Google checkout. Annoying. I tried it out, saved $10 on an order. Except – surprise – not that many retailers seemed to be accepting it. Well, not yet anyway. I found what I was looking for at Buy.com.
I never checked ‘receive spammy promotional crap’ (I never do) and yet I still got it. No surprise there. And I thought, ‘perfect, this is why google offers to forward email from them to me – so I can discontinue it whenever I want to, right?’
First I tried to sign in to google checkout. Somehow when I created my account, and associated it with my google account (used with gmail, etc), the password apparently didn’t ‘take’. or something. Because the next time I tried to log in (to check the status of an order), I couldn’t. I had to go back to my email and click on some link to get my order status.
Same thing this time around. I eventually went back to my email and found one of my previous emails about an order and clicked the link at the bottom saying “stop receiving email from these folks.” But it was annoying that there wasn’t some kind of centralized screen where I could review all of my merchants and manage my email preferences for them there.
In order to even try, I had to reset my google password (fortunately they DO let you set it to the same thing again) and that seemed to correct the problem. Of course, nothing like what I was looking for.
I do also find (at least) one thing annoying about gmail. I still don’t seem to be able to use Safari – not sure what’s up with that, but it’s not terrible using Firefox – but besides that –
When I write on the computer, I frequently jump around in the text as I am sorting out what I write. Same goes for composing an email. And when I hit ‘down arrow’, especially when I’m already ON the last line of the text I’m composing, I DO NOT WANT a new line added for me. That’s really freaking presumptuous and annoying. I just want to put the insertion point at the end of the line.
Grr.
Part of me wants to care enough to …
- blog about it (I AM CHANGING THE WORLD HERE PEOPLE. YEAH)
- write to them and ask them to make it a pref or something
- figure it out and make a greasemonkey workaround
Speaking of item 3 – I actually heard something along the lines of Google locking people out of their system for using greasemonkey scripts that mess with gmail or ad-showing stuff, etc. I guess I can understand that because that’s the premise of their service – targeted ads in exchange for free email. But I can just imagine them misinterpreting some greasemonkey hack to remap or disable the ‘down-arrow’ key functionality as some attempt to circumvent ads and getting locked out of my email box as a result.
SERIOUS PARTY TIME
…followup…
So I hunted around trying to figure out how to even SEE the gmail source – didn’t get 100% there but found John Manoogian’s archived dump of the source — heh, small world — and pecked through that looking for keycode 40 and whatnot. Of course, the functions are deliberately obfuscated (I’m sure they’d claim they’re merely shortened to streamline your download time and improve your gmail experience) and even if I could figure it out, who exactly would I complain to?
Why, Google groups, of course.
That’s right. No longer is there any gmail-support@google.com, who I already found it a huge PITA to deal with. Now it’s some weird amalgam of newsgroups (“google groups”), or something. What if I don’t WANT to join the group just to get help? Yeah… then I won’t get any. So much for one-on-one. But hey, I’m not paying for it. Again: I understand where it comes from but it makes me want to use their stuff SO much less as a result.
Grr, again.