Think simple Mr. Google, says Yahoo!

Few years ago, my brother explained me how to think simple with a real example which, at that time, I thought was a joke.  The example was about how NASA, the US of A's space organization, came up with a million dollar pen which writes even in zero gravity, when the Russian astronauts used pencil to solve the writing-in-space problem.

I thought it was a joke until I heard about it in the 3 idiots movie. But then, Indian films are not subjected to peer reviewing process like scientific journals, and so what ever they say need not be true! Nevertheless, the idea of think simple is well communicated with this example.

But nothing can teach us the way our personal experiences does! 

My brother's daughter turned two today and we celebrated it with cake cutting and all. I do not remember how I celebrated my second birthday, because cake cutting was not a normal thing  in our family those days. Nor was taking photographs. I believe my parents would have celebrated my birthday by taking me to a nearest temple and worship the deity by performing special puja. 

But with the advent of technology, and with change in life style, today I can capture the precious moments with my digital camera, and can show it to her when she grows up. And that I did. I took snaps of the Happy Birthday chart decorated with balloons, the cake cutting, blowing candles by kid's parents, happy birthday wishes from relatives, and the fun time we all had on the occasion which brought some of us together after long time.

After transferring all the pics to my laptop, I thought of various options to share them with those who attended the birthday party. Since I had already used my picasa quota of 1GB, I opted to send the pics as attachments using my gmail id, which was made possible due to their ever expanding storage capacity. But the 25MB limit made me to split the whole folder into 13 parts, with 6 photos ~ 25MB each.

After sending about ten mails, I faced an issue. Google thought I am spamming since I sent about ten mails, each with attachments of about 25 MB, in a very short span! I was not able to share the remaining pics as I kept getting "Unusual activity detected, and so your mail id is suspended for 24 hours".

Though I am a die hard fan of Google, I do have a Yahoo account. I decided to send the remaining pics from my Yahoo account  instead. While I was sending the 13th part (3rd part by Yahoo! mail), Yahoo detected an unusual activity!

But unlike Google, Yahoo did not suspend my account with immediate effect. Instead, they used a simple word verification technique to make sure that I am a real person and not a bot spamming their users with my mails! This is such a brilliant idea, since there is a way to verify that I am a real user, and so I can continue to use my mail account! Whereas, suspension will only end up in not allowing me to send or receive most important mails for the next 24 hours!