Ionut Alex Chitu compiled a selection of farewell notes from departed Googlers. Nostalgic and longwinded, they're full of remembrances of free food and something called respect for engineers. Here's the good stuff — Googlers on why Googlers go. Four-word version: To be in charge.

AUSTIN, TX — I almost didn't sleep last night. At 4 a.m., after posting party reports for you ungrateful bastards my gorgeous, intelligent readers, I considered just powering through until my breakfast meeting with the boss, who was flying back to New York in the morning. Instead, I caught a disco nap. Even so, I arrived at the PureVolume ranch looking more rested than the weary souls shuffling in for free breakfast tacos. If you haven't had an Austin-style breakfast taco — soft tortilla with eggs and bacon or chorizo — then you should reflect on the direction your life is taking and what you can do to amend your ways.

"I think the Google logo is childish and ugly," Jeff Veen just said at a SXSW panel. Many designers share Veen's opinion. It's notable only because Veen is in charge of user-interface design at Google. Are we going to see a revamp of the logo? Unlikely, if only because there's so many billions of dollars of brand value attached to the current ugly, childish version.

It's been almost half a year since Google bought the stat service Measure Map and hired its creator Jeffrey Veen. Looks like he's taken charge at his new home, thus ruining all our planned "It's not easy being Veen" jokes. In a chat with design firm 37signals, he shares his emergency meeting strategy.

Valleywag's first SloshCon at the House of Shields was so successful that my hangover's having baby hangovers. Remember the live-audience interviews and speeches on the game plan? Scrapped. We didn't want to ruin the vibe (half the crowd had arrived in the first 20 minutes), so we all kept on drinking and bullshitting one-on-one. (Top photo by Jeremiah Owyang)

Beware the Valentine-tie-in press release. The Register gets cute about the crap that companies send the press. [The Register]
New Internet — all the stuff that wasn't wrong with Old Internet. [Techdirt]
Larry Ellison will eat anything. The latest Oracle acquisition is another open source firm. [CNet]
Oh, that's rich. "I failed my Google exam. Ergo, Google will die." [Craigslist]
Jeff Veen's letter to early Measure Map users: "You can expect great things from this acquisition." Sure, like with Blogger and Dodgeball. [Yugatech]

Told ya. If you haven't already seen Jeffrey Veen's post on the Google Blog, the Measure Map creator just left the UI consultants at Adaptive Path and sold his user-friendly stat-tracker to Google. (Of course, Valleywag readers knew it five days ago.)