Let’s be honest, we all have biases. For those of us who have had a part in ministry that includes active evangelism, it’s a part of every day life; people look at and interact with the world differently.

There is a similar truth in technology. People have differing uses and preferences when it comes to how they want their technology to look, work and approach the tasks they have to do. As I have looked at the list of people who have subscribed to these posts I notice that there are some people who will not always find my posts interesting because they’re using programs, platforms or operating systems that I don’t use and therefore know very little about.

CruTech is an outgrowth of a mentality of getting the most out of your technology without having artificial limits placed on you; this leads me personally to advocate for a number of technologies and systems that may or may not catch you in stride. While I don’t have the time (or much interest) in getting to know these systems, I do want CruTech to serve you as well as possible; if you are (or know someone on staff who is) better versed in things that I don’t know about or use I would love to have you (or them) become a the second author of content here. Feel free to contact me by leaving a comment below.

As a semi-pro wrestler I once heard about once said, “Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty.”

Stuff I am a fan of:
• Open Source software
• the Windows operating systems
• Google products and services
• being able to tell my computer what to do rather than having artificial limits placed upon me
• web-based technologies

Tech stuff I know little about or don’t particularly like:
• Macs
• Internet Explorer or Opera
• Microsoft itself
• proprietary software
• overpriced technology that is available for free or cheap

Yes, I said I don’t really like Macs, I do understand that they can be very useful for those of you who are doing visual design, audio or video editing. They are not really any more useful or easy to use than Windows machines and are far more susceptible to viruses and other attacks than they were in previous generations. On the other hand, I would love to have someone writing for CruTech that knows Macs well and can help those of you who read to use them more powerfully as well.

I just wanted to make sure you all knew where I was coming from. I will focus a lot on web-based technologies which are open to use on Windows, Macs or Linux machines so don’t click that unsubscribe link just yet!

I do all of my emailing through a single Gmail account. I am able to do this simply because of Google’s amazing thoroughness in the implementation and design of Gmail. Let me list off a few of the many advantages and post a walkthrough of how to sign up for a Gmail account.

Some advantages:
• Free. Anyone can sign up for it. There are extras that you can pay for, but not really necessary.
• Storage space. By the time you read this there will be more than 6.5 GB (gigabytes) of it. If every email you send or receive is 50 KB (pretty big for an email without an attachment) that allows for almost 21,000 emails before it’s full. (You can add 10 GB more for $20/year.)
• Growing storage space. It’s estimated that Gmail is adding 3.3 MB daily (67 of those hypothetical emails).
• POP and IMAP access. POP and IMAP are the primary ways that programs like Outlook and Thunderbird bring in emails from the web. This can make your email available anywhere.
• Incoming POP access. This is how I do all of my email from my Gmail account. You are able to have Gmail pull in your USCM.org (or CCCI.org) email and store it in Gmail – this also works for your internet service provider account (Verizon, Comcast, etc.). You can even have Gmail send emails from those accounts.
• Keyboard shortcut navigation. This is a great feature in any program for working quickly and efficiently, we’ll learn about this in future posts.
• Multiple accounts built into one. If you sign up for johnny.crusade@gmail.com you also own johnnycrusade@gmail.com, j.o.h.n.n.y.c.r.u.s.a.d.e@gmail.com (or anything in between) as well as johnny.crusade@googlemail.com. You can also add words to it with a plus; for example johnny.crusade+ebay@gmail.com for all of your eBay stuff so if you start getting spam you know who has been selling your email address.
• Search don’t sort. Remember, Gmail is from Google – a search engine. Gmail can instantly find old emails as you search for them. It’s quick and thorough. There are also advanced searches that you can use… we’ll look at them closer in a future post.
• Sort if you must. Gmail can sort emails just like Outlook into categories (called tags) – the main difference is that you can have multiple tags on one email. So, if you have a student who is a leader at one of your schools but is also attending the summer project you’re directing you can label his email both “Podunk State” as well as “OCMD Summer Project”
• Filters. You can have Gmail automatically filter things depending on what email it was sent from, or sent to, or words that are in the email itself… or by about a thousand other things.
• Threaded Conversations. Gmail will group related emails together as a “conversation” so that you don’t have to flip back and forth between individual emails between you and someone else. It will group them together in order so that you can read them all at once. Honestly, this may be the main feature that changes the way you read email.
• FREE!

If I have convinced you (and really, what more could you ask for?) take a look at the walk-through that I put together a few months ago.

We’ll walk through the Inbox next.