Doug Green

First the happy news. I've had some correspondence with a friend from High School. That's more about the power of Facebook than about cleaning my contacts. But it was nice to exchange emails and update his information

But the sad news is that I removed two people who have passed away. My Grandmother, my Dad's Mom, died a few months ago. She was 92. We weren't very close, but she was family. I know that my Aunt misses her daily. And it's sad that she's gone.

I also removed Verna Bell's name from my contact list. Verna was a Saint. She was very involved with the local community, the local Democratic Party, and her Church. Verna died last October. Read her obituary here. I miss her too!

But like every good geek, the tech stuff is much longer than the people stuff, so read on...

I've been doing some computer housecleaning the last few days. I had used Microsoft Office for years. But since moving off of Windows about two years ago, my contacts have been in limbo. When I first switched to Ubuntu, I used Thunderbird. And then about six months ago I switched to gmail.

All of my Office contacts were synced to my phone, but I couldn't get them from the phone to Thunderbird or from the phone to gmail. I tried syncing from my second Windows Vista 64 bit computer, but had problems doing this directly since I'm not running any Microsoft Office products (using Open Office instead). Finally, yesterday I just synced my phone to my wife's Windows XP computer, and then imported them from there to gmail.

Now that I've moved all of my contacts to gmail, I shouldn't be surprised. I'm a Google fan (thus the Google ads on this blog). I love gmail as a mail client. The interface was very intuitive. I liked the "merge contact" features. I especially like setting up a group, say for "Kiwanis", then just type "Kiwanis" in the "to" address line and have gmail fill in all the names. If you're not using gmail yet, give it a try. You don't need to switch to a gmail address, you can use gmail with your existing email address. It's worth it just for the spam filtering.If you haven't switched yet, give it a try.

BTW, I can't wait until they release wave. If you're a tech geek and you have an hour, watch this video.