Google, you can do better..

Last week, I was trying to look up old posts to link to something I was writing.

Three for three, the Google ads on the right sidebar were something like this.. 

My first thought was "hey, don't I know the woman in the top picture? have seen her somewhere before!"

Then realized that it is exactly the same ad where I had seen her before. the mind is a funny thing. It makes these associations.

Yes. I agree. There IS a "sweet Asian Woman I should be with" and she has a name already.. Sangeetha! 

If Google was smart enough, it would have figured it out. 

On the bright side, they have figured out the right demographic based on my travel habits.  For a good six months they were showing ads for the "sweet Russian woman I should be with". Sooner or later they will zero in on "Indian woman I should be with", then figure out I am already with a sweet woman and finally pitch me something else. Or so one hopes.. 

For crying out loud, there are very few things that are interesting to me right now Google. My life is an open blog!

Work, Home and Bikram Yoga

If it is work, pitch me things that will make travel a breeze (doesn't have to be sweet Asian women.. that is taking it to an extreme)

If it is home, it has to be "back to school" related.. pitch me something that I will be tempted to buy for the kids or for myself, which is restricted to food and photography (don't bother with the Nikon ads either. You should have figured out that I am too deeply invested in Canon to move now after 25 years). As for buying things for the "sweet girl", she would rather buy it herself. So you have to work a little harder and pitch me those things based on what she is checking out online. A little help there would be nice!

If it is Yoga, then you know what you can pitch.

It IS really that simple!

The Android newbie..

Have been a bit on the busy side the last couple of days. One main reason is that my company gave me a brand new phone. It is a phone new to the company as well and I have volunteered to be the Guinea pig on this one..

After getting so many complaints from me about poor AT&T service on my iPhone (note we live in Cupertino, the birthplace of apple but the iPhone has the worst signal coverage with AT&T in this area as the locals have banned the cell phone towers around us as it will be an eyesore on the mountain skyline!) switched me over to Sprint. Also this happens to be an android phone.

Right now there are 4 bars on the phone and the phone works as a phone very well. (Duh?)

It took me two days to figure out the menus, the look and feel of the phone as well as andoid quirks. Have almost made the menus and screens look identical to what was on my iPhone! We are creatures of habit and the fingers automatically to to a certain spot on the phone to check calendar, mail or make a phone call... so now we have an Android phone with 4 rows of 4 apps which look 1:1 like the iPhone screen.

The kids helped me find their stuff too and it is all in there on the second and third screen..

Only issues so far?

No way to see Tamil Fonts. People write stuff in Tamil in emails sent to me, google+ etc and all I get is a bunch of rectangles. Don't know if there is an easy way to support complex fonts or the Android guys simply havent provided support for Tamil fonts yet..

The iPhone was showing Tamil fonts fine. It just didn't work well as a phone...

Also this thing has two cameras, one on the front as well and should enable video chat! Except the gtalk has no videochat enabled on this. So we have to download some other app to do this and sign into google through that app. Do not know how safe that is. So if you have figured out a way to do gtalk with video on a Photon 4G, let me know as well.

Thanks in advance.

Also, many thanks to all of you who gave us tips on the whole birth certificate thing. Really really helpful. Much appreciated!

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Image compression ...

Old Image from previous post which was larger size (3051 pixel width) and sharpened in Canon DPP to +7

New image reduced to 1280 pixel width and sharpened in Canon DPP only to +3 before uploading..

I Stand corrected.. no difference in compression! Apologies to Google..

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What has happened to Google news?

Was a big fan of google news. Yes, it is now in past tense.

Seriously, the first time I had clicked on the News link when it was there, I was hooked.

You got world news on top. You almost clicked the news button on top and what you were looking for was usually the number 1 link.. right there as though they read your mind!

You could also scroll down just half a page and fast flip links to things that interest you!

Now, it is all messed up. You get local weather which we don't need google to tell us. Based on searching (through google) looks like the changes are permanent and there is no plan to give an option to revert back to the old settings! Apparently that is to help the user!!

Local news which we usually don't care about.

Taking off any flexibility of even seeing what you want in a format you want, all in the name of personalization.

Why did Google do this?

Did they ever ask folks in the top of the news page "Are you happy with Google news? do you want any changes? Do you want us to be more like Bing news or Yahoo news? If we copied those pages would you still read Google news?"

etc. etc. and my bet is the answer would have been "do not mess with this product" from most folks who read it.

Why Google? Why?

Why would a company that was doing a lot of things right now doing a lot of things wrong?

The mess with Buzz, now the mess with News?

Do you hire too many people from Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook recently?

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They sure get creative, don't they?

This crossed the spam filter and presented itself in the Inbox!

Very creative way to get your account info, no?

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