As soon as this blog entry is posted, very early Saturday morning, we're off to the truck, the 5'er is all hitched up, and we'll be driving down to the Swartz Bay Ferry Terminal for the first leg of our trip to Alberta. We'll be stopping at the KOA in Sicamous tonight, so I should be able to blog about our first day's travel. Yesterday was just another day of packing, checking, packing and double-checking to make sure we remember to bring everything with us. Thank goodness we have great checklists otherwise I know we'd be leaving a lot of stuff we need.
So, today, I'm just going to write a little about email and how we've become recent converts to Google's Gmail system. In all the years I've used e-mail, I have pretty much stuck with MS Outlook and have never had any real problems - that is, until recently. For the past few weeks a lot of our emails, both Paulette's and mine, sent using Outlook have been going into cyberspace never to be seen again. We were both getting questions from family and friends like "why didn't you respond to my emails"? I spent about an hour on the phone with our ISP the other night to both confirm the problem, which he agreed was real, and to see what could be done to fix it.
The end result of that was not very comforting. Don't you just hate it when you're talking to techs on the other end of the line and quickly discover that you probably know more about the problem than they do? Strangely, incoming emails are not affected at all. I double, triple and quadruple checked all of our settings to no avail. I like to think that I can resolve most of these kinds of computer issues, especially software related ones, but, this is just plain weird and I just got tired of battling with it.
After sticking with MS Outlook for years, I've finally converted to Gmail
So, I decided to make my default email program Gmail. I just started using Gmail a few months ago when I began blogging. I've found it to be simple, straightforward and definitely much, much better and far superior to Microsoft's Hotmail - which I don't like at all. What finally convinced me to make the switch to Gmail was the ability to setup Gmail to import all incoming emails sent to my old ISP(shaw.ca) address and direct them into my new Gmail account. This way, the changeover is completely transparent to anyone sending me a message using my old email address. Either way, whether it's my old email address or my new Gmail account, I will get the emails in Gmail. It works just great.
It would be nice if computers were as peaceful and quiet as this Vancouver Island stream
The switchover was completely painless too - no need to notify all of my Contacts about the change. I just imported my all my email addresses from Outlook into Gmail, same with all my Calendar appointments and records. It was so easy, and works so well, Paulette changed over to Gmail as well. It should make life a bit simpler for us as it's a web-bases system completely accessible both at home and on the road.
Now, we just have to make sure we stay at campgrounds that have decent wifi or all of the above will become quickly irrelevant.
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