• Good old Gmail

    When 1GB mail first came along many people scoffed; sure it was a huge benefit considering we had all become accustomed to 6MB, 4MB, 2MB mail etc., but most people tried to figure out why we’d ever need that much e-mail storage space.
    To be fair, and while I am not the worlds biggest e-mailer I have only hit the 1/4GB mark after having an account for nearly 2 years; that’s a measley 10% of the total storage space available at present.
    However; the e-mail client has prove its worth time and time again and forced the likes of Yahoo! and MSN to reply with similar products.
    The superb Gmail Drive means you can use your account as the handiest high-volume storage medium in the world, accessable from any computer with internet access; no wires involved!
    However, this post is not to big up the service in general, but to put forward a personal reason why Gmail has made life so much easier.
    About a year ago I was editor of my college’s newspaper, The Dhúlaigh Reporter, shortly after that I created my personal portfolio website which, if you know me, you’ve probably seen. The plan was to turn my contributions from the newspaper into images that would be hosted on the website, the idea being it would offer a better idea of all aspects of the work involved, from design to writing. I wouldn’t need to rely on poor scans of hard copy either because I had the digital Quark files on disc. The process is essentially simple.
    Being myself however, I kept forgetting to actually convert the quark files into jpegs until recently; at which point I realised that all the files were on my desktop computer back in Dublin and would be impossible to have transferred. Then I remembered that I had sent the entire newspaper digitally via my gmail account to the printers. I did a search of my sent mails, chose to view only those with attachments and found the right e-mail by date without even having to think about the subject title.
    What does it mean? Well expect to see an update to my published/print and published/design pages very soon.

    Thanks Google, you may be getting fair criticism for your caving in to Chinese demands but at least you can do some things right.