Thursday, May 03, 2007

09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0

Time for a quick "googlepc" update...

For the most part I've been satisfied using Google Docs as a replacement for word/excel. But there have been some deal breaking issues.

First of all is availability of service. A couple of nights ago I was sifting through email looking to print out a couple of forms I needed to complete to bring to an interview I had scheduled the next day.

I kept getting errors that "Oops, the service isn't currently available" and "There was a problem, the good news is it's been submitted as a bug so we can fix it" and other such babble. Basically, I couldn't get to my docs, when I needed them. I went back and forth for several minutes and did finally get them opened up.

Not so much a deal breaker as a nuisance but when I tried to print these documents I of course got all the default header and footer stuff printed from the browser. Typically, I like this stuff, it gives me a date and a URL where the document can be found for future reference. But, when printing a form they screw up the page alignment and for job applications and such just isn't in good taste to have them on there.

I have no intention of reconfiguring this every time I print. Google Docs needs to get a decent printer interface worked out so I don't need to use different page configurations for printing when I try to print one of their docs.

The other deal breaker I've run into was the personalized home pages. I've been using a my.yahoo.com page for about 10 years and it's always been stable and reliable. Monday morning I log in to my personalized google home page via my google apps site and all of my news feeds are missing. Just gone. I had about 12 RSS listings in there and they have now gone away. No email, no notice, nothing. It lost all my customization.

I spent a lot of time configuring the look, theme and content of my personalized home page, you don't just go wiping it out on someone with no explanation...unless you're google, of course.

I'll rebuild it and try and keep using it, but one more fumble and I'm going back to Yahoo guys.

Oh, if the title of this post doesn't make any sense - just Google it. Or Yahoo it and spread it around. Then ask yourself why we're letting these idiot no-brains influence our government. Did they really believe this was their silver bullet? Have the guys developing their content control ever actually read anything about encryption, code breaking or digital security? Is "pathetisad" a word?

Actually, don't Yahoo it - I'm currently boycotting Yahoo for ratting out a pro-democracy Chinese national. Read all about it here. I'm so torn. Maybe I'll just write and host my own personalized home page on my own server on my own url and then when it crashes I'll have no one to blame but myself.

Oh well.

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