First Post on Blogger

I didn't go looking for any favorites, but it seems like Google seems to keep providing me with tools and toys that work pretty well for my online work. I've let myself get burned countless times by not keeping backups of e-mails or blogs or personal or professional web sites, so the opportunity to let somebody else keep track of everything up in the Cloud was welcome. On the other hand, letting somebody else keep track of everything means that when things go wrong, I don't have control.

Of course, this idea that I have control of things has caused me at least as many problems as it has solved. So for now, I'm happy to let them run the stuff in the background. What I'm less happy with is that I waited so long to set up an account here, and lost a little of my branding there. I've been grabbing every version of David Runyon that I can for quite a while, and now I find that I have to use Dave Runyon for this blog. That's not that bad, it's just that I lost out on the daverunyon.com domain, while I do have the davidrunyon.com domain. So it's just a bothersome problem of consistency.

I've also started transitioning my e-mail world over to Google Apps. It's not a perfect solution (yet) for me, but it shows a lot of promise. I've assigned my MX records for my domain's e-mail over to Google; so now I have a (free) gmail account with my own domain branding. This allows me to use my e-mail client (Apple Mail) at home, but still have everything stored and organized online. So when I have to use browser mail, all my old e-mails are there for me. This is a good step forward from the clunky IMAP options I used before, such as Squirrel Mail; and it seemed like my sent mail never ended up online where it belonged.

What I also like about the Google Apps suite is that I also have the online Calendar and Google Docs, and a good PDF reader built into the browser mail app. These meet the majority of my "office" needs when I'm not home, and combined with my iPhone, I've got a pretty good virtual office.

This blog is not going to be about how much I like Google, nor will it be about technology. It's not really about anything, but I know that technology is something I like to experiment with, so I'll report some of my thoughts here. But I also intend to talk about how my Christmas was, what I'll be doing on New Year's Eve, and how I'd like to see some of the economic stimulus money get spent.