When Google introduced their online Calendar solution, I was pleasantly surprised when I received an email soon after containing an upcoming event, GMail offered to “Add it to my Calendar.”  Obviously there were parsing rules in place that recognized a date and/or time, even guessed correctly at the name of the event.

Unfortunately, as in all rules assumed in parsing, mistakes can be made:

My guess is that it was looking at “7.50 ea” and translated that into 7:50 Eastern, but I can’t be sure.  All I know is that it interpreted three items a friend of mine ordered into appointments.  No big deal, but it just reminded me that, even when some parsing rules seem simple and straightforward, someone is going to have a use case that breaks them.