33 posts tagged “google”

This was very subtle:

I thought it was a typo when I originally saw it (the proofreader’s instinct again), before it clicked: it’s Google’s 11th birthday. As parodies go, this one is clever—and few people can go around wrecking the Google logo in parody form, since the company regularly does it by itself.

In case my Firefox 3.5.3 woes were due to Google Toolbar not being up to date, I installed a new one. Bad mistake.
   The new one is difficult to edit in 3.5.3, and each update took 20 to 60 seconds for the menu bar to stop being greyed out. During this editing process—and, in fact, through no intervention of my own—the Google Toolbar spanner icon disappeared.
   So how does one get it back? Ask Google?

You guessed it: in order to get back a missing icon, you need to click the spanner icon. Which is a problem when the spanner icon is missing.

I am now remembering why the last time I used Google Earth, it was 2005. It’s very hard to use.
   Say you want directions between two very common locations. I chose Buckingham Palace and Victoria Station. I fed them in.

   You click next on the search button, I presume, which is marked by the magnifying glass. I think I am right. I only started designing websites in 1993. Google doesn’t like that:    It doesn’t know which Victoria Station I meant. The logical thing is to select the first one, correct? That would signify to Google that I meant Victoria Station, London SW1V, United Kingdom.
   All it does is open yet another set of ‘Did you mean’ options: And ad infinitum.
   I have typed in, manually, Google’s version of the address into the ‘To’ box, but it still produces a ‘Did you mean’. Yes, Google, I did mean. Now, work already!
   As I have said numerous times, I wish these programs were made for the common man and not someone with a master’s or Ph.D. in computer science.

I have never been to the capital of the United States before, but I was playing on Google Earth for the first time in about three years tonight, looking for the White House. Unless all my schooling was wrong, and I consider myself reasonably well educated, I was under the impression this is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC. Here’s what Google Earth returned:

Nothing around here even looks like the White House. Can any American readers please explain what I am doing wrong, or is this another one of those computer glitches that only happens to me?
   If I have done nothing wrong, then here are some possibilities of what has happened:

• the White House doesn’t exist and never did. I only dreamed that it did;
• the White House only exists in fiction, like Ernie Wise’s wig;
• the boss of Google voted Republican;
  
• the White House has been moved to another location, like they did with the Museum Hotel;
• the White House has been blocked from Google Earth for a 9-11-related reason;
• UFOs have beamed up the entire White House;
• the Manhattan Project has beamed up the entire White House.
  

Some more oddities I have found on the web today, both relating to Google.
   Ever hear of people wanting you to give 110 per cent? Google’s Blogger service sure tries hard:

In a republish yesterday, Blogger reported that it was giving 103 per cent.
   Here’s one from just a few moments ago. Selling Cialis? Google News now picks that up: See the second and fourth entries. I found a third one there as well.
   And remember the PHP error I noted at the end of June? It turns out I am not alone with Firefox refusing to open a page and prompting me to save it instead, as I finally found this complaint today. However, unlike the complainant I was unable to solve it and the error is not on the servers I visited. As he was using Ubuntu, and I am using Windows, we can probably conclude that the error is Firefox’s alone, and sporadic as well.

Does anyone know if Google Video is dead? I can get to the other Google sites, and I know Google announced it would kill uploads to its video service. All I did was click the ‘Video’ link at the top of my search results’ page.

Google has some weird off-days. When typing the last blog entry, I went to hunt for the Dick Smith Electronics website in New Zealand. It wasn’t there, with the query Dick Smith Electronics site:nz:

The Australian one could not be found without the site:nz qualifier. Weird.

I don’t know if folks knew this, but Google supposedly was meant to make life easier with maths, so you could feed in arithmetic into the search box and it would work it out.
   Um, not really. Trying to convert temperatures just now was not easy. I have to type things in full: e.g. -6 degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit and not –6°C in °F (it didn’t like that) or –6°C in Fahrenheit. It is quicker reaching for a conversion calculator, or, if you remember the formula in your head, to do it that way.
   I am not even that sure if people can spell Celsius and Fahrenheit.
   I read on another Vox blog that it feels like –30°F in Chicago today, with the wind chill presumably. That’s –34°C in new money. It is a temperature that I find unfathomable as it never gets that cold here unless you head down to Antarctica.

I know a few of you in the northern hemisphere, where it is winter, are not happy with your stormy weather. But spare a thought for those of us who are meant to have summer right now. Summer, it seems, is off, and midsummer tomorrow is forecast to be lousy. The climate is wetter than a Rod Blagojevich excuse. And 10°C on Monday is plain chilly.

This Google video is worrying, especially as I refuse to carry one of these things except when I am out of town—and even then never in a trouser pocket. Yet some people’s lives are dominated by them—such as this chap’s: