Geeking Out
OK. I may not be an über-geek, but I certainly have geeky tendencies. And let me tell just how excited I am two recent additions to my online life: GMail and Mozilla Firefox 0.9.2.
GMAIL
I’d heard of GMail lore, heard everyone was trying to get an account because it’s an invitation-only situation. You have to know someone else cool enough to get an account with GMail, because it is still in its beta version.
First, they give you 1000 megabytes of storage, which is quite a lot! Also, in GMail, you don’t ever really delete anything. Sure, you can send it to trash, but it never really goes away, just in case. Instead of sorting your messages into discrete folders, you assign labels, and any given message can have multiple labels, so an e-mail from my Dad with an attachment might be in with all the other e-mails with attachments, and it might also be in with the e-mails from my Dad. I can also set up filters so that messages coming in from Dad are automatically given the label “Dad.â€
Each message is grouped with all its replies and displayed as a conversation. It’s like a little clump, and you never have to delete all the stuff that came before to save space. It displays it in this really clever way so you can click on any part of the conversation you are interested in reading. If I send a message to Anne, then she responds, it’s all gonna be clumped as a conversation. I never have to go see what it was she was replying to in the first place. Whenever you get an e-mail from anyone, they are automatically added to your contacts list. I love that! I also love how you can import addresses from Outlook and Yahoo. They’ve automated that. The only ads I ever see are Google ads, which are really non-intrusive, and I’ve received almost no spam. When I have, there’s this handy button that says, “Report as spam,” which I find really satifying to use.
It’s just seriously cool. I was going to say that you should try and befriend someone who has invitations to give away (sadly, I have not yet been offered any by Google), but no! I came across this site, so you can get going right away! Do you have anything to offer that is as cool as these people in exchange for a GMail account? Haha!
MOZILLA FIREFOX 0.9.2
The other really groovy addition to my online life is Mozilla Firefox 0.9.2. Oh MAN! It’s so great. There are all these groovy extensions you can get, and they are all organized really well in one place, so that you can tweak the options any time you want. It’s tweakability it beyond stellar! It loads way faster than the last Firefox, too. When you use Mozilla, you don’t have to deal with stupid popup ads. It’s much safer from spyware than IE. All the really good spyware is written for the browser in which it can do the most damage, and that is, of course, Internet Explorer. After my rabid spyware outbreak earlier this summer, which resulted in me having to do a full system wipe, I decided to look into other options. Firefox 0.8 was good. 0.9.2, which I just downloaded a couple of days ago, is EXCELLENT!
No, they aren’t paying me. I really am this excited!! 😀
