Two Complaints about Google

1. Last week I was trying to make a blog post. When I got to the Publish step, I typed in the letters from the captcha incorrectly. This brought to a page informing that Blogger couldn't tell if I was a human or a computer (they only want the former posting to blogs). Instinctively I hit the back button to go to the previous page and fix the mistake. However, something had timed out and instead of going back to my unpublished post, I ended up on a generic page, my post lost forever. This never happened before the XXXed out the "beta" part of the blogger logo. Apparently the non-beta version has two new features: Sign in with your gmail account, and lose all your data when you make a typo. Awesome.

2. To keep track of my marathon training, I created a spreadsheet on Google's free Docs & Spreadsheets service. I can edit it from work or home, and was also able to publish it for viewing by anyone. I missed, however, that the default for published spreadsheets is that only a snapshot of the document is published, rather than constantly being updated every time I made a change. Thus, while I thought everyone could check up on my progress the last two months, anyone who actually tried to do so would have been left with the impression that I had completely abandoned by trainig regime. Fortunately, there is an option to automatically republish the document (but, bizarrely, the only option is to republish every five minutes, rather than, say, anytime a change is made, which would seem to make more sense). But, the default wasn't what I expected.