May 25 Tools Part 1

Like many people in the IT industry, I have become the local Tech Support guy for many of my relatives and friends who have a computer problem - not that it bothers me much, and it's a great way to learn new things, it's just the time factor involved. As Murphy dictates, the problems flood in when you have the least time to deal with them!

People often ask me what software I use when I use and surf the Net and I'm happy to run through some of that.

Email - For my personal use, I'm a long time Eudora fan - I'm not sure when it first appeared but I've been surfing around the net since 1994 and I don't recall ever using any other client. It's dead simple to use and the free version is good enough to do most things you'd ever want to do. In my work space, I have to use MS-Outlook which I'm well used to by now as well.

Dealing with spam is probably the biggest problem I have in the use of email. For a while I used MailWasher to filter and deal with the problem but it really didn't solve or reduce the problem for me - it's probably a good product, I may not have invested the effort to use it properly (and I think it become non freeware after a while which made it expensive to use across multiple computers).

In the end, I decided to channel everything to a Yahoo! mailbox and let Yahoo do the filtering for me. I paid up the $20 for the enhanced service which lets me send mail from different addresses and gives me POP access back to Eudora so I can offload and keep my real mail where I want it.

One of other real bonuses with this approach is access to my email from anywhere - as I travel a lot I can use Internet kiosks in airports and other places and read and retain the mail I want for later download to Eudora and heave-ho the rest as I go. Think I'm getting somewhere between 200-300 non-work emails a day now (add another 50 or so for work related email), so the thought of not accessing it for a week is rather daunting!

I'll also admit to having a GMail account which I haven't really got into yet - it just auto-forwards to Yahoo - but, like Yahoo, it will be accessible from anywhere in the world.

Browser - I generally use Internet Explorer both at home and at work mainly because it's what most other people use and it's just easier developing web sites in the most common browser.

It hasn't always been that way - I was most certainly a Netscape Navigator bigot in the early days starting (I think) with version 0.9 beta. IE simply didn't exist or was pretty woeful in those days for quite a long time - I think I made the switch around version 5 of IE. These days, FireFox looks Ok and I use it a little bit as well as IE, but mainly just to check web page layouts. Occasionally IE won't load a page properly, so FireFox can be handy then as well.

More coming a later time - if anyone has questions, please comment!

By the way, the Software and Browser pages are good place to take a look.


Happy Surfing!