Technology drove me into a lake…

Despite my love for The Office and Michael Scott’s very convincing arguments against technology (shout out to my blog title), I have found some really exciting uses and improvements in the technologies I use daily lately.

First of all, I’d like to take a moment to try and convince all readers of this blog to create a Gmail account. As a former user of many different free email hosts including yahoo, hotmail, and msn, Gmail is BY FAR the best I’ve ever known. I love this little host so much that I have even abandoned my office email outlook account. How can you do that, you ask? Well, my Gmail is so smart that I can set it up to both send and receive all my work emails (as well as any other email accounts I might still receive messages to) into ONE central account. Your next question, wouldn’t that be confusing to mix all your work and personal emails into one inbox. The answer: No, because Gmail is so smart that is automatically labels incoming mail from my account formerly known as outlook AND automatically reply’s from the account that the email was originally sent to. Genius.

I have recently discovered Gmail “Labs”, which are a lot like applications for the iphone. My two favorites are the forgotten attachment detector and “Got the Wrong Bob?” The forgotten attachment detector searches your emails to see if you mentioned “attached, attachment, attaching” in the text and alerts you if you start to send such a message without the attachment. This has proved quite useful for me and has greatly reduced the number of follow-up “oops I forgot to attach” emails that I have to send each week.

“Got the Wrong Bob?” will scan any email recipient list that I make and alert me if I’m sending an email to William, my client that it thinks I meant to send to William, my husband. How does it know who I meant? It cross-references past email lists to see which “William” I usually send an email to in conjunction with Leslie and Taylor (or whoever else is in your recipient list). Once again, Genius.

My other favorite new find is the AT&T Uverse TV Mobile Remote Access app for the iPhone. From this application, you can manage your Uverse DVR…it does everything from deleting old recordings to free up space to searching and scheduling recordings of all shows starring John Krasinski or Tina Fey. Another genius idea that helps make life just a little bit more convenient.

So, despite the occasional failures of technology, I’d say as a whole, it’s a great thing. I may change my mind if it ever drives me into a lake though.