GMail

I'm moving all my email to my GMail account. I finally decided to consolidate everything to gmail. I was sick of managing all the emails from all 6 of my email accounts, sick of wierd warnings about bad Certificates from one host, and sick of waiting for Thunderbird to load, and its various bugs at the moment (constantly consuming 20% CPU). What did it was my finding the ability to send email from any of my addresses and, mostly importantly, have replies come from the address the person at the other end sent it to. That way I can keep professional corrospondance on my IUPUI account seperate and not have to tell people about my gmail address. All without ever using all those accounts directly again. Ohsonice.

I also discovered Google Analytics and have signed up for an account to replace my truely ancient eXTReMe trackers. Funny how their website has changed in like a decade. Amazingly its free and super high quality...hope I won't have to wait too long to get an account.

Google really is taking over the world. Gmail is my only mail interface, Google Home is my homepage, its the only search engine I use, I use google maps/Earth constantly, and have now started using the caldenar as well. I know their setup isn't suitable to everyone, but its perfect for me. It has most everything I need all in one place. So even if their service isn't /quite/ as good, I'l probably still use it anyway, because of the shear convenience.

I have only one problem with the whole mess. Google is storing a huge amount of my personal information: all my emails, my chats, even my search history. Stored on my desktop, its not hard to encrypt my data soas to be impossible for the gov or anyone else to get their hands on. But with Google a .gov supeana is all it takes to get them all. I know Google has fought for user privacy in the past, but I'm not sure that will always be possible. I also worry about hackers. There's too much trust in this structure for my liking. Yet I still enable all these features and use them.