I Don’t Trust Gmail. Here’s Why.

I have had an email address with Gmail for probably 20 years. I mean my email address is my name @ Gmail. No numbers, no weird abbreviations, no strange punctuations, just my firstnamelastname @gmail.com How long has it been since that was possible?

Three or four years ago I began receiving emails to my address that were clearly intended for another person with my same name. Their email was literally my email address! At first I thought it was just an glitch in the system. Later I thought perhaps they had simply mis-typed their name (maybe left out a letter or something) or had made up a name so that they did not get spam emails. However, many of those emails were for legitimate purposes – receipts from Tractor Supply or from their cell phone provider. What gives?

My Technology

A common discussion in any of the technology forums is which platform is better. Some argue that Windows is best, others that Mac is and others, still, argue that Linux beats them all. What is my take? Well… it depends.

###I am Operating System Agnostic

Truly, I am. I have all three operating systems in use in my home as I write this.

I started my technology back in 1984 or 1985 with a Commodore 128. It didn’t take long at all to capture my imagination and soon I was doing some Basic programming, playing games, writing papers, etc all on that little computer. I’m not sure my wife was all that impressed. But, boy, I sure was!

Nextcloud, OnlyOffice, and the Like

Every once in a while I get this notion that I need to move my data off of sites like Dropbox, OneDrive, and so forth. When I do, I start playing around with self-hosted services such as NextCloud, OwnCloud, and so forth. I’m currently in one of those cycles and have been playing around a good bit with Nextcloud.

I’ve even coupled it with OnlyOffice so that I can edit documents in the

Moving to a Self-Hosted Bookmarking Service

There’s a hint that bookmarks are going away. Services like Delicious that used to provide great web-based book marking services have closed down. In their place are the likes of Instapaper and Pinboard and the like that break stuff into different types. Instapaper to store sites that you want to read later, Pinterest for images you like, and so forth. That doesn’t work well for me, though. I want everything in one place. That’s also why I decided to try a

Technology For It’s Own Sake

About eight years ago I spent a couple of years teaching high school. Being a nurse, and coming into the experience with no real educational background it was quite an interesting, and eye-opening experience. Needless to say, I probably learned more than my students did. One of the things that left me scratching my head was the approach the school system took toward education. Tons of money was spent on technology and teachers were required to have at least one “technology lesson” each week. That lesson had to be so designated on your weekly lesson plan. Talk about misguided! As I write this I still see a lot of the same things happening in education — at all levels. And it’s just plain dumb. Let’s explore this a bit.