Daily Archives: November 26, 2014

Google annoyances

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I’ve just been updating software on my machine and saw that Google was inviting me to ‘upgrade’ my Google Calendar. So I foolishly clicked to accept the upgrade. Then logged into my calendar to find that the screen is littered with corny jpegs of a birthday cake which indicate, apparently, the birthdays of my ‘friends’. Pissed of by this, I then went looking for a way of turning off this absurd and unwanted ‘feature’. But it turns out that if they are ‘friends’ from Google+ (another turkey btw) then there’s no option to unsubscribe from this toxic calendar feed.

It’s almost enough to force me to use the Apple iCal app.

There must be a way of getting round this idiotic ‘feature’. But I don’t have time to do the necessary research because I’m trying to write. Maybe I should bill Google for the ‘research time’ needed to restore what is a useful product/service to its original condition.

Diplomatic blogging

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Last night I was at the Irish Embassy in London to give a lecture about George Boole, the great Victorian mathematician and the first Professor of Mathematics at my alma mater, University College Cork. It was a gratifyingly packed house, but the most unexpected discovery was that the Ambassador, Dan Mulhall, not only runs a rather good personal blog, but that he is also a Joyce enthusiast. Here, for example, is the text of the lecture on the ‘Cyclops’ chapter in Ulysses that he delivered on Bloomsday at the York Festival of Ideas. It’s pretty good IMHO.

My only complaint is that — like an increasing number of people — he persists in using the term ‘blog’ when in fact he means “blog post “. But I suspect that I am on a losing battle on this. I’m beginning to sound like the pedants of the 1950s who objected to people calling transistor-powered portable radios “transistors”. Sigh.