Demotion.

I don't think anything worthwhile weally went on this week.

This week my two-week-old phone decided that it would vibrate for both texts and emails. It didn't at first. I really don't care to have my emails vibrate. (Most of my emails this week were from Healthcare.gov reminding me to renew my coverage, but I have insurance at least until May.) I think I got it fixed, but it was very non-intuitive.

A while ago, I complained about Google guessing what you want to search for and requiring you to put things in quotes so that it includes the words in the search. Well, it's far worse than I knew at the time. A few weeks ago, I was doing some research on South Africa, so I did this Google search:

 Notice that my search term "Illinge," which was a very important word, was omitted from the search, as Google informed me. So then I put it in quotes to ensure that it would be included. The results infuriate me:

Not only did the same pages come up, they no longer even tell you they omitted the terms, even though I specified that's what I wanted! Don't guess what I want! If I didn't want it, I wouldn't have typed it! I hope someone at Google gets demoted to janitor for this. It would have been better if they simply said there weren't any results. I usually love Google. Not this time.

Another thing that infuriates me is some changes that Facebook has made through the years. Some changes have been good, but several have been horrendously, stupidly bad ideas. Once upon a time, there was an option to "Unsubscribe from comments and likes." It was brilliant. But now you no longer have that option. Most of my newsfeed is things that people like from people I don't know from Adam, or from pages that I care nothing about. It also makes me less inclined to "like" or comment on pages I follow, because I don't want everybody to see those comments. I wish they would bring the "Unsubscribe from Comments and Likes" back. Now I either have to unsubscribe from someone entirely, or get all their comments and likes along with the stuff I actually care about. Someone at Facebook needs to be demoted to kitty litter scooper.

They also changed their search feature to be very cumbersome. You used to be able to search for people based on where they live or other information. Not anymore. Now it just tries to guess who you might know. So if you wanted to find someone named John Smith from Killarney and you have no mutual friends, you're out of luck. Demote someone to window washer.

Also, on your own profile you can view your Activity Log, which basically records everything you've ever done on Facebook. It can be a very useful tool, especially when I use it to jog my memory for my memory blog. It used to be that you could jump to individual months. Not anymore. If I want to look at something in July, I have to click on the year, and then I have to scroll through December, November, October, September, and August before I get to July.

But it gets worse. If I want to look at something from January, I have to scroll through the entire year. If I want to look at, say, January 2013, I can't click on 2012 and simply scroll up from December. When I scroll up from December 2012, it will only take me to whatever month I was most recently looking at. Demote someone to lice remover.

I could understand if these things had been made this way in the first place, but the good features existed at one time. To get rid of them is either tremendously unintelligent or diabolically malevolent. (I, for one, would love an "Unsubscribe from shares" feature. I really don't care to see your food recipes or your Obama-hating up and down my feed. But such a feature never existed, so I'm not really mad that it doesn't now. Just the stuff that used to exist.)

Now that I've been using Windows 10 for about six months, I must say that I'm glad they had the intelligence of a parrot to bring the Start Menu back, but I find the new Start Menu to still be inferior to the Start Menu they always had. Why is the search one separate from the other one? I think it's easier to search documents now, but that's the only good thing. But it's so much better than Windows 8 that I guess I can't complain too much.

Last night I had a surprisingly realistic dream that I was back at BYU and I was taking a Spanish class. As I was sitting in my desk before the first class, I realized that I was in a high-enough Spanish class that I would probably have to introduce myself in Spanish, and I was trying to recite in my mind what I was going to say. I had studied French much more recently than Spanish, so I would have to remember to say "hace" instead of "il y a" for "ago." My grammatical reasoning was just as sound as it would have been in real life. Sometimes I miss college, but only very rarely do I miss homework.

Tonight my family took quizzes where we filled in blank maps of Utah's counties and America's states. I got all of them, although I almost mixed up Delaware and Connecticut, but I got them. Once I was almost a pseudo-geographer. But then I became a pseudo-geologist instead.

This is a picture I found on the internet this week where a third-grader had to use the word "geologist" in a sentence, and his sentence was "The geologist showed his rocks to a stranger." "Hey you, listen, this is feldspar!" I would have linked to the original, but there was another part that looked like an inappropriate joke, and I want to maintain my clean-cut image. So I didn't. Sorry.