About The times. (Gainesville, Ga.) 1972-current | View Entire Issue (April 3, 2024)
2B Midweek Edition-April 3-4, 2024 The Times, Gainesville, Georgia I gainesvilletimes.com LIFE ‘Putnam County Spelling Bee’ comes to Gainesville From Staff Reports A Brenau University grad and alumna of Gainesville Theatre Alliance will return home this month to direct “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” a Tony-winning musi cal comedy about middle-school adolescence. The show runs from Friday, April 12, to Saturday, April 20, at the University of North Georgia-Gainesville's Ed Cabell Theatre. Kari Twyman, a 2018 graduate of Brenau who studied musical theater, will serve as both director and choreographer. Twyman is a working actor and choreographer in the Atlanta area, and she said she's excited to bring her unique perspective to the production. “In a heightened time of consuming media that is heavily influencing the clothes we buy, the phrases we use, or even how big or small our bodies should be, “The 25th Annual Put nam County Spelling Bee” leads the audience back to the basis of being an individually unique kid,” Twyman said. Also working on the production are musi cal director Dale Grogan, a veteran of sev eral past Alliance productions; and lighting designer Christian DeAngelis, an assistant professor at The University of Georgia. Winner of the Tony and the Drama Desk Awards for Best Book, “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” is set against the backdrop of a middle-school spelling bee. As the contestants navigate the challenges of spelling seemingly impossible words, the audience is treated to an exploration of puberty, identity and the desire to fit in. The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee When: April 12-14 (sold out), April 16- 20 at 7:30 p.m., matinee performance April 20 at 2:30 p.m Where: Ed Cabell Theatre, 2900 Landrum Education Dr., Oakwood Tickets: $18-30 More info: GainesvilleTheatreAlliance. org Tickets for the production range from $18 to $30 and are available for purchase at GainesvilleTheatreAlliance.org or by calling the GTA Box Office at 678-717-3624. Gainesville Theatre Alliance is a collabo ration between theater departments at the Photo courtesy of Gainesville Theatre Alliance Brenau University student Ally Medley plays Logainne Schwartzandgubenniere in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. University of North Georgia and Brenau University. How Google revolutionized email and left customers fooled Paul Sakuma Associated Press Google co-founders Larry Page, right, and Sergey Brin, left, Sept. 2, 2008 at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. BY MICHAEL LIEDTKE Associated Press SAN FRANCISCO — Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin loved pulling pranks, so much so they began rolling outlandish ideas every April Fools' Day not long after starting their company more than a quarter century ago. One year, Google posted a job opening for a Copernicus research center on the moon. Another year, the company said it planned to roll out a “scratch and sniff’ feature on its search engine. The jokes were so consistently over-the-top that people learned to laugh them off as another example of Google mischief. And that's why Page and Brin decided to unveil something no one would believe was possible 20 years ago on April Fools' Day. It was Gmail, a free service boasting 1 gigabyte of storage per account, an amount that sounds almost pedestrian in an age of one- terabyte iPhones. But it sounded like a preposterous amount of email capacity back then, enough to store about 13,500 emails before running out of space compared to just 30 to 60 emails in the then-leading webmail services run by Yahoo and Microsoft. That translated into 250 to 500 times more email storage space. Besides the quantum leap in storage, Gmail also came equipped with Google's search technology so users could quickly retrieve a tidbit from an old email, photo or other personal information stored on the service. It also automatically threaded together a string of communications about the same topic so everything flowed together as if it was a single conversation. “The original pitch we put together was all about the three ‘S’s” — storage, search and speed,” said former Google executive Marissa Mayer, who helped design Gmail and other company products before later becoming Yahoo's CEO. It was such a mind-bending concept that shortly after The Associated Press published a story about Gmail late on the afternoon of April Fools' 2004, readers began calling and emailing to inform the news agency it had been duped by Google's pranksters. “That was part of the charm, making a product that people won't believe is real. It kind of changed people's perceptions about the kinds of applications that were possible within a web browser,” former Google engineer Paul Buchheit recalled during a recent AP interview about his efforts to build Gmail. It took three years to do as part of a project called “Caribou” — a reference to a running gag in the Dilbert comic strip. “There was something sort of absurd about the name Caribou, it just made make me laugh,” said Buchheit, the 23rd employee hired at a company that now employs more than 180,000 people. The AP knew Google wasn't joking about Gmail because an AP reporter had been abruptly asked to come down from San Francisco to the company's Mountain View, California, headquarters to see something that would make the trip worthwhile. Page, then just 31 years old, proceeded to show off Gmail’s sleekly designed inbox and demonstrated how quickly it operated within Microsoft's now- retired Explorer web browser. And he pointed out there was no delete button featured in the main control window because it wouldn't be necessary, given Gmail had so much storage and could be so easily searched. “I think people are really going to like this,” Page predicted.
