Frequently Asked (or likely to be asked) Questions about the Google Calendar

0. WTF, man???

Good question! I was discussing with some other people about the "Before Time." You know, back before we had Google to help with our every day life when we had to go to libraries to find papers, and a dinosaur might eat you on the way over. Boy, life was hard back then! So we decided that it would be fun to start referencing time as the "before" time, and the "after" time, or BG and AG. A quick "Google" search turned up the history so I was able to figure out how long it has been in the after time, and the Google Calendar was born!

1. Well, okay, I guess that sort of makes sense. How does the Calender work?

The calender works in a very similar way to the calendar we use works. There are 12 months in the Google Calendar

  • Lucky - after the "I'm feeling Lucky" button (31 Days)
  • Orkut - after the Google Social Network, and a Google Engineer (28/29 Days)
  • GMail - which we all know is the mail program provided by Google (31 Days)
  • Froogle - the shopping service provided by Google (30 Days)
  • Page - after Larry Page, one of the founders of the company who developed the original search algorithms (31 Days)
  • Brin - after Sergey Brin the other founder of the company who developed the original search alogirthm (30 Days)
  • Page-Rank - the algorithm the search engine uses (31 Days)
  • BackRub - the original name of their search engine (31 Days)
  • Query - the things we submit to Google! (30 Days)
  • Ad Word - Googles mechanism of generating ad revenue (31 Days)
  • Picasa - The photo organizer/viewer that Google bought and now maintains (30 Days)
  • Blogger - The blogging software that Google bought and now maintains (31 Days)
    Since the company was founded on September 7th, that means that the first of Lucky coorsponds to Sept 7 on the "normal" calendar. Since Lucky is the first month it has 31 days, just like January. Orkut (the second month) has 28 days except on a leap year when it has 29 and so on. Incidently leap years are on year 4AG, 8AG, 12AG, ... It may interest you to know that this calendar was invented on the 28th of Page-Rank in 6AG.

    2. How does it work technically?

    The calendar is driven by a Python CGI script. (I like Python!) Basically I first approximated the number of seconds since the Epoch of Sept 7th 1998 (using the time module). I say approximate because I'm just taking midnight CST (the time zone the web server is in). The I get the current local time (seconds since Epoch) and subtract the two. That gives seconds Googles existed, the rest is just simple math. If you are really interested, then I will send you the code.

    3. Google is certainly cool, but why make a calendar after it? There must have been a greater event in computers then the start of Google?

    Yes, Google is cool! Yes, there have been bigger events, if you have a better event and want to make your own calendar go for it! I'm just a big ol' Google Fan :-P

    4. What's next?

    If the mood strikes me, I would like to make an app that will convert arbitary calender dates to Google Years. If that already exists, then I guess the next step is to update this FAQ!

    5. I looked at your code and/or did the math and you suck! Your dates are off from your defination!

    Oppps! If you find a mistake, please let me know! This program was thrown together in just under 20 minutes, so it may be buggy! Feel free to correct me!

    6. I don't see an answer to *my* question, what should I do?

    Send it to me, if I think it is good enough I will update the FAQ. Same thing goes for over all suggestions to the Google Calendar.