If you aren’t already listening to the podcast of The Ricky Gervais Show, you need to start immediately. I have been a big fan of Ricky Gervais ever since first seeing The Office on the BBC while visiting the UK. Tremendously funny, fresh writing were par for the course on this show, harking back to the classic feel of This is Spinal Tap. I give Steve Carell et al a lot of credit for bringing the show over here. They seem to have gotten most (not all) of the same cues from the original series. So as you can imagine, I was overjoyed when I heard that Gervais would be doing his own podcast. His latest show Extras hadn’t made it over to the U.S. in any form other than bit torrent downloads and I was yearning for some more great writing from the master.

The podcast doesn’t disappoint. Hosted by Gervais, Steve Merchant and Karl Pilkington it consists of stories, conversation and a lot of laughing. While it does venture away from being scripted like the television shows, it offers a great feeling of improvisation that makes for some crippling belly laughs. Typically they are a result of Gervais himself killing himself laughing at co-host Karl Pilkington. I don’t want to try and describe the dynamic too much because I feel that it would take away from the novelty. I would recommend that you head on over to iTunes and listen for yourself.

Google, darling child of the Internet, has been going through some tough times as of late. These recent stories have brought the uber-search site back into the front of my mind, and it got me really interested in an article I found tonight.

Google Redux: a design exercise, a short article by Andy Rutledge, examines the aesthetic and functional layout of Google’s homepage. Going one step further, Rutledge attempts to refine the front page of the search engine we all know and love. The article has a lot of intriguing points, calling into question placement of page elements and the forethought that went into the overall layout.

Now, granted one of Google’s strengths has always been keeping things simple, but when you start to dive into their layout and markup, you see some pretty startling things. Tables for layout? Hideous masses of non-breaking spaces? Non-sensical CSS class names? There’s a serious amount of transgressions against best practice markup going on in there! Now I’m not aiming for this to fall in the category of stuck-up developer rants, but come on Google: with the amount of cash you’re raking in, it might be time hire some developers to bring your code up to modern day standards.

On that note, where do I send my resume?