So, favourite Niece/Goddaughter, here’s your birthday present.

1. 2012 Membership to the Melbourne Storm
2. Virgin Blue $200 Gift Voucher
3. Your personal domain name: www.ashleighmcclure.com
   I registered this domain for you so can have your own little part of the internet. I’ll show you hot to set it up so you can have all your existing email addresses and anything@ashleighmcclure.com go to one mail box.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1401152/

Over the years I have had many email address from different ISPs, employers I’ve worked for, businesses I’ve started and for personal branding. Being online since 1996 I have collected and created a huge archive of emails; over 30,000 which was clogging up over 30GB of data on my HDD even though I had moved many years worth from to backup DVDs and external HDDs.

I recently started working with a new client (@wingdude) who outlined the way he preferred to work with consultants. Amongst other things he stated he ‘lived in GMail’ and had over 10 years of emails sitting in Google’s cloud. Google offer many fantastic free services of which GMail is but one. Google Apps is a brilliant and free solution for small to medium enterprise who need to offer email to staff without having to pay for email hosting. There is also a document creation and management function, calendar function and website construction interface. I use it for one of my businesses (@nextbigthing.com.au) , am about to deploy it for another business (@misterbig.com.au)  and implemented it for one of my personal branding domains (@craigashleyrussell.com).

When Google first launched GMail it was through an invite only mechanism. Very wise considering in those days there was no such thing as cloud computing so the addition of users had to be managed carefully to avoid server failure at a massive scale. Originally, each invitee was given 10 invites for their friends. These found there way onto message boards and even eBay where they sold for a ten to twenty dollars. Now anyone can join without an invite and get about 7GB of storage, which grows all the time (you can actually watch your memory allocation grow, kilobyte by kilobyte), and Google’s amazing search interface for your own mailbox. That means you never have to delete emails ever again as the memory continues to grow. And it’s spam filter is the ultimate; I get no spam. Plus all this costs me nothing. $0!

I liked the idea of cleaning 30GB off my HDD and taking advantage of GMail’s advanced tools so I started to plan the best way to go about it. After all, moving 30GB to the cloud meant using 30GB of bandwidth at least. So these are the steps I took before sending a single email.

Migrate all my emails into one place – my Apple Mail app

Run de-duping software to ensure that I was not uploading any double-ups.

Delete any emails I was 101% sure would never need again; e-newsletters etc

Move all hese emails to the Inbox or Sent Mail box – all other mailboxes and Smart mailboxes had been condensed

Set-up my GMail account. This was interesting because I had several already; my very first crashrus@gmail and, for personal branding, craigashleyrussell@gmail. I decided to make crashrus@gmail the master account. It was my login to Google analytics, YouTube and several other of their platforms. In short, that login had a ‘history’ with Google that could be useful down the track remembering that one of Google’s search criteria is history.

Next I turned on the IMAP feature for my GMail account. IMAP essentially keeps a mail client and email web server in sync with each other. I have always found this very handy especially as when an email is marked as read on one device it is automatically marked as read on every other device or web server where that IMAP account resides (online, laptops, stand alones, iPhones etc). An email which is sent from one device appears in every other device too. Well not really, but a version of it does. The server houses the email in reality.

That’s it. All my emails from many different accounts are now living in Goggle’s cloud, available to me any time via my choice of device.

When I send an email it goes from the account that received it. I can create signatures for each address but the real bonus os Google search. I’ve had instances where looking back at 5 year old emails has made a big difference.

And migrating to GMail has made a big difference to me.

Just spent an hour doing what any real coder would have done in 30 seconds. My first iPhone app may be in beta by the time we’re embedding chips in our heads. But there is great satisfaction in figuring these things out for oneself.

The dirty little secret about the internet is that if not for the porn industry it probably wouldn’t exist today. Or if indeed there was a version of the internet that started without the massive investment of the porn industry it would be vastly different than what we enjoy today.

The whole concept of displaying images via the internet was thanks to the porn industry. There’s only so much you can do with letters to the editor that start off something like; “Dear Penthouse, I read your letters every month and never thought anything like this would ever happen to me…(insert details of threesome, the good kind, here).

Then consumers demanded video. The porn industry delivered. Then instant messaging. Helllllo, porn industry. And of course the porn industry is like any other enterprise and wants to be be paid for the services offered. So they developed the technology for high security payment platforms years before the banks had heard of internet banking.

There’s a famous story about a research group at HP testing the technology of a scanner they had just invented. They wanted to email the scanned image to colleagues in the UK over the internet and determine if the result was acceptable by comparing it the original image. How do you get the original image to them for comparison? Their solution was to scan an image from a publication that is printed identically around the world. They chose Penthouse. As it turns out Miss November in the US is the same Miss November in the UK

The latest advance that the porn industry is leading us towards is 3D TV. smh.com.au has a story about it here.

I have the latest Mad Men (Season 3) and Dexter (Season 4) if anyone wants them. Leave a comment below.

It’s so important for businesses to deliver what they promise. I was researching domain expiration information for a friend this morning and being a client of NetRegistry went to their site. They offer a IM (