January 8, 2011

I had mentioned before that one of my goals for 2011 is to be better organized. Writing things down (electronically) works well for me, and having the information I need synced between my electronic devices (iPod, iPad, Mac, etc) is very important to me.

I have been using Google to synchronize all of this information for me; I maintain my calendar on Google Calendar and I use my Gmail contacts as my main contact list. I have been having a few issues with this as of late. First of all, Gmail mangled my contacts a bit a month or so ago and the discrepancies have been making me crazy. I like each entry to be as complete as possible and all of them to be formatted identically (dashes and spaces in phone numbers, for example). I like every entry to have a little thumbnail of the person the card represents. I’m strange, I know, but seeing a smiling photo of each person in my address book makes me smile. Many use it to associate a name to a face, I don’t need to do that, I just like to have a thumbnail smiling back at me.

Since I intend on being on an Apple calling device of some sort in the relatively near future (either an iPhone or an iPod Touch using Skype and my Verizon WiFi), I decided to rebuild my address book using my MobileMe account. I’m starting to show a glimpse of my tinfoil hat tendencies, but I don’t want to store my personal information with a free service (especially one that is ad-supported) again. I pay for MobileMe, so I figure they owe me something and more importantly, everything is backed up somewhere else.

Also, my jp-at-jpnearl-dot-com e-mail address is hitting unprecedented spam levels as of late. That e-mail address has been automatically forwarding to gmail for the past year or two and gmail has been keeping the account quite clean, but I’m seriously considering getting rid of that e-mail account (I’ve had it for over 10 years) so that the spammers can just give up on trying to sell me everything that is spelled with numb3r5 and $ymb0l$ that I don’t want anyways. I’ll probably use the MobileMe address that is my nickname (without periods) dot last name at me dot com, but I’ll be rude and send out a mass email when I do that. When I make that step, I’ll be deleting all the other extraneous accounts that are living out there.

Another step in my quest for organizational perfection: a single point of contact.