Dan Birchall

Photo: Suzanne Frayser/Subaru Telescope, NAOJ I mentioned the annual Volunteer Dinner in a post last month .  For the last several months, I've had the good fortune to have my friend and fellow volunteer  Josh as a co-worker, and to get to help train him.  We've each volunteered over 1,500 hours since 2004, and have both been recognized for "Long-Standing Contributions."  Josh was named "Volunteer of the Year" as a student, and I've been in the running for it the last few years. Since we volunteer in a field related to our work, and our workplace's press officer attended the dinner and insisted on taking our photo, we kind of knew that sooner or later, work would have something to say  about what we do with our personal time. I'm really looking forward, though, to next year's dinner, because as of late summer, we have two newer co-workers - our old friend Jennie and our new friend Rita - who are also both volunteers

And congratulations, South Sudan .

  Today, Google+ rolled out its new Pages feature. On the surface, Google+ pages are pretty similar to Facebook pages - a way to create a presence for a business, movie, cause, or whatever.  They're not exactly the same, though. On Facebook, users can like a page.  A page can post on its own wall, as can users if the page allows it.  A page can add other pages to its favorites, and page administrators can easily switch between doing things as themselves and doing things as any of the pages they administer.  Google+ pages pretty much match all these features. On Google+, though, pages share more capabilities of normal accounts.  They have circles, and can post things for members of specific circles. If a user or page circles a page, the page can reciprocate, and can then comment on posts shared with it.  In fact, the only obvious thing I've found that a page can't do is circle an individual user who hasn't circled it first. So what's this mean? Well, l