Fmail
Published July 07, 2004
Why are two heads better than 2,000? What is it about the two-punk dynamic that makes them so exponentially inventive? Two nerds, two punks, two guys talking, tinkering, thinking. Suddenly these's an industry. Like Orville & Wilbur over by there at the bicycle shop.
Joel & Ethan. Bill & Paul. That kid Jobs and his buddy What's-his-name out in What's-his-name's garage building Apple computers (infringing Apple Records but later infringed by Snapple).
How come two guys can do what generals and their armies can't? Because.
Like Microshank and YooHoo, Gobble was once my favorite upstart. But effective immediately, I have placed the Gleebies on double-secret probation.
Gmail earns an F.
I realize it's the beta version, and it's beta than anything else I've used, but it only works 40% of the time.
The first time I saw the failure pop-up, I was actually charmed. "Oops..." it said, "The system was unable to perform your operation. Please try again in a few seconds." I was not charmed the second time.
I'm alarmed. I have so much respect for the Gooqle twins that I found it easier to believe the internet was under terrorist attack than that our boys down the block failed to consider you can't hook up a garden hose to a fire hydrant. Because you can't.
You can't give everybody 1000 Gb and not expect them to test you. A thousand gigabytes is to YeHaa's Premium 2 Gb what Peoria is to North America. Yet Peoria has an airport.
It all smacks of what happens when upstarts becomes startups. When money and people are blasted in from a firehose to do what used to be done by two guys and a helper it takes months for everybody to dry off and clean the place up a bit, after which most of them will be fired, which will raise the stock price and indicate better times ahead, at which point the company settles into the life of the behemoth, chugging along amiably as a mannatee.
In the meantime, failure pop-ups. Which I plan to endure, out of faith in the two guys, whoever they might be.
I misnamed them here not from disrespect but kindness. I trust they're apalled.
- Fmail
- Published: July 07, 2004
- Type:
- Section: Culture
- Writer: CW Fisher
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Well, Scott, maybe you gave them a more favorable review. I may have been selected at random for failure. Or maybe it's all my fault. Blame the victim? Is that how it goes? ;)
Not blaming you, Curt. I could very well encounter this same problem next time I try to log on -- this is just the first I've heard of it from any source.
happens all the time to me, and I've only been on gmail for less than a month. sigh ... i'll have to reroute all those email that I was getting (but not reading) through gmail.
p.s. that's how I found this blog. i was googling the "oops..." gmail error.
It's only started recently for me. I suspect that the corporate firewall at work is what's doing the problem for me. It's happening with both IE and Firefox. With the same browsers (on the same laptop), I get in just fine from home.
Right now, I'm getting the error message when I try to send a message. Makes the account less useful - yahoo mail works fine from work.
Quick update - looks like gmail will work fine if it's in https mode, for what it's worth. It still doesn't work in regular http mode, but messages can be sent successfully in https.
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I've been using Gmail for almost three months as my primary email account and have not once encountered the error message you describe, much less anything approaching a 60% failure rate. All in all, I've found it to be far more stable than my other free accounts at Hotmail and Yahoo!, which are frequently either very slow or down entirely.