Google+ is the answer of Google to Facebook. Some have long been waiting for this.
The basic features currently offered are Circles, Hangouts, Sparks, Huddle (for mobile users).
Let me say a few words to each of these features.

Circles
… are groups of users. As everywhere in google these associations have a label-like character and not a hierarchical character which means: You can add one person to multiple circles. This comes in very handy when using the other features of Google+. This is also more natural than the “one person can only belong to one group”-approach since a person can both be a friend and a colleague, just to name an example.

Streams
… are micro messages we all learnt to love. Post your status, post a link, a video, every community or social platform has these nowadays. What’s different in Google+ is that you can choose who should be able to read this stream. If you’re going to a party you may want to post that, but only to your friends, not to you colleagues or boss. Just select the Friends Circle and/or some individuals and hit the share button.
This of course works both ways. While signed in Google+ you can choose which streams you want to read, just select friends and all the streams of your colleagues will be gone from the view .

Hangouts
… are personal chatrooms. You create a hangout and choose who may join. The invitees will see that you’re currently in a hangout in their streams and may join you – if they so choose. Hangouts are not limited to text, you can use your video camera and mic to talk. Also a very neat feature is, that you can select a youtube video and watch it together. Hopefully there will be a way to share your desktop in the future – That way we can all move to Google+ and don’t need Microsoft’s Skype anymore

Sparks
… are a sort of interest groups. You can enter a keyword and add it as an interest. If something is posted, that contains this keyword you will be notified about this post. As far as I can see there is no real group functionality behind this. However – I can’t really remember when, if ever, I posted something to a facebook group so I’m not missing out on something here.

Huddle
… i think it’s a multi-recipient-sms-chat software for your mobile phone. Didn’t get it to work already (always got ‘failed to send’). Since I don’t have an sms flatrate I should be careful with this. I’ll update this part as soon as I know more.

Update: If you’re getting failed to send – try updating your Google+ App on your Phone
There’s one for iPhones now too.

What’s more to say?
Google+ integrates with many of the existing google services like youtube or picasa. As a matter of fact, Google+ does not own a separate photo album functionality – it simply integrates picasa smoothly. The same goes for Google Talk and the PlusOne (+1) functionality which is the ‘I like’- button of Google. Hopefully there will be a ‘-1′ button soon, I know you all want it as bad as I do. (Just remember that you want this button, but you don’t want to be ‘-1′-ed yourself. Just saying – maybe it’s not such a good idea after all)

I believe Google+ tops Facebook in many ways. I feel to have more control over my profile and the groups I join. I really hated that Facebook adds you to groups without any confirmation. Anyhow people are creatures of habit. You all don’t need the games you can play on facebook, but you will miss them anyway. Kind of like a toy that you never use – but won’t give away because you once paid for it. Your friends are already on facebook – well that could be changed, but why should you initiate this move. This kind of thinking will make you and your friends stick with Facebook ’till the sun turns supernova and all live on earth dies. I know Google+ can be much better than Facebook but it’s thanks to the lazyness of all of us that it will be tough to break out of our Facebook habits and do the one right thing: Move to Google+ because Google has your data anyway – no need to hand it to Zuckerberg as well.

Und ob ich schon wanderte in finsteren Globals,
so fürchte ich keine Access Violation,
denn Parameter sind bei mir.
Deine Referenz und dein Call-By-Value spenden mir Thread-Safety.
Du bereitest mir ein Invoke im Angesicht meiner Kapselung.
Du forkest mein Main mit Threads und schenkest mir echtes Multitasking.

Yes there are some pretty good howtos out there that explain how to temporarily change the MAC address of your ethernet device on a Mac. I’ll just repeat what I learned since a friend of mine seems not to find the sites i did.
I did this on Mac OSX Leopard and Snow Leopard. I don’t know how whether it’s the same on Tiger or older versions – just get a newer Mac pal, you want it anyway!

So here’s how it works for a copper interface (wifi: see below):

1. Open a terminal. Personally, I prefer iTerm – but any terminal is fine.
2. Become super user. Since I don’t want to type sudo for every freakin’ command I do this by entering:
   sudo su
   Enter your user password. Enjoy the power you gained for a second and remember: You can really really damage your system configuration as root user, so watch out!
3. Check your network settings with:
   ifconfig
   Find your network adapter. On my Mac en0 is the copper wire nic and en1 is wifi.
   You recognize your copper interface by checking whether it can do 100baseT or even 1000baseT (it’s written next to it). Yeah, that’s a lame description but it works since there is no wifi that does 1000baseT (yet).
4. Change the MAC address by entering something like
   ifconfig en0 ether af:fe:af:fe:af:fe
5. Verify changes with
   ifconfig | grep en0

So you want to change the MAC address of your wifi device. That’s a little bit more tricky. Here comes:

1. Follow steps 1-3 of the above guide to gain godlike powers and identifiy your wifi interface
2. Make sure your wifi device is running (Check wifi symbol in top right corner in Finder). It has to be running, you can’t change the mac of a device that is down.
3. Disassociate the device from all networks. There is a tool to do so called airport. No worries, you already have that tool – you just didn’t know. It’s actually located here /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport. So that’s very unhandy – let’s change that.
   ln -s /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport /usr/bin/airport

Now you can just type the airport command from wherever you want. Nice huh? Well anyway. Disassociate all wifi networks now. Type
airport -z
or
airport --disassociate

4. Change the MAC address by entering something like
   ifconfig en1 ether af:fe:af:fe:af:fe
5. Verify with a look at the output of
   ifconfig

So you’re all set. Get crackin’ … I never said you should – but it would be wise to change your MAC before doing so, since the MAC is a unique identifier to your device.

Use the comment function if something doesn’t work as you wished or if you just find me awesome and want to tell me exactly that.

One more thing: I used af:fe:af:fe:af:fe as MAC address. This is very unwise since it looks nothing like a MAC address. Most MAC addresses start with 00:01 or something like that. Just be creative but not fancy. Fancy gets you feds – and you don’t want ‘em.

Nothing poetic this time. Just wanted to report something in the hope this might someday save someones sanity .

Currently I’m working on my bachelor thesis and since I think of myself as a expert this has to done in LaTeX. So I’ve been writing for a couple of days and everything seemed nice and easy. It all started when I tried to create a table. No matter what I did, the table didn’t care for page margins or anything. I searched for any possible solution and tried everything – nothing seemed to work. It also didn’t matter what tabular-environment I used (tried: tabularx, longtable, supertabular, tabular*, …)

So out of frustration (after three f*****g days) I started throwing out my \usepackages and suddenly it worked. I narrowed it down to the pdfsync package. Well now one might ask “Wait! What has pdfsync to do with tables” and I can’t give an answer to that – because there is no logical explanation if you’re not a TeX freak and understand the fundamentals. Anyway – remove \usepackage{pdfsync} from your document and you should be fine.

Oh yeah – before I forget, I’m using TeXLive – have to actually – because I work on Mac and Windows – try that with MiKTeX Editor is WinEdt – and Syncing with SumatraPDF-Viewer works even after removing the pdfsync package – now isn’t that irony?

Hope this helps