Things Noticed

This is a pretty random post with two parts.

  1. On a recent trip to Norway, I noticed something about the way the society there reinforces its ethics among the public. If you’re riding public transport and are caught without a ticket, the fine is 750 kroner. If you try to lie about having a ticket, or produce a fake ticket, the fine is 1500 kroner. So, lying is worse. Maybe Berlin could use some of this, considering the number of people who often ride without paying.
  2. Google continues to invest heavily in its own applications while letting its built-in Android apps rot. Makes sense, as it gradually moves people off of using non-Google services. Things like email, for instance. Case in point: the standard Android email app.
  • It doesn’t try to autocomplete recipient email addresses from either the header or the contents of previously received messages, so if you’re writing someone for the first time on a particular device, it will make you type in their entire email address. Awesome. It doesn’t try to figure out who you mean, with typical Googley cleverness. I’m sure the Gmail app doesn’t make you do that.
  • It takes forever to load messages and doesn’t cache them long enough or cache the contents particularly well. Or between restarts of the app. I’ve had to reload large images via IMAP multiple times, and message contents, and so forth. Once it’s retrieved once, why doesn’t it stick around for at least a few hours?