Nimavenl - Nicole's Random Ramblings

Money makes the world go round. According to website UK Essays "the quotation 'money makes the world go round' was first used in a musical play ' Cabaret', it was written in the 1960's ... The main aim of this line was to say that it is money that makes the world turn, not nobility or love. It highlights the fact that our society is heavily dependent on money." Our society is indeed heavily dependent on money. The Dutch say that 'geld maakt niet gelukkig' which translates as 'money does not make one happy' - a statement I agree with. Personally I am afraid that our society as it is cares WAY too much about money, power, wealth and influence. We seem to have forgotten that people matter and that living beings should come before money, before power and before wealth. Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf reports today that Google will now be allowing developers to promote their Apps in the Google Play store . Just as sponsored results in Google S...

I love how easy it is to copy words, head over to Google Translate, paste the words and find a translation online without having to search through a dictionary to find the words. Having translated to and from languages I know, I understand that Google Translate is not foolproof or always right, however translations tend to make sense, especially when one understands the context of the words one wants to translate. With the recent murder of Özgecan Aslan in Turkey and my desire to learn more about what people write about that, I've been trying to translate Turkish via Google Translate. Whether I translate to Dutch or to English does not seem to matter - I am stumped by sentences that barely make sense to me. I'm used to being able to to translate Arabic and Hebrew with relative ease... I can only hope that Turkish translations will soon be as easy. I learnt some basic Turkish a very, very long time ago from friends. These days, I can still say some swearwords, count to ten and...

Dear Reader,  This is a bit of an angry rant.  Please read at your own discretion.  Dear Google, I use your services. Well, I use Google Search, Gmail, Blogger and Translate. Most of your other so-called services I just complain about. Or actively avoid, as in the case of YouTube. You see, dear Google, I am liking you less and less. We became close friends some ten years ago -- our 'ten year anniversary' is coming up... Will you congratulate me and tell me you love being friends with me? Of course not. At most you'll hassle me about buying something, spending my money on something, installing something that will allow you to better track my online movement or... No, wait. Let me start over. What will happen is this: In your quest to learn more about me, who I am and how I behave, you will only collect more information that gets passed on to more parties wanting to use that information to send me advertising you or they think I might like, send me offers to s...

In today's media-dominated world of fashion, image consciousness, brand names and online identities, I am proud to say that I am a Google Girl.  I've been using Gmail since 2005 when it was still invitation only and prefer Google's search engine over others. I also use Blogger for my blogs and have for years.  One thing I wish I loved more is Google+. It could be THE perfect place to have all my online content together in one place,  presented in a style and format of my choice. My photos, reviews, opinion pieces, shared 'likes' and more. Instead, it is presented as yet another online networking platform that to me has no unique features that make me want to use it over other platforms. I am trying to do more with it and to "plus one" more posts, however am still hesitant about it.  As part of my attempt to do more with Google+, I have chosen to link two of my blogs to my public Google+ profile. This way, my original content has my name on...

Star Trek celebrates 46 years of daring to dream of boldly going where none had gone before. The first Star Trek episode aired on 08 September 1966. To commemorate that, Google created a Google Doodle with characters from The Original Series on it. How totally awesome!!! Congratulations, Star Trek! " Celebrating 46 years with a Google Doodle " | Star Trek.com (Photo was added later)

Google strikes back? * As I'm updating posts, I try to add references and links where previously there were none. This image most likely came from this Design Magazine .

I've been busy. Both in real-life and in the online world. How busy I've been online over the years shows itself in the amazing amount of emails I receive about Friend Requests, New Posts, Great Offers, New Games and more. The thing is - these aren't spam emails, they're newsletters / updates from websites and social networking sites I've subscribed to over the years. So, I've started a huge clean-up action. I plan to keep lots of online community subscriptions - Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Goodreads, Youtube and Google are the keepers, off the top of my head. Thing is, these are websites / communities I actually use. Some of the ones I no longer use are Hyves, Yahoo, Bebo, MySpace, and several others I can't even remember the names of, just that I un-subscribed from them yesterday. One inspiration for doing this was Googling my name and coming up with a whole list of hits that weren't about me but someone with my exact same name. Not that strange...