Going Ga-Ga for Google

Some day when I am old and writing my memoirs from a veranda on the French Riviera, I shall organize my life story pre- and post-Google. I'm just old enough to have keen recollection of life without internet (I took a typewriter with me when I went off to college). And I'm young enough to have thoroughly embraced the thrill of cruising down the information highway. In fact, googling for answers to a diverse array of life's perplexing questions has become part of my almost-daily repertoire. For instance, in the recent past I've googled the following topics:

• how to make granola in the crockpot
• the pros and cons of freezing cilantro
  
• interpretations of Leviticus
• memorable quotes from "Monsters, Inc"
• exercises to bolster wimpy triceps
• how to say "thank you" in Swahili, and
• whether the international dissertation tribunal prefers citations to be listed alphabetically or chronologically

As you can see, it's difficult to imagine how deprived my life would be without such crucial bits of information. However, each of these significant searches takes a back seat to yesterday's Googlicious triumph.

Having finally arisen from my prolonged slump of pathetically unproductive days, I was sitting at my kitchen table diligently transferring a slew of video files from my dissertation project onto my new external hard-drive. All was going well until an error message popped up informing me that "the file is too large for the destination file system." What the heck? It was only 4.5 GB and the hard-drive holds 500 GB! I fussed around with it for a while, to no avail. At this point I called the tech-support guys at the university.

"Hmmm," helpful computer geek responds. "I don't know. Maybe you should try restarting your computer. If that doesn't work, google it."

(Might I add that I'm pretty sure this guy is getting paid for his advice.)

Restarting the computer did not fix the problem. So I googled the error message. To make a longer story shorter, I discovered that the problem was likely that the hard-drive was formatted in FAT32 instead of NTFS. Of course, why didn't I think of that?!

I then proceeded to follow recommendations by various benevolent computer gurus who had shared their knowledge online. In the end, I did this:


All by myself. Reprogrammed my computer to transfer files into some new and miraculous form of digital matter. I now have an equal-opportunity hard-drive that is happy to accept files of all shapes and sizes. Furthermore, those few strategic Google searches have practically transformed me into a computer programmer.

Now it's your turn. Seriously. I call on all seven of my loyal readers to post one of your favorite Google searches in the comments. What life-changing information have you acquired recently from googling?