Island Packet – I feel just awful complaining about the people at Google, because they have single-handedly streamlined, by an incalculably exponential margin, the amount of time I spend looking online for music to steal and pictures of Scarlett Johansson. I feel like I should send them a thankful-tasting pie or something, but I also have in my head that they’re very cool people, and would graciously demur with a tap on the heart and a shake of the head like, no, dude, don’t worry about it, we got you.

So please, Good Nerds of the Google Office, Which I Imagine To Be A Giant Shiny Wind-And-Corn-Oil-Powered Cube Floating Somewhere Near Tahiti, don’t take this personally. I am not upset with you, even though you have insanely awesome jobs, health benefits that I can only dream of (like, for instance, dental), holidays off, ping-pong and pinball tables in your offices, a free in-house gourmet cafeteria and I’m sure some sort of indoor neon go-kart track, with lasers.

But like those of many other residents of the area — except Dick Cheney if he’s around, which wouldn’t surprise me as his aging mechanical exoskeleton is refueled by the sun — my home recently has materialized on Google Street View, an online functionality that offers panoramic 360-degree street mapping (when writing about technology issues, it helps to throw around majestic-sounding buzzwords that make it sound like you are attempting to jam a multitude of bowling pins into your mouth) that allows users to virtual-walk down your virtual-street and see firsthand how little actual attention you’re paying to your actual lawn.
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