If you hate Gmail's new look and how to make it tolerable

I so hate Gmail's new look. Today was finally the day when I was no longer allowed to "temporarily" use the old look. What does the new look mean? It means I no longer have the comfortable choices "Archive", "Report spam",  "Delete" etc., but some cryptic pictograms, so each and every time I want to do something, I would have to hover the mouse over one button after another, to see what it does, until I've found the right button. A fucking one or two second's delay with every fucking elementary operation. Either that, or click accidentally the wrong pictogram dozen times a day. A constant annoyance like that is liable to make a murderer out of me in a week. I can't find the words to express my outrage at the mean bastards at Google who just can't keep a perfect thing perfect but feel the need to alter it only for the sake of changing something every now and then.

So I reflected that now is the time that I really need to find a new email service. Hotmail isn't an option as it's clearly more illogical and inconvenient than Gmail, but there must be plenty of other free email services. To think of that, maybe I will even give Hotmail a chance. I mean, Google really seems to be becoming a sinking ship. Look how the Google search has become cluttered beyond any reason by other search engines and nonsense webpages that have learned how to make Google to place their pages among the top search results even thought they contain nothing of the kind you were searching for. Sometimes it seems like Google wants to repel their users. Like the way they're taking over websites like YouTube and pressing you to log in with your Gmail account. Now I can't be logged in to Gmail with one account and to YouTube with another. I have to think twice before logging in to YouTube because that would log me out of Gmail. What the fuck do they think that's supposed to be good for? All right, I know, it's because they want you to only use one identity on every website, so it would be easier to whoever has access to their database to keep track of what's you've been up to.

But I'm digressing. This morning I found myself hating Google possibly more than I've ever hated Microsoft. I've been using Gmail for I don't know how many years and recommended it to everyone and gotten so used to it and now they are taking it away with their idiotic attitude. Of course, I clicked on everything I could think of, trying to find a way to get Gmail look even halfway usable again. I couldn't. Then, in desperation, I began looking if anyone had found a way to get the old look back after all. I mean, Gmail's Settings is such an unintuitive labyrinth that it's quite possible that the possibility was there but I couldn't find it. It's happened several times that I've found that one or another Gmail's idiotic features can actually be changed – as long as you're lucky enough to find where it's located.

Anyway, I quickly found that there were many people like me, unhappy with the new piece-of-shit look of Gmail. I found a discussion where a couple dozen of people had been complaining about the new look in a last couple days, or even telling they were switching to another email service. The last post was from an arrogant bitch apparently representing Gmail who laughed in everyone's face by saying thank you for your feedback and we are so committed to providing the best service to our users, and I have closed this discussion because it was so old anyway.

Sure, it's an old story how Google keeps pissing in their users' faces and acting as if everything was perfectly normal. But then I read another thread which lead me to another thread which lead me to the vital information that IT IS ACTUALLY POSSIBLE TO CHANGE THE SYMBOLS ON GMAIL'S BUTTONS BACK TO TEXT. After some looking around in the Gmail Settings labyrinth, I found how to do it:

1. There is that flower- or gearwheel- shaped thing in the upper right corner. Click on it and choose "Settings".

2. On the "General" section (which opens by default), about in the middle of the page, there is a setting "Button labels". You have two choices: "Icons" and "Text". Those rat bastard assholes have made "Icons" the default choice, but if you select "Text", you'll have your convenient, understandable labels back. (Don't forget to scroll down and click "Save Changes".)

Understandably, before I began searching for help on the Web, I had been going through all those Settings pages, and I hadn't found those four words of text "Button labels – Icons – Text". It's amazing. It's not the first or second or tenth time that I find myself wondering how do they manage to hide things so skilfully? I've never seen another piece of software like Gmail where the settings, logically speaking, should be easy to find, but I just keep looking and looking and can't find them, and then I finally find them somehow, and think "Oh, here it is!" And the next time I need it, I keep on looking again until I feel I'm going crazy.

Anyway, WHAT ON EARTH PREVENTED THE GMAIL MORONS FROM SIMPLY LETTING ME KNOW THAT I DIDN'T HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THOSE FUCKING IDIOTIC CRYPTIC SYMBOLS? It would have been so easy to say. Instead, I was, during half a year or so, flooded with messages "we will fuck up the comfortable user interface you are used to, and we just do whatever comes into our minds when we're stoned, and we don't give a shit what you think"?

Of course, I'm seeing this attitude all over me. I mean, try to get any reasonable answers from the Amazon staff, or the mind-blowingly absurd experience I had with a British software company some time ago. Or look at this article about a Canadian bank which dwarfs even that. The English-speaking world seems to have forgotten what customer service means. But Google is the worst I can think of at this moment. They don't even bother to try to pretend they care about its users.

Now, on the one hand, we are not paying for Gmail, so, strictly speaking, we are not entitled to demand anything. On the other hand, if you are the clear market leader and you have built up a huge enthusiastic user base, it's stupid beyond words to keep irritating them by forcing unnecessary changes to the worse upon them, just because some freak employed by you wakes up one morning, scratches his balls and thinks "hey, wouldn't it be cool if so-and so looked different?"

To sum up: I've had it. I am going to find a new email service – one that doesn't treat their users like shit.

How many women are actually attractive?

Every now and then, I hear myself say that I would fuck every second woman whom I encounter in the street. One day, I began to wonder if it's an exaggerating metaphor or is it actually true. I certainly see women every day whom I would fuck without a second of hesitation, but what is actually the percentage of women whom I would consider as sex objects?

Now, how could that be found out, I asked myself. The most obvious way is, of course, to stand somewhere in the street, choose a point nearby, and count every woman who passes by that point – like, by dividing a sheet of paper in two and making a dash on the left side when the woman is desirable and on the right side when she isn't. After counting a certain number of women, like 100 or 1000, one could calculate the percentage of desirable ones.

I was, however, at home, and too lazy to go out and do such an experiment. So I thought: would there be a faster and easier way? Indeed there was.

I thought about every female person employed by my employer. There was 34 of them. I divided them into 4 categories (and by a lucky coincidence the calculations resulted in nice round percentages):

1. Repulsive. If I saw such a woman approach me naked, I would run away. Approximately 30% of all women fell into this category.

2. Bearable. If I were offered an opportunity to fuck such a woman, I would refuse, but if she would stand naked at my door and beg me to fuck her, I might be able to do it. That category also included approximately 30% of all women.

3. Acceptable. If I were offered an opportunity to fuck such a woman, I would fuck her, but I wouldn't be willing to make any effort to seduce her, and I would rather prefer not to be seen with her in public, and I would be reluctant to show her to the world as my intimate partner. Approximately 20% of all women belonged to this category.

4. Desirable. That's the kind of woman I really very badly want to fuck and I am willing to put up considerable effort to achieve that. That was the remaining 20%.

Thus, it would turn out that the percentage of women whom I would fuck is closer to one third than a half, but in rough approximation, the above metaphor stands. Of course, my colleagues aren't probably representative of the entire population, but still I hoped that this mental survey wasn't too much off the reality.

Later, I confirmed the results by counting real women in the city. I didn't actually stand on the street with a pen and paper. I just counted women mentally when I had to stand somewhere and kill time (like wait for a bus). I would count only a couple of women on one day, and a dozen on another day. "Women" means I excluded children but didn't exclude the elderly. During a period of 4 months, I ended up counting 1290 women and then I decided it would be enough.

The results were such:

Repulsive: 43%

Bearable: 20%

Acceptable: 21%

Desirable: 16%

As you see, a thorough survey turned up roughly the same result as the quick colleague count: I would fuck approximately one woman out of three, and really desire one out of six.