isabel wang

This site may harm your computer

In his post on GDrive yesterday, Om Malik wrote that he didn't like the idea at all:

My biggest problem with GDrive is that it would come from Google. As my friend Mark Evans points out, “Before you know it, Google has become a daily and integral part of your digital portfolio. Not that this a bad thing given Google’s products are really good but it should make you think about how dependent you can become on Google for pretty much everything. The downside is you can lose access to a lot of essential information if Google, for whatever reason, locks you out.”

How timely of Google to show Om less than 24 hours later that we have more immediate worries than "Google one day going too far, and getting away with it". 

Until I saw Robin Wauters' Techcrunch post, I wondered if I could have done something wrong. Hmm. Maybe I should be backing up my Gmail messages and Google Docs.

I haven't come so far after all

In 1986, having just landed in Baltimore from Taipei, I spoke almost no English and couldn't finish the simplest sentence without getting stuck on some unknown word or phrase. One by one I looked them up in my Chinese/English dictionary.

Last week, having just landed in DC from Taipei, I thought of my 10th grade self, who used to live 40 some miles away. I had met the folks from Civic Taipei during my trip and promised to send them a quick guide on uploading online videos. Disoriented from jetlag, I'm not sure I realized I'd be answering their questions in Chinese. But then a Chinese follow-up email landed in my inbox. I'd apparently taken on a nearly insurmountable task.

Typical. File. Formats. Did I know how to say any part of that in Chinese? Copy embed code and paste in HTML? Yikes. Google Translator lookups are a whole lot faster than flipping through a paper dictionary, but it's still a struggle to string bits and pieces of text together in a way that sounds right. It brought back such vivid memories of having done this before. I am almost exactly where I was, geographically and linguistically, 23 years ago.