this ground now that Grand Central is part of its offering.

Check out the Google tribute logo to the one of my favorite childhood toys, Lego bricks which is celebrating its 50th Birthday!

Taken from the official Lego website:

The 50th birthday of the LEGO brick is in January 2008 and there is plenty to celebrate. Children all over the world have played with LEGO bricks for the past 50 years, and LEGO is still right at the top of many wish lists, just as it always has been.

Industry and trade associations also recognize the LEGO success. Just before the turn of the millennium the LEGO brick was voted “Toy of the Century”, one of the highest awards in the toy industry, by both Fortune Magazine in the US and the British Association of Toy Retailers.

Legos are awesome! For those of you who missed it, check out my post about Monty Python and the Holy Grail in Lego.

Man, I could spend hours upon hours playing, building and just geeking out with my giant box-o-legos. I was fond of the little Lego people too.

My box of Lego bricks are long gone… first handed down to my younger brother, then later sold at various garage sales.

I think sometime this coming week I need to hit a local toy store and see about getting some Lego bricks for old time sake… maybe build myself a Lego laptop or robot?

Doing some research on Pirates this evening, I stumbled upon an interesting gem of a website called Google Pirate.

The concept behind the site? Use the power of Google to scour every corner of the internet for exactly what you need:

I got a fever! And the only prescription.. is more cowbell!

This is definitely a useful website for many reasons… but before you fear (the reaper) getting your “Arrr” on, take a look at the legal disclaimer from the Google Pirate website:

This website is completely compliant with the DMCA. Before you send off emails, be aware that this site has a legal use and does not condone copyright infringement or intellectual theft in any way. This website does not contain any illegal material, nor does it even contain direct links to illegal material. It is designed using Google’s Custom Search tools to narrow search results down to filetypes to remove unwanted sites that aren’t related to the client’s search.

This website is not affiliated with Google. “Google” is a trademarked name of Google Inc. “Google Pirate” is not a trademark name/url and is only named such due to the relevancy of the word Google.

The use of the word “Pirate” does not imply that we condone piracy. Its simply because we think pirates are awesome.

I completely agree, Pirates are awesome and in times like this, I remember the words of Bruce Dickinson:

“Easy, guys… I put my pants on just like the rest of you – one leg at a time. Except, once my pants are on, I make gold records.”

I’m telling you – you’re gonna want that cowbell on the track! Babies.. before we’re done here.. y’all be wearing gold-plated diapers.

What does that mean you’re asking yourself? Never question Bruce Dickinson! Roll it!

In Memoriam: Gene Frenkle: 1950-2000