Day: January 15, 2008

This post could rapidly turn into a massive digressionary polemic and I have no time, so let me expel this bit of brain flatulence:

My first Google registration was for Gmail in its earliest beta incarnation (back in the day when people sold invites on eBay, got mine from Jim Forbes). I used it to set up a spam catcher — an anonymous address for those times when I didn’t want to part with my personal addresses in online registration forms. Other Google products used that mail address — Google News, Google Reader, iGoogle, even the mobile suite of Google apps on my Blackberry — and as they gradually took over more of my screen time they gradually became more important, enough so that were it not for corporate enterprise demands like Lotus Notes, I would probably run my life through Google.

Doing so under a registration designed to trap erectile dysfunction spam was becoming an issue.  I had to transition to a sensible account such as david.churbuck, not sexypapa123 ….
The transition has not been pretty, but the promise — especially if I can create a parallel computing environment that compliments Lenovo’s (cross calendar conflict resolution, email forwarding) — is very compelling.

So, surprising how a personal beta of a beta product turns into a headache after two years because I considered it too experimental to run under my primary identity.