I’ve been fully using Google for about two weeks now and am quite happy. Gmail is great. Google Calendar is great. I’m also using a Rails application called Tracks for my GTD stuff. When I am sitting in front of a computer it is the perfect solution. The thing is, I actually got my dream phone/PDA, a Palm Treo 700p. It’s a great device. I can’t sync Google Calendar to the Palm calendar app though. Google also does not have an interface for their Calendar that works with the small screen web browser of the Treo. For the time being it looks like I will be using the Palm calendar app and going back to iCal. Tracks works okay in the Palm web browser so I can still use that.
I don’t think I will be missing .Mac at all.
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I’m not sure Apple has earned my $100 this year when it comes time for my .Mac account renewal. So I’ve been taking a more serious look at what Google has to offer. I took a quick look at Yahoo!, but their new beta web mail interface is basically a web based copy of your typical three paned email application. Nothing special at all.
Why am I not happy with .Mac? Well, for my $100/year I get a paultry 1 GB of disk space. So, between my email, my web site, backups, and any files I may want to have online access to that gig is not going to go very far. It’s really rather worthless. I use a couple hundred MB for email. Another hundred for my web site. Several hundred for files, and then I have only a couple hundred left for backups. Well, I am paying around $100/year for my web host right now, and not only do I get 5 times the disk space over .Mac, I get many more features. It’s a ?¢‚Ǩ?ìreal” web host versus .Mac being kind of a starter host.
.Mac offers other things, namely syncing, that make it a decent service. With .Mac I am able to sync calendars, address book, bookmarks, my keychain, and mail settings. That’s great except it works for shit. Be warned, if syncing gets messed up on one of your machines it is a bitch to fix it. There are several alternatives to .Mac syncing. Google Calendar is really nice. I mean really nice. It is a great application. Very easy to use, all AJAXy and zippy. With Gmail you get contacts. Syncing bookmarks and other browser specific items is now possible with Google Browser Sync.
.Mac also offers email of course. It works good. I have IMAP and a web interface. The only real complaint is that Apple’s web site is so graphic intensive if I am stuck on a slow connection checking webmail I feel like stabbing my eyes out. Gmail is really nice. It’s fast, I get 2.5 GB of storage. More than I can use in the next few years I think. If I want I could use POP3 to get my mail with a desktop client. The web client is so zippy though I doubt I would want to.
So I am going give some of Googles offerings a try for a while. So far I am really liking it. The only concern I have is syncing a PDA or other such device. Obviously, with everything being web based that would be difficult. However, I figure if I can get me one of those spiffy new Palm Treo 700p phones I’d be set.
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My friend Elaine has a cow in CowParade. She got a great location right outside the Overture Center. She’s got many more pictures on her web site. There’s also a great Flickr photoset here.
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Sarah’s sisters were in town over the weekend. They were going to be going wedding dress shopping for Sarah’s older sister Julie. That meant the fiance, Brett, and I were on child care duty. My two kids, and Sarah’s other sister’s two kids. All in all quite a painless weekend. I even got a cool toy. A little remote control airplane. I must say, it’s the coolest thing ever. Noah and Jack even got the hang of flying it. We may have to pick up a couple more and have dogfights.
The pain in my ass started Sunday night though. We were picking up the toys and the little pool in the backyard, and while I was stepping down from the four foot tall rock wall I slipped and landed my right side on a big rock. I bounced off and stumbled to the ground. Today my right gluteus is hurting big time.
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