T-Mobile and Google Fucked Me Over. Again.

If you ever played any of the X-Men versus Street Fighter series of arcade games with Infinite Combos, you know how it feels to be an Android user on T-Mobile.  You just get constantly beat up.

For the past several months, I've been using my glorious LG G4 without problem.  Then a few weeks ago, T-Mobile decided to OTA push Android Marshmallow.  During the update process my phone stopped working.  I tried rebooting it and it kept on crashing.  I tried wiping the system but it would either crash again immediately or go into restore mode and require my Google account authorization to unlock the phone and then crash.  No matter what I did it just kept crashing.  I tried pulling the battery out and reinserting it and then rebooting the phone for several days hoping it would actually startup again.  No dice.

Eventually, I called T-Mobile tech support for a replacement phone and they said they would ship me a replacement phone for $20 and that it would take 5 to 7 business days.  I waited for 8 business days and the phone didn't arrive.  I called up T-Mobile support and found out that tech support person never submitted the order for a new phone.  They did document in their system that the phone needed to be replaced.  After 5 days my new finally phone arrived.

All said and done, I had to wait 3 weeks to get my replacement phone.  To make matters work, due to all the skinning of the OS by LG I can't visually see the difference between Lollipop and Marshmallow.  I found out that the list of new features are pretty much meaningless to me.  I don't use Google Voice nor do I care about 200 new emojis or new wall paper themes.  Thanks for nothing Google and T-Mobile.

Google Hates Computer Code

Recently, I picked up a nice technical book on Fast Fourier Transforms.  The good thing about the book was that it wasn't deep into mathematical proofs and it contained small self-contained pieces of code.  The bad thing about the book is that all the code is in BASIC and some of the code is quite long to type by hand.

It dawned on my that if you load images into Google Docs it will automatically OCR the file for you.  I also have 10 year old Xerox scanner with some old software called PaperPort that handles scanning, OCR and document management.  I'd figure that modern Google cloud software would be way better than desktop software.  I was really wrong.

I took some photographs of pages that contained BASIC code in my book with iPhone 4.   Its not a great image but a company such as Google that can build self-driving cars should be able to adjust images automatically, right?

Some DFT code written in BASIC.

On my desktop computer, I uploaded the images to Google Drive.  Then for each file, I imported them into Google Docs.  The import process automatically creates a new Google Doc with both the original image and the OCR'd text.  For a comparison, I used my ancient Windows XP-era PaperPort to OCR my images.  Here is the output for each side-by-side.

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Its absolutely mind blowing how poorly Google Docs OCR performed. Its really, really bad: I  see bits of Chinese characters and the formatting is all over the place.  The output is completely unusable.  On the other hand, the PaperPort OCR output was quite good.  The main issues were the insertion of spaces that didn't exist and confusing the letter O with the number 0. 

Frankly, the Google translation is so bad  I might have as well as dropped my book onto my keyboard and use whatever it typed as the code translation.  Unacceptable Google.