Category: life

Many years ago when I wanted to leave computer business and purchase a gas station, a friend of mine who was in fuel business said, “You know nothing about gasoline. Stay where you are. Keep doing what you’re doing, just do it a little better than others rdquo;. Believe it or not – this simple advice really works, and I had a chance to see it in action today.

Let me ask you this, “Can you come up with any innovation for the time interval between the moment you pressed the button Send in your email client and the moment when the send process actually begins rdquo;? No? And Microsoft couldn’t, even though MS Outlook is probably still the most popular email client.

But Google found a way to use this time interval “a little better than others”.

Today, I was sending an email using my gmail account with a file attachment. You know what happened? I pressed the button Send but forgot to attach the file. The text of my email message had the words “see attached”.

I pressed the button Send and … Google made my day! Just look at the message I got:

Is it crazy or what? If you think about it, it’s so easy to implement! So why other vendors didn’t do it?

How about this nice little feature: have you ever regretted pressing that button Send right after you hit it? No Biggies.Go to the menu Settings, Labs and enable the Undo Send feature. Now after pressing the button Send, your new email will stay in a queue for a configurable time (5, 10, 20, or 30 sec), and you’ll see an Undo link above the emails list that you can hit if you changed your mind within this interval. Nice? Yes! Easy to implement? You bet! So why no one else did it before? They just never thought of it this way?

I know, I know hellip; Re-phrasing a famous writer Isaac Babel, “That’s why Google is where it is, and you just have spectacles on your nose and autumn in your heart.”

Bravo, Google! They do the same things as others, but just a tiny bit better.

Update. Two years after publishing this post I found another GMail’s little gem: highlight the fragment of the email text and press Forward – only the highlighted text will be included into the forwarded email. Is it cool or what?

Update 2. Three years after publishing this post I noticed that each email has a bookmarkable URL! Just now I’ve added an item to my calendar to respond to a certain email and pasted its URL into the calendar.

Go to myspace.com and search on “smoking pot ” or something stronger. You’ll find the messages of young (and not so young) people who are trying to be cool and write about how they like smoking pot or chilling out with marijuana, which may not even be true. Forget for a second about the bad effects that smoking pot has on your kids. Most of the kids will get over it and won’t do it in their adult lives. But guess what, the record in MySpace remains forever.

These days, when I’m about to meet a new person on business, or hire a new employee, I go to google first trying to gather some “intelligence” on this person. I often find some non-business related info about people I ‘m searching on. In some cases it simplifies hiring decisions, and sometimes it’s good to know what’s this person into after business hours.

The sites like myspace.com is one of the popular places where our kids hang out. And they want to be cool. And they want to impress. And they publish some stupid things about how they spent their time – real or imaginary things. But the record remains. Now, your daughter is looking for a roommate in college, “Mom, there’s this girl Mary Lou…She’s really nice and we’ve decided to share an apartment”. Mom goes to myspace, does a quick search on Mary Lou from Springfield, MA and answers: “Over my dead body “. Mary Lou might be a nice girl and published that marijuana blog just for kicks. Too late. Over my dead boy.

Then Mary Lou is applying for a job. Her perspective employer goes to myspace.com – over my dead body.

Got the message? Send this blog over to your child, if you know his/her email.

The story #1. Yesterday, my son (he’s in the seventh grade) asked me if I knew how to send a letter without a post stamp? I knew, but was hoping that he’d tell me a different story. Nope, it was the same advice that one poor immigrant gave me about 15 years ago. This is an illegal but an elegant advice – if you need to send a letter, say to Joe Smith, write his name and address in the return section of the envelope, and your name and address in the recipient’s section. Drop it in the mailbox without affixing any post stamps. The post office will “return” this letter to Joe Smith with a reminder about missing postage. Messing out with mail is a federal offense, so please do not even think about doing this, but isn’t it cute?

When I asked my son where did he find out about this, he said at bored.com, a Web site were all kids go when they are bored.

The story #2. My colleague’s daughter is even younger than my son, and this is her story. In every organization where you work there is always a lonely person, nobody likes him, he’s not being invited to parties, after-work drinks et al. You should always buy candies, stop by this person’s cube, smile to him and offer candies, because when he will be fired and will come back next day with a gun methodically shooting each of the former co-workers, he’ll stop by your cube, will think for a moment, “Hmm, this person was giving me candies” and will proceed to the next cube.

Isn’t it just a tiny bit strange that such stories are being told by kids? Can you share with us your kid’s story?