Toys! Whee!
I tackled the start page first. It's not that that sort of start page is new to me: my ISP (EarthLink) has had one like that for years. But there are lots of gadgets on it that I don't like that are hard to get rid of and the look is generally cluttered, so I was willing to try another one. I went with iGoogle's page because it had a nice clean look, figuring that I can always go back to EarthLink's if iGoogle starts to annoy me. It's a bit odd getting a peek into my Gmail account instead of my EarthLink email though, since Gmail is only one of my backups.
I would get a lot more out of these tools if I didn't already have a PDA. It takes only a few seconds to turn on the PDA and three minutes bare minimum to get a computer up and running. These online tools aren't much use for reminding me to do stuff that isn't computer-based (set the rice to soaking, return the library books). The PDA has problems in this area too--it doesn't really remind me of much if I forget to check it in the first place--although I can set it to sound an alarm as a reminder, which has been helpful.
That aside, many of these things looked useful. Google's calendar was more than adequate for the events I typed in to test it with. Remember the Milk seems to be getting lots of good reviews, but when I try to enter a task, it locks up. I'll try it from another computer, but how much use will it be if I can only use it on certain computers? Backpack was probably useful as all get-out, but it was overkill. Actually Backpack looks like it might be an equivalent to Microsoft's SharePoint Server, in which case, Backpack does a much better job of explaining itself than SharePoint does. We could probably use it at work except that we've already got SharePoint.
The sticky note programs look like they have potential. But because they need to be downloaded, I'm going to try them out at home first; our IT department frets about unapproved software being installed on our work computers.
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