Tag: Google

Satyrdaz Theme Music

Last night was beautifully clear and cool.The temperature dropped into the 50s. We were rewarded with a coolly comfortable house in the morning, third day in a row. I credit the skunks for some of that. We usually open our windows at night, and our doors for a few evening hours, to naturally cool the house. Skunks, though, were getting busy at eleven at night, releasing their odor and forcing us to shut the windows. The skunks have taken an August recess. Hope they’re not ending it soon.

Today is Satyrda, August 9, 2025. It’s 75 F now, feels 85 F, and is going to reach 91. Tomorrow, we stalk the century zone again. I think about how pleased I am that I used the cool stretch to get outside work accomplished. The flip of that is, while I was doing that work, I discovered — or sometimes, re-discovered — other work to be done at there. I’m bristling about it a little now because today and tomorrow are swamped with calls for other activities, like a memorial service for a friend. There’s too many of those things going on.

We’re going on vacay, too. Detailed planning plagues the days leading up to our planned departure. Food is the subject. We’re sharing a house with two other couples. Those four are a decade plus older than us. We all live under food restrictions. No this and that. I now have my own list. They all want to cook in the rented home. That’s apparently part of their vacation ethos: “Let’s go away and cook.”

Each couple is to provide dinner one night. We’re on our own for breakfast and lunch. My wife and I have a surprise dessert planned, a vegan fondue smorgasbord.

As I sat reading news and sipping my coffee, my wife said from her part of the office, “We don’t need to worry about him. He’s golfing today.”

“Not true,” I answered. “Thanks to modern technology, he can text something or call someone and launch a new round of craziness.”

Although we never said his name, we’re talking about the human wrecking ball named Trump, who is also known as TACO. My wife and I share some laughs over FAFO stories, like the Trump Burger guy who ICE picked up and plans to deport, Roland Mehrez Beainy. Beainy responds to the claims against him, “Ninety percent of the shit they’re saying is not true.” Well, that’s probaby so. This is the TACO regime. They’re addicted to lying, just their leader, TACO himself.

Shifting tones, my wife and I are angry about reports of how big tech is helping the TACO Regime. Apple’s investments, and Tim Cook’s gold offering to Trump sicken us. Amazon Web Services gave Trump a billion dollar discount. Gag, groan. Google slashed cloud services for the TACO Regime. OpenAI is giving Trump’s agencies access for $1 per year. Ordinarily, I’d think, look how great this is, with these companies helping the United States. But they’re not helping the U.S. Nothing Trump does helps the U.S. It’s all about him. And these companies are bribing him to stay on his good side.

Today’s music is “Pride and Joy”. This is a 1983 rock blues offering by Stevie Ray Vaughn and Double Trouble. My wife and I are both fans of SRV & DT, and we enjoy this song. But I don’t understand any segue that leads from what I dreamed, thought, or observed that led The Neurons to pull this one out and slot it into the morning mental music stream. It’s just one of those brain things, I guess.

Coffee has been sucked up. Its off to the races. Hope grace and peace finds and keeps you. Cheers

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WTF, America

It’s another WTF, America, January morning in 2025. Google brings us this one. Bending their knee to power, as greedy corporations do, they have decided to rename things in accordance with the wishes of the First Peckerhead. In case you’re unaware, I’m referring to the first felon elected as POTUS in the history of the United States, aka #47.

Tell you what. I’m not caterng to this damn whim. It’s still the Gulf of Mexica and Denali to me. I’m not going to help the right-wing machine rewrite history, culture, or facts.

End of.

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Grenday’s Wandering Political Thoughts

I read a note on Mastodon. Here it is:

I wondered about the veracity. Because anything on the net is suspect these days. So I searched on the G spot, “Did meta donate to biden’s inauguration fund”. As you can imagine, the results came back with pages informing me about how the Z guy and Meta donated bunches to Trump’s inauguration, and others’ reactions to that. Didn’t answer the question, of course. Search engines rarely do these days.

