Long overdue return to The Beach House

The Beach House has been stagnant for a few months, and it's kind of Google's fault. Well that's my excuse.

You see, I use Google Apps, a neat function whereby we have our own personal domain (kerlin-bell.com), to which Google's very good webmail service GMail is linked. This allows us to use GMail but with our own domain name and email address, thereby sidestepping the whole "I hate my ISP and what to ditch them (yes that's you Telstra) but I'm kind of locked into my (insert ISP name) email address" problem. You can churn ISPs if you have an independent email addy.

But until recently (OK, a few months back), Google didn't have all its services linked to Google Apps. So if you used something like Blogger (the platform for this blog) or the equally brilliant RSS aggregater Google Reader, you needed a second Google account. And it made the whole logging on process rather complicated.

So back in April/May, Google fixed this and finally brought all its other services into Google Apps compatibility, and enabled a single sign-on for it all. But oh boy was the conversion process a trial... And it was complicated by them not having a handful of services not yet ready for conversion, which you only found out once you got going. Which ones? Yep - Blogger and Reader.

So along the way, I lost track of the temporary account I had to convert both the Reader and Blogger services over to. So I couldn't log onto the blog to add anything new, and nor could I look up the backlog of interesting stories I had tagged for posting. And to make matters worse, these services still had my old Bigpond email addy recorded on the "Lost your password?" function! An email account I closed well over a year back.

In the meantime, I just resorted to posting items of interest to my Facebook page facebook.com/kerlin or to give my Facebook friends (yes - they are actual friends) a break from my political rantings, my new dabbling into Twitter at twitter.com/AshleyInTheory.

Figuring out the problem was last on the list during a busy period. But recently I fired up the old-fashioned way of handling email - MS Outlook - to try find an old message, and it started downloading several hundred emails still coming through the Bigpond account! It seems Telstra just doesn't get around to actually closing email accounts... How nice, yet bizarre, of them. And among all the rampant spam - which was part of the reason for ditching Bigpond - were the responses to my repeated "Lost your password?" please!

So after diving back into the convoluted and not yet entirely resolved Google Apps conversion process, The Beach House is getting a long-overdue visit and freshen-up, complete with exploring Google's new but kind of flaky template functions.

I'll gradually catch up with sharing the many interesting and amazing things I've found in my web travels over the interim, and my rantings and ravings on all that is good and bad in the political sphere will resume. But gradually, so it doesn't drown my Facebook friends with things they've already seen courtesy of the Blogger/Facebook automatic linky thing.

Of course, it's a big assumption that anyone out there actually cares about any of this, and it is highly likely the numbers of such people are particularly low. But that's okay, because this blog isn't really about everyone else. It's more my latter-day version of a diary (albeit sanitised for a public sphere), and about making some space in my head for the many many other things that come pouring in every day, courtesy of this amazingly connected world we have now.

Huh...Can one's head actually "fill up" and need you to make space for more? I don't really think so, but it reads okay and I'm sure you get the drift. Perhaps recording things is more about burning it into my own neurons and thereby aiding recall...

(And for any undetected typos in this piece, I blame the truly horrible keyboard on this Toshiba notebook and its habit of randomly ignoring keys I've typed unless I bash the bejesus out of them.)