The Curse of Virtual Stuff

Even Google has limits. I recently ran out of online storage space for photos on Picasa. After I aborted the last upload I noticed this:

You are currently using 1005 MB (98.18%) of your 1024 MB.

My Gmail account is in much better shape:

You are currently using 1270 MB (16%) of your 7519 MB.

Google Documents is much more forgiving, as long as you play by Google's rules:

You are currently using 6 MB (0%) of your 1024 MB.
Only stored files (.PDF, .DOC, .JPG, etc.) count towards your storage limit. Google Docs formats don't use up your storage space.

Funny they give you so much more free storage space for email then they do for the other things. I suppose it's because more people use email and many of them are careless of what they save. Documents and photos require some purposeful action, and people who have taken the time to upload these things may appreciate their value more and are willing to pay for it. Upgrading is certainly cheap enough: $5 per year for 20 Gigabytes. Yes, you can buy enormous disks really cheap, but then you have the curse of real stuff to deal with. Me, I am just going to delete some photo albums of my brother's pictures. He can store them on his dime.

P.S. Putting this post together was an onerous exercise in html. I wanted to copy the storage messages from Google exactly, not just the text, but the color and font as well. You would think that would be simple, but no, no, no and no. Simple cut and paste didn't work and Blogger's rinky-dink editor doesn't support multiple fonts. None of my usual tricks worked. I ended up editing the html in Notepad++ and just trying different things to see what worked.

The text of the messages is a little larger than the originals, but I prefer that as it's easier to read. I suppose changing the background on the messages to match the originals would improve the contrast and the readability, but I've had enough of this, it's past my lunchtime and I'm hungry.