Tried Finecomb. Even worse results.

Bing came closer to the answer on page two of its results. FoxBusiness reported, “Biden inauguration bankrolled by corporate donors like Amazon, Google, Boeing”. Check out the story. Other than that headline and a qualifier that’s it’s not that unusual as a business practice for corporations to donate to inauguration funds, they didn’t cite any company’s actual donation.

Finally, I tried DuckDuckGo. Sadly, their results were about the same as Alphabet’s search engine.

What is funny in a sad and bitter way is that FoxBusiness barely covers the fact that corporations and oligarchs are pouring money into Trump’s inauguration fund after that headline grab about Biden’s inauguration fund, that I could find. That just doesn’t seem like news to them.

BTW, I did learn through FoxBusiness that Robinhood donated $2,000,000 to Trump’s inauguration fund. So while there’s a lot of shrieking about Meta & Z guy, the B guy and Amazon, and Google, others are rushing in with little fanfare.

Ann Telnaes sure had it right, didn’t she?

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Friday’s Wandering Thoughts

I so love it when I go on a net page in Chrome to read something. Google covers part of it with ads. I can ask that they close the ad, and do.. They want feedback when I do that. Four options are included. None allow me to tell them, “YOUR AD IS BLOCKING THE FUCKING PAGE’S CONTENTS WHICH I WANT TO READ.”

No, that’s not an option. Guess that’s the price of technology.

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Just Wondering

A recent television ad extolling Fitbit and Google’s virtues suggests, what if the two entities combined? I wondered, would they be called Goobit or Fitle?

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Obit

It began with my obituary. 

Everyone googles themselves, right? Filling the gap between what you should be doing and thinking about what to have for dinner. Games have been played, work postponed, and the news is another blunt instrument on your head. So, idly, you type in your name.

My name, Michael Seidel, is bitterly common, bitterly because that makes it forgetful, except for the weather guy, what’s his name (see what I did there?). Google returned pages of Michael Seidel in their vaunted search results. Most were dead, except for real estate agents.

“Get more granular, dummy.” I played with search parameters. City, state, birthday.

Obit, obit, obit.

“Fuck.” What did the net know about me? My lust had to be sated. All that turned up, though, were obituaries. With some vinegar, I clicked on one to address the question, who is this imposter?

There was my photo and details.

I’d died the day before.

Car accident.

“Malware.” Had to be. Some new variation on ransom ware, doxxing, or cat fishing.

Loud rapping on the front door burst my concentration and triggered a sphincter clench. I hadn’t heard a car, I wasn’t expecting a package or a person, and visitors were as rare as snow in summer in this age of COVID-19.

Screw it; I wasn’t answering the door.

Then I was standing in the office door, looking in at me, me all the way from the disheveled, thinning, graying, fleeing fucking hair, navy shirt, beige shorts and clothes that I now wore.

Sweat ran down his flushed face and neck. He was panting. “Come on, let’s go.”

The natural retorts skittered through my head without reaching my lips because ‘I’ dashed across the room and peered out the window. “The shadows are coming.”

 

2

New Gmail A’comin’

It’s been a while. Are you ready for a rant?

Then you’ve come to the right place.

A new version of Gmail is coming. That has some factions of the net wet with excitement. “Have you noticed some new features in your Gmail?” Their words glow, as if this is really exciting.

I yawn. I spit. I curse.

Google has demonstrated a pattern of leaping out with new things that cause people to go, “Oh! Look what Google has done!” Meanwhile, old products and concepts that they brought out that caused people to go, “Oh! Look what Google has done!”, languish.

The Google publishing effort was one of those things for me. Google apparently desired to be like Amazon and publish! I investigated publishing on there to discover it was already gone.

Google Plus is another wanna be like some other company. In this case, it’s Facebook. I follow people and they follow me, but it’s like we’re walking in a circle in a living room.

