One of my major criticisms of Google over the last few years has been the state of most of their products. While many of them are initially innovative and useful, they usually fall by the way side and seemingly get abandoned. The "beta" moniker seems to be ever-present on most of their services, leading one to almost believe that there is no such thing as a finish product within the walls of Google. I just read this article where someone took the time to figure out just how many of Google's products are in beta. The verdict? Nearly half of them, including the four year old gmail product ...

That's it really. I no longer carry cash for the most part. My paycheck arrives in my bank account electronically. When I pay for things, I use my credit card, debit card, or paypal. My bills are paid via online banking, and except for a birthday card once a year, rarely use snail mail. I probably receive 5 pieces of mail a month, but receive around 100 emails a day, and currently have 13,050 messages in my gmail inbox. The fastest way to get a hold of me (even beating out phone calls) is actually via email these days. I ripped most of my CDs to my computer last year, and primarily listen to MP3s ...

Seriously. I look in my spam folder of my gmail account and on my blog every few days, and it's absolutely ridiculous just how much garbage ends up in it. Between the two I see about 100 or more combined comments/emails per day. It's just insane. No, I don't need viagra, or 100 different types of drugs, or some girl in YOURCITY to come over, or to come to your shitty seminar. Please give up already. It's not like any of these are intelligent either. I bet I could wire up a resistor, a few capacitors, a nine volt battery, and a piece of chicken that would catch 99% of them without any fancy algorithms. ...

For all of you people who upgraded to Leopard and are using GMail, you have have noticed a few weird things going on. For me, my contacts no longer auto complete properly, and periodically all the javascript in gmail stops working. I've checked a lot of newsgroups and many people are having the same problems. Apparently gmail has tried moving to a newer version that isn't really compatible with Safari 3.0 yet. The solution is to just go up to the top right in gmail and click "old version", which will roll back your GMail version to one that does work with Safari. You're welcome :) ...

Well, now that I've gotten all my weekend fun out of the way, I think I'm going to take it easy and relax. Of course, the first thing I'm going to do is warm up some left over lasagna, but then I have a bunch of web work I really want to get done. Plus, Sunday is usually laundry day, and I need to catch up on that. I set up by Gmail/IMAP account on my Apple Mac Mail program. I'm not sure if I'm going to use it though. At least for me, it seems pretty slow. Not only does it seem to take forever to sync, but the CPU is fairly high even with the Mail program is idling. It might be related to the ...