This is another great idea for keeping your personal history. Gmail has tons of space... and it's free. The search options can't be beat!

Blogger Rafe Needleman uses Gmail to record memories of his young son's life. With the hefty storage, easy accessibility and robust filter and search tools, it's a neat way to be able to quickly pull up that time when your little one met Santa Claus—or yanked your laptop off the table. Of course, with stuff this precious, it's always a good idea to back it up.  

So with the recent announcement by the increasingly awesome Google Reader team of a note taking ability for Shared Google Reader items, I have figured out a way to automatically add my comments to posts I read and post it on my wordpress blog. For those like me that struggle with finding time to blog, this is AWESOME! I can now do all my blogging instantly from where I do most of my research! You can even post a shared item directly to my shared feed without subscribing to it! Does it get any better?

WARNING: This means that I will be posting a LOT more articles, that will predominantly be just pointing you to good resources I have found on the internet! (Hey, that’s what I do now!)

For those that might want to also do so, I am using a really nice plugin called FeedWordPress. I can then just put my RSS feed for my shared page in there and off we go.

A couple of weeks ago I came across a great new website from Doug Hatch called EQ Idea Exchange (EQIdeaExchange.com).  Doug is a Elder’s quorum president in Silicon Valley and has put together a lot of his resources that help him out in managing his quorum.  I was an Elder’s quorum president in a former life and I have to tell you the resources he has there are awesome!!  Here is the area’s. 

• Quorum Organization
• Presidency Meeting 
• Home Teaching
• Proclaim the Gospel
• Perfect the Saints
• Redeem the dead
• Activities and Service
• Quorum Meetings
• EQ Lessons
• PPI Interviews (This is VERY useful) 
• Visits
• Tools and Tricks
• Other

 

Interesting article on Newsweek yesterday “America’s Next Top Mormon” about the prominence of members of the church on reality TV shows… I guess a member of the church has won “The Biggest Loser,” “The Rebel Billionaire,” and “Survivor,” not to mention some second place finishes. Then there is “So you Think you can Dance,” “Dancing with the Stars,” and of course “American Idol.” I have a friend who constantly updates me on ‘my guy’ David Archuleta… even though I have never seen the show, I have some sort of affinity toward him…

I love this quote:

There must be something about the Mormon community that makes these people so self-confident and so open,” says Lynne Spillman, a casting director for “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race.” She thinks that coming from a large family probably helps in a game like “Survivor,” with its complicated group dynamics mirroring sibling rivalries. “They also have these incredible experiences through their missions,” she says, “and can relate to being dropped off in the middle of somewhere they’ve never been and having to make it.

On the heels of yesterday’s post about older conference talk audio, I read this morning a post from LDSWeb guy that the Joseph Smith Manual has audio now for English, and has plans for 11 other languages. Awesome! This could be great for returned missionaries trying to keep up on their languages… or missionaries for that matter…

That reminds me… a couple of weeks ago, I saw that the church had posted the audio for preach my gospel as well… awesome! That means that people can listen to the lessons without a missionary. Might be a good starting place for someone who is not willing to meet with the missionaries quite yet.

I love listening to scriptures/lessons while I run. It is a great way to spend a little time pondering about the eternities!

I am a techie for most of the day, and I can tell you first hand the REAL pain that I have seen when people lose their data. There have long been some PC backup options out there, but today online backup startup Mozy released an automated backup solution for the Mac! Mac users worldwide rejoice!

Of course, any good service costs money, but this one is pretty good with an UNLIMITED plan for only $4.95/mo. I don’t know anyone that wouldn’t pay that to retrieve their pictures/video’s/documents/etc! Think of all that family history LOST!

At the end of last year I lost a hard drive with the first 6 years of our marriage on it… all the pictures… all the video’s… gone. I thought that because I was a techie, I could get them off… well, there was no retrieving this failure… learn from my example!

I highly recommend that you find a backup solution of some type of you don’t have one yet. They also offer the same for PC’s of course!

A post on the LDSTech Forum today suggested that we archive the talks from conference from pre-1997. That got me thinking. That in itself would really be awesome… but imagine if we could not only archive those but index them to point to specific spots in the audio with quotes about specific topics… especially oft quoted talks…

Keep an eye on that thread…