So, here in Springfield, MO we are buried under several inches of ice. Driving around my neighborhood looks like a war zone. Most of the trees above 20 feet tall have lost most of their branches under the weight of the ice. Our power has been out for a day and a half and it’s not expected to be back on in the next couple of days. Luckily I live really close to my work and we’ve got massive generators here keeping parts of the building fed with electricity. It’s funny just how dependent we are on electricity and we don’t really realize it until we go without it for a day or more. We have a gas fireplace so we’ve been able to keep reasonably warm. I had to come up to work and charge all my gadgets though!
So while sitting around without electricity I was reading a book on my Sony Reader (which I love by the way). The book is called The Google Story (a good book by the way) and I finished it. In the back of the book are some Google tricks and one of them said you can send a text message to GOOGL (46645) and get search results back. So I grabbed my cell phone and sent some text messages to Google. Here are some of the things you can do:
“Weather 65804” – Gets weather for a particular zip code. You can also substitute the zip for a City name.
“Movie theaters 65804” – Gets a listing of movie theaters for a particular zip code with phone numbers and addresses
“Eragon 65804” – Gets showtimes for the movie Eragon for a particular zip code. Needs to be a current movie.
“define lacrimation” – returns the definition of a term.
“Joplin mo to Springfield mo” – Returns driving directions from Joplin, MO to Springfield MO.
“Best Buy Springfield MO” – Returns the address and phone number of my favorite hand out place! :)
When the search results returns a phone number you can click on the phone number and dial it directly from the text message as well. So I can do my search for Best Buy and call them to see if they have any Nintendo Wii’s in stock (which they don’t and I wish they would.)
There are more things you can do with the Google mobile check out this page for more or send a text message with the word “help.”
Pretty cool huh?