Digital Meanderings
Meanderings of a coder

Today Google announced a new version Google Apps named Google Apps Premier Edition. Although I subscribe to the regular version currently I may switch to the Premier Edition since I now run a business.

My experience with Google Apps has been extremely positive. I love being able to separate my personal life from my business life while still using the Google’s great tools. While GMail is my favorite feature the other features are nothing to sneer at.

From a business perspective Google Apps just makes sense, especially if you run a small business. For email you used to register a domain, buy hosting, setup a mail server and bought/downloaded an email client. This was such a hassle, at least I always thought so. I want to spend my time performing tasks that make me money, not System Admin tasks that don’t. And that was for email, but what about other office tasks such as documents and spreadsheets?

For other office tasks, Google Docs is a nice solution although I don’t feel that it is truly ready for the enterprise yet. Don’t get me wrong, Google Docs is great for simple documents and spreadsheets but it does have its problems, all of which have been noted numerous times around the Internet. But when it comes to document sharing, Google does a great job! I’ve used it for a project (Shasradio) I’ve been working on and I plan on using for my consulting business.

Overall Google Apps is another great product from Google. I just have one piece of advice - remember to backup all of your information! Although Google promises a 99.9% uptime guarantee I don’t see any mention of a data guarantee.

Google Apps Premier Edition costs $50/year/user and provides a host of features, including an API. This has not been a paid advertisement, I just want to spread the Google Love.

Tonight is snowy in Sioux Falls and I’m a little bored. So I decided to write about some of my favorite podcasts.

• Geek Brief. A gadget oriented show by Cali Lewis and her husband Neil. Cali has a great personality and she’s great looking. Gadgets and a sweet, beautiful girl - what more could you want from a podcast? (Video).
• Mobuzz. A technology oriented show hosted by Karina Stenquist. She is another beautiful host, and she’s extremely intelligent. Her on-air banter is fantastic! (Video).
• This Week in Tech (TWIT). Another technology related show. The original cast is made up of the bastard children of TechTV, most notably Leo Laporte. Another regular on the show is John C. Dvorak. (Audio).
• FitPod. This an exercise related podcast that contains great music for getting you pumped up and keeping you going strong throughout your workout. Make sure you download “Fit&Run.” (Audio).

If you have a favorite podcast, email it to me at: zechariahs+podcast@gmail.com.

Because of my recent GMail fiasco I’ve been downloading all of my email to my computer. I’ve been able to download most of my messages, in fact I was able to get all of my messages until 9/1/2006. Then the pipe ran dry. Every time I logged into Gmail via Thunderbird the GMail servers would tell me that I had no new messages. After some research I found the GMail POP Troubleshooter.

The GMail POP Troubleshooter checks your Outlook or Thunderbird settings to determine any configuration problems. After running the tool it alerted me to the fact that the “Leave messages on server” setting is invalid as this is GMail default behavior (Help Center - Incorrect ‘leave on server’ setting). I changed the setting and my Gmail messages started downloading again. w00t.