Phew..... I've finally escaped from the clutches of the blueberry bushes!
I've also finally gotten my Extended Reach internet (not without a passle of problems... was supposed to be hooked up last week... just got it up and running Wednesday afternoon) and am lovin' it! It's nowhere near as fast as real high speed, but compared to dial up... well I feel like I've morphed from the turtle to the hare!
I also decided to go with Mozilla's Thunderbird for my email. I switched browsers to Firefox a couple of months ago (after huge problems that came with an I.E. upgrade) and I love Firefox! After checking out Thunderbird, it looked good, so I downloaded it. Had quite a few problems trying to get the configurations right from my old ISP and Outlook Express and getting email to go straight from Embarqmail (my new ISP email) to Thunderbird without routing emails through Outlook before they went to Thunderbird. A call to tech support at Embarq solved the problem and Thunderbird is running smoothly. Woo Hoo!
Since I wasn't thrilled with any of the homepages I've tried out, I made a custom homepage using iGoogle. Love it!! Besides an assortment of nifty gadgets (including weather, news, literary quote of the day, a note feature, my gmail and other neat stuff) I added a Google Reader and sorted my blogs into folders. Somehow I've ended up subscribed to over 100 blogs and that's been quite difficult for me to keep up with. Some are merely info-type blogs on which I don't leave comments so the folders helped me organize the blogs in the way I read them. So now, instead of over 100 blogs showing up in my Google Reader, they're in folders and I click the folder with the blogs I want to read... and.... Presto! .... there they are! Hopefully I'll be able to stay more current now that I have a faster connection and am a little better organized.
Well, I'm still customizing Thunderbird and sorting emails that are currently in four different locations. I hope all this time and effort in streamlining will pay off in more time for.... ART!
