i luv google

   There is no doubt that Google Translate has been incredibly helpful at times, especially with increasing globalisation which now sees websites being used by people from all around the world. 

   I’ve found that Translate does best when given a huge block of text to decipher. And maybe that’s because the context aids it. 

  But when - as you can see above - you’re looking for an accurate translation of what a particular item is called, that’s where it usually fails big time. I wondered what “梅菜” - a commonly used ingredient in Chinese cooking - was called in English. Translate returned “plum”. Ummmm, no. It’s not a “plum” at all. Not even close. It’s some kind of preserved vegetable that I don’t think even comes from the plum family.

   Some time very long ago now (yeah, I didn’t post about it back then because I’m a huge procrastinator, and also, cancer happened), I noticed that Gmail had started suggesting canned replies.

   They’re quite relevant for the most part. 

I’m aware I haven’t posted here in almost 2 years. Somehow nothing else in the world seemed important anymore after the husband was diagnosed with Stage 3B cancer last year in April. Slightly over a year later, I’m still picking up the pieces of my completely shattered life. Nothing will ever be the same again.

   It’s sad that, for all Google’s power and might, it still can’t cure cancer. I thought you could do anything, Google. I really did. 

   But Google has been extremely helpful in pointing both myself and my afflicted significant other to the latest research on gastrointestinal stromal tumours (GIST). We found out everything we needed to know about this disease long before his oncologist even made an appointment with him to discuss medication. It’s frightfully amazing the amount of info you can glean if you know what to search for. And Google has been our facilitator through and through.

   Google has changed the way the map moves when you drag it and this irritates the hell out of me, especially since I’m a heavy Maps user and plan my travel routes by dragging the map a lot. It now moves like it’s spherical, as opposed to flat before. 

   This was too cute for me not to post, being a lover of both turtles and the contemporary “geometric-minimalist” art style. 

  Google’s come up with its own “Olympics thingie” (called the “Doodle Snow Games”) to match the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games. 

  I still patiently await the day we’ll see an actual physical book (not e-book) showcasing all of Google’s doodle logos over the years. Some of the artists Google commissioned are really awesome. (Which is more than can be said for some of their programmers.)

So I’d been using Google Drive for some time now, and recently needed to delete some files to free up some space. I decided to see which folders were taking up the most space, so I could remove those first.

  Turns out I couldn’t.

   That’s because there is no option to view folder size in Google Drive. Yes, you heard me right.

   I repeat again:

Google Drive, a paid storage service, does not allow you to view the directory size of any of your folders.

   This is just unbelievable.

   Here is a thread where users contemplate this issue, some offering convoluted and overly time-consuming workarounds, others proposing to use a (rather shady and unknown) 3rd-party app, and yet others saying there must be some conspiracy involved. As always. *cue eyeroll*

   I really don’t give a rat’s arse about what Google’s reasons behind not having an option to view folder size are. All I know is, I would never pay for a service that doesn’t even offer such a basic feature. It’s so basic I would even term it primaeval. How can a 21st-century file storage service not have a 20th-century function?! It is inexcusable.

   So, unfortunately, Google, you have gone down a huge notch in my book.

So here’s something you may or may not know, which I just found out today... the painful way.

  Gmail has this feature called “conversation view”, which, if activated, will group together in one single message thread all your messages that have the same subject line and which were sent around the same date/time.

  You’ll get what appears to be a single email, but with a bracket next to the sender’s name, indicating the total number of emails that belong to that thread.

  I’ve always had conversation view set to “on” in my Gmail account, because it makes my inbox look tidier, and I don’t have to personally label each and every message I receive that clearly belongs to the same thread.

  But then today I realised that conversation view has an inherent flaw - it doesn’t actually always label each individual email message within the thread!!!

  Now, you might think, why is this a problem?

  Well, just a few minutes ago I needed to find a particular email that contained info about an item I’d sold some time ago on Steam. I knew that email had been labelled “buy/sell” (or so I thought!), so I searched for it under that label. Lo and behold, the search results yielded nothing.

  Stumped, I eventually searched my entire mailbox for the message, and not just the “buy/sell”-labelled emails. Once I did that, Gmail managed to find me the message I was looking for. When I looked at the results, I saw that the message I wanted had been grouped together with 18 other messages into a single thread with the same subject line. That thread was labelled “buy/sell”. Yet searching for that single message under the “buy/sell” label yielded no results.

  The only explanation for this is that, in conversation view, when you label an entire thread of messages, depending on which message you are viewing in that thread when you label it, not all messages in that thread will get labelled. This is despite the label correctly showing next to the whole thread in your inbox.

  Here’s a maybe slightly more helpful illustration of what I mean:

  If you look at the above image, the “buy/sell” label is clearly seen being applied to the entire thread. But this does not mean that each and every message in that thread is similarly labelled, as my search results have revealed, because then I would’ve been able to find the message I’d been looking for when I tried searching for it under its thread label.

  Even Indonesia’s komodo dragons get their own tribute today. Well, not to them to be precise, but to the national park that houses them.

  Remember DMOZ? No? Well, I do. Very clearly too. I stumbled upon it in the late ‘90s and was amused that human editors (and not machines) determined which sites got listed in their directory. (And yes, I also submitted many of my websites to DMOZ back then - of course I would, because: cute green dinosaur!!!)

  While sorting my browser bookmarks just last week, I came across DMOZ again and wondered how it was still running.

  Apparently though, it won’t be soon. Come 14 March, the site will be shut down. After close to 20 years, if I’m not wrong.

  And this post is on my iluvgoogle.org blog why? Because DMOZ, like Google, is one of those old-timers from the start of the dot-com era, which has struggled to stay competitive and relevant since Google started taking over the world. (I mean, not that I’m against that - Google taking over the world, that is.) And seeing DMOZ finally go is like saying goodbye to someone you once used to hang out with occasionally and somewhat fancy, but eventually drift apart from due to practical reasons. One of that reasons being specifically to make out with their bigger, better “enemy” (*cough* Google *cough*).

  Despite its commerciality, when Yahoo finally died, I must say I did feel a tinge of sadness - it was my virgin search engine after all. Same thing with Netscape Navigator (minus the commerciality factor) - my very first browser with a very cool name. But DMOZ is kinda different. Though I never used it much, I did like the concept and feel, and it’s always sad to see another early player you had some affection for bite the dust and call it quits.

  Once again, Google’s come up with a truly adorable V-Day treat - a sweet Pangolin minigame in place of just a doodle logo.

  (Pangolins are still found in Singapore too by the way, though they are extremely rare and critically endangered now, due to habitat loss and poaching.)

  Well, that was disappointing. I was expecting today’s doodle logo to have sound of some sort. Hmph.