Gmail FTW
I'm gonna try to get back into a more bloggy kind of mood around here. The cobwebs are everywhere, but blogging will help me at least kill some time during the day, and lately there's been a lot to kill. Things at work are really up in the air and kinda all over the place, as they've been shuffling us all around a lot, and creating new positions and such. As a result I sometimes feel like a lot of things fall through the cracks and I get a lot of spare time, which I've been filling with just surfing the web. However, yesterday they sent out a company-wide email saying they're going to do a web usage audit of everyone because apparently there's far more internet surfing going on here than they'd like, so I'm now looking for ways to occupy my downtime during the day. Writing some entries here will definitely help to fill some of that time.
I'd like to tell anyone reading this that Gmail is the coolest thing ever when it comes to email. I've had Gmail for a while now, but only recently began to realize what all I could do with it. For the last 6+ years I had an email address here at this site as my main email address and I was using Thunderbird at home as my mail client, and generally I was very happy. The only problem was I couldn't use it at work, although I could still check my email online by going through the company that hosts my site to check it. Doing so was a very slow and somewhat annoying process, but if I really needed to check something I could. Because of this I generally just used my work email for most daytime communications, as I'm sure most people do. I got Gmail a long time ago mainly just because back then it was this cool new thing that promised much more online storage space than places like Yahoo or Hotmail did, even though I didn't use either of those services just because I was content using my work and home emails, and because I was content using my other emails I generally didn't use Gmail.
A couple months ago, however, I began to get annoyed that my emails were in two different locations, and that if someone sent me an email at work and I was out sick or off on vacation or something, I wouldn't see it till I went back to work. I decided the best solution was to just tell people to email me exclusively at my Gmail account and that would take care of it, and that's what I've been doing ever since. But then about two weeks ago I learned that I could use Gmail to handle emails from non gmail accounts, and set about making my wildyams email address work through Gmail as well, and it is fantastic. I can now send and receive emails from my wildyams account without having to use an email program, and I can now use that email address from any computer that has an internet connection. In addition, I discovered that someone made a program a few years ago that will import all my old emails that I have on Thunderbird (over 6 years' worth) into Gmail so that I can have all my emails located in the same place! It's a farily lengthy process to import all those emails and it went all night and didn't finish importing them till this morning, but it is really great to have that all set up.
Anyway, not the most exciting blog entry, but it did help me kill some time.