applying myself & bashing Google

 Days have been passing like the speeding Smart cars around here, and each one has included some minor mishap or crisis. It's gotten me into an odd mood–one that is fixed only by doing all of the dishes, sweeping the floor and doing laundry in our bathroom sink. My anxiety always works itself out by putting my hand to work, most frequently resulting in desserts and breads of some kind. With the two hotplates, I've had to find other options.

Today, I cleaned up and didn't feel any relief. It's started to feel like this is all I do, and the things I should be doing (studying French, writing, reading nonfiction to better my writing) get pushed to the back hotplate. I was determined to get back to the longer-term to-do list, to focus on the things important to me.

So I applied to graduate school. After weeks of thinking and talking about my personal statements, fussing over writing samples & reading the application checklists, I took the first step. One of seven graduate school applications (with the exception of letters of recommendation) is complete and sailing itself across the ocean to an Office of Admissions.

This has helped offset other setbacks, like

1. Ayn Rand writing way too many pages so that I can't finish this Atlas Shrugged, or
2. French strikes causing the place where we're going to buy bikes to close for the day, and
3. Me getting distracted by class preparations and not doing yoga, or what about
4. Google not telling me they store my albums in Picasa and then telling me I have to delete pictures before I can add more to my blog.

This one really, really gets to me and I'm going to take a minute to stray from the usual francofile topics to another topic that really, really irks me: property rights in a digital realm. Let's hope there "integrated PR"team really does seek out Google in the blogging/social networking world and finds this post.

Dear Google,

I love you. It's true. I refuse to by an iPhone, because that could take you away from me. I refuse to accept Bing as I viable search option. I appreciate your excellence free e-mail program.

However, I do not appreciate the pictures hosted on my blog–me they the sourced content of others or my own content–being collected without my knowledge. Your help tools suggested that I create Picasa albums, to pull photos from instead of repeating the same images (my headers have now all been deleted to create room in these finite albums). Your help tools did not tell me that Picasa was more than a suggestion: It is obligatory. It is finite, and it is not explained when we reach the end of our space.

I spent two days trying to insert pictures on my blog before a friend and fellow blogger explained to me that my Picasa albums were full. My Google account, which is linked to my blogger, links to Picasa and stores all images here. How convenient? It could be. It could also be seen as an act that removes the right to my property, an act similar to Facebook's privacy changes but without the due reaction from the public.

So I understand: You don't put a (true) limit on my G-mail. You limit my pictures. This is your right. It is also my right to know where my content ends up, and I would expect better from a search engine dedicated to similar human rights.

Am I overreacting? Most likely. Is it because this means I have to sift back through posts and use Picasa versions of my files instead of uploading them from my collections? Perhaps. Am I upset because Picasa is ages behind Flickr in terms of usability standards and web design? Perhaps, but as a faithful user of Blogger for years I don't want to be bitter. I don't want to run out of space & search for a new, larger, more flexible option. I want to stick with the solid source for free blogs that has been, to this point, adequately updating itself to meet the needs of its users.

Yours sincerely,
Megan