My Soul Belongs to Google
Let’s face it, some entity was bound to end up with it sooner or later, and I guess Google really is one of the better choices. Now, if you care to know the reason behind this, it’s because in just over 2 weeks I’m finally going to have to give up my email address I’ve had for 6 or 7 years. There were lots of choices for my replacement address: Hotmail (yeah, right…), Yahoo (the likely winner if did it not require the use of a 3rd party program to access your mail in Outlook), self-hosted on one of my domains (would require me to keep ownership and hosting on the domain), or Gmail (the winner). But no, Google’s ownership does not stop there.
Google has many, many other services online that they offer, say for example…..Google Calendar. Using something like this would allow me to manage my schedule in one central place and then view it from a number of different computers. This could also be accomplished through an Exchange server, but since I have yet to set up a local server here at my house, this was the next best alternative (even if I did have to download a plugin for Outlook to make it work). Supposedly I’m also supposed to be able to publish entries back from my client to Google Calendar, but I just never made it that far. Are we done? I think not…
Since I will be using multiple computers throughout the week (a minimum of 3: dekstop at UTD, laptop, desktop at home), I’ve often thought how nice it would be to keep my Firefox profiles synced across all 3 computers. While my solution was just to have a file server that kept my profile directory synced, Google has an extension that does pretty much exactly what I want. Granted, I haven’t installed it on any computers yet, but it’ll probably make the to-do list in the next day or two. So, Google, have fun owning my soul.