John The Geek Tech Tips E-Letter #002

If you’re one of those who has no fear when it comes to computers
and technology, feel free to skip the first half of this edition.
I want to talk to those who are afraid their computer is going to
explode in a shower of sparks if they touch the wrong key!

In my experience, the number one factor that keeps people from
being able to use technology to their advantage is fear. Most
people just have trouble operating outside their comfort zone
because they’re afraid of making mistakes. Yeah, mistakes can be
annoying, frustrating, and even dangerous sometimes, but nobody
gets anywhere in life without making some mistakes. The trick is
to keep the mistakes somewhere below the disaster level!

So, what’s my point? There are very few things you can do on a
computer that qualify as disasters. Most of the time, if you goof,
you can try again until you get it the way you want it. If you’re
prepared, you can even put everything back the way it was before
you started and get a Do-over. That’s called having a backup and
we’ll talk more about backups in a future e-letter.

Don’t be afraid of your computer, or web host. Get in there and
get your hands dirty, so to speak. Most people learn best by doing
and while you’ll make mistakes, you’ll learn from those mistakes
(hopefully!) and the next time you’ll do it better. The key is to
DO IT!

I learned to program a computer out of self-defense. The company I
was working for at the time bought a computer and hired a
programmer to write the software to do the things we wanted the
computer to do for us. After getting things up and running, sort
of, he took off for parts unknown. I discovered I was interested
in how the computer worked, and that it wasn’t nearly as scary as
I’d believed for years, so I spent a lot of nights and weekends (I
was single at the time) bashing around in the computer figuring out
how to get it to do things. A year later, I left that company to
work for a software vendor writing and maintaining accounting
software.

My father-in-law is the opposite extreme. We bought him a computer
a couple of years ago as something to keep him occupied while he
recovered from heart surgery. We bought him several books to go
with it. He’s still reading the books and has yet to turn the
computer on by himself! That’s like reading books about driving a
car, but never getting behind the wheel. Maybe someday he’ll have
read enough to give himself the confidence to sit down at the
computer and try to work with it, but that’s about as likely as him
becoming a Power Seller on eBay!

I’m sure you’re somewhere in the middle of that spectrum,
{!firstname_fix}, and hopefully more toward my end than Dad’s, but
if you are a tad less than intrepid when it comes to computers and
technology, not to worry, it’s not hopeless. It just takes a
willingness to try things with the understanding that you will
screw up occasionally and that when you do, usually the worst that
happens is you have to start over. Annoying, yes; fatal, no.

Okay, to continue our discussion of free software from last issue,
let’s examine GMail in some detail. I like to use GMail as my
primary email application because it’s web-based, and it can be set
up to retrieve email from other accounts. In addition, I tend to
use a lot of forwards that are pointed at my GMail account. I set
up an email address on my web host that simply forwards to my GMail
address. GMail knows about this address and uses that address as
the return address when I reply from GMail. This way, I can use
one web mail interface that I like instead of dealing with multiple
web mail clients, and I can handle most of my email from one place.

This is just one of many useful features in GMail. Two more are
Labels and Filters. I get a ton of email every day and I need to
find efficient ways of handling it so that my entire day isn’t
taken up with email. GMail uses the concept of Labels to
categorize email. I set up Labels the same way you would create
folders in a typical email client. I tend to save a lot of email,
so rather than having a zillion old emails in my Inbox, I label
email I want to save and use the Archive feature to remove it from
my Inbox, but save it for future reference. I assign Labels to the
emails before Archiving them so that they’re easy to locate in the
future.

This is where Filters come in. Rather than manually assigning a
label to every email that comes in, I set up Filters that check the
incoming email and automatically assign appropriate Labels to the
email based on the From address, or Subject line or any of a number
of other criteria I can choose. So, addresses I receive from
regularly are automatically labeled as soon as they hit my Inbox,
saving me a bunch of time.

There are many more features of GMail that you can explore, most of
which are typical for any full-featured email application, but the
thing that sets GMail apart is the search capability. As you’d
expect from Google, they’ve made searching GMail easy and
efficient. Given that Gmail gives you nearly 3GB of storage (it
increases over time from a base of 2GB), having a strong search
feature is a must. It’s possible to Archive messages that are not
labeled and the search feature makes retrieving them fairly easy.
I don’t recommend that you Archive unlabeled email, however, as you
have to resort to the search in order to retrieve them again.

To get your very own GMail account, go to http://mail.google.com.

Next week we’ll talk about Google’s Calendar application and what
it can do for you in your business and personal life.