Migrations

Back in the mid-late 1990s when I was distributing small press comics through the mail (as the original incarnation of BugPowder) one of my favourites was Goathland, a diary comic by John Welding. I haven’t really thought about John much recently (hence my only-just-now discovery of his lovely looking blog) but images from Goathland, seared onto my brain circa ten years ago, occasionally spring to mind. One in particular went a little like this:

John and Helen, having recently moved from Milton Keynes to the village of Goathland in the North Yorks Moors, are getting ready for the winter. They move everything into one room of their cottage and hang blankets up over windows and doorways, nesting for the cold months ahead.

I’ve been sort of doing that this last week. While the “two rooms” notion, making a distinction between sleep and work, was a nice one in the summer it’s not proving quite so effective in the winter as it’s easier and more financially sensible to keep one room warm. Added to this the whole laptop phenomena (a relatively new development when I moved in) means I’ve pretty much been working from bed while at home. The table in the kitchen ain’t been used much.

So I’ve put together my work desk (previously in pieces above the cupboard) and set it up in the corner of the bedroom. Right now it’s a bit a of a bodge but when I get back from NZ I’ll put a bit more thought into it, perhaps figuring out a way to shut the work-stuff away at night.

A different form of migration has been taking place online as I’m falling headlong into the ever-lovin’ arms of the Google corporation. A brief experiment with their Reader proved a success so I’ve moved over to that from the Mac-based NetNewsWire and today I told Gmail, which I’d previously been accessing through POP, to get the peteashton.com email directly meaning I no longer need to use Apple Mail.

There are a few reasons for this. Firstly the interfaces in Gmail and Reader, while taking a bit of getting used to, are far superior to the desktop versions. Don’t ask me why but they are. Secondly the search is much quicker, especially for the feeds. But most importantly the flagging (or in Google’s case “starring” ) system seems to work better for me. With NNW and Mail I’d be flagging stuff but never coming back to it meaning the process was kinda pointless. With Google I do. There’s no rational reason for this -it just works for me.

I’ve also started adding stuff that didn’t come through feeds or mail into Google Bookmarks. Del.icio.us and the like never really grabbed me but if I can somehow integrate these three systems into One Single Place (the iGoogle home page thingy really feels like a backward step) then that’ll be a super way to funnel stuff into the blogs. Which is what this is really all about. I’m now in the business of information management, filtering all the crap about online into useful things for my blogs. These Google tools seem to have enabled this a lot more than I was expecting and I still have to figure out how to use them betterer.

Later: It occurred to me what the difference is between the Google apps and the desktop apps. Mail, NNW and (for bookmarks) Firefox are all about filing stuff away whereas Google is all about using stuff. Or at least that’s how it seems to me.