Introductory rant over, I encounter issues on Gmail. Slow loading is one aggravation. Another is that the deleted emails return like the ghosts of this morning’s mail. Aggravating, yes. I already read this, did that, went there, deleted this, WTF, Google?

Getting help has proven impossible. Searches and scans deliver no tangible results. Most answers assume I’m on a Droid or smart phone and that it has to do with the mail settings. Fucking not applicable, okay? Other responses found on Google take me to Hotmail and Outlook issues. Everything else suggested has been tested. The problem still exists. Damn exasperating, it is.

So, excited about the new and improved Gmail? Fuck no. Still waiting for them to fix the previous edition.

Rant over. Back to the coffee.

2

Alphabet Issues

Time for a Sunday rant. I have good reason for it. I know; everyone who rants say they have good reasons for their rant. Let me state my case, and then you can decide.

Alphabet Inc. is trying to gaslight me.

Alphabet Inc. was created as a holding company for Google and its multi-tentacled endeavors. Google wants to be everything for us, substitutes for television, Netflix, Amazon, a dominant world force that we can trust. But the delta between what they promise and what’s delivered grows every day.

The three primary Google products I use are Gmail, Chrome, and the calendar. (I also sometimes use Google search, but it’s so damn commercialized, delivering the same results as different entries, that it’s become better to go with other search engines. They’re not much better, though. *Where have all the good searches gone?*) They’re three products that have been around for enough time for them to stabilize and cross that chasm from being bleeding edge to cash cow. When a product reaches the cash cow stage, it’s expected to be reliable and free from significant bugs.

It ain’t so with Chrome and Gmail.

I use the Inbox app to manage my Gmail. I write “manage” because that’s what they use to describe it. Inbox manages my mail as well as a toddler manages the bath water. Emails that have been read and deleted consistently haunt my inbox as unread, causing the frustration and irritation of wading through the past several days worth of mail along with today’s deliveries.

This is where the gaslighting comes in. Gaslighting is an old expression about conning people and confusing them about reality. “Didn’t I already do that?” they ask in old movies.

The villian laughs. “No, dear, you said you were going to. Honestly, were is your mind, my precious?”

That’s how it is with Gmail. “Didn’t I already read that?” I ask myself as I peruse the Inbox. “Oh, God, I thought I answered that yesterday.” I certainly meant to answer it. Where is my head?

Well, hell, it’s not my head, it’s Alphabet Inc. and their Gmail product. I have read, answered, and deleted these emails. Alphabet is just putting them back in.

Thinking it might be Inbox instead, I used Gmail without Inbox, as an experiment.

Nope; same results.

Don’t get me started on what’s going on with Chrome. It is very effective for administering my daily dose of first world blues and frustration, and is a wonderful impediment to having a good mood as I surf the net.

I would switch from Gmail, but our email addresses have their tentacles in every aspect of our lives. Extricating ourselves is a long and complicated process. It’s getting as involved as doing taxes in America or determining if it’s a catch in the NFL.

1

The Internet of Relationships

Dad was playing a computer game on his smart phone when his son walked in.

“Google, turn on the television,” the son said, sliding onto the sofa.

Dad called out, “The Internet is down, son.”

The boy said, “Google, turn on the television.”

Flinching with exasperation, his father called out, “Danny, the Internet is down. You need to use the remote.”

“Google, turn on the television,” Danny said.

Irritating growing, Danny’s father said, “Didn’t you hear me? The Internet is down. You need to use the remote.”

Danny looked at his father and frowned. “Google, what does the Internet is down mean?”

“Jesus,” his father shouted. “Are you serious? You really don’t know what I’m talking about?”

Studying his father, Danny said, “Google, what does he mean?”

“He?” his father asked. “He? Seriously? I’m your father, Danny. Get it? Now if you want to watch television, you need to use the remote to turn it on because the Internet is down.”

Danny’s frown danced in and out of existence as his father continued playing his game. Finally Danny looked up and said, “Google, what’s a remote?”

Gritting his teeth against a scream, his father finally said, “Google, how do I get through to my son?”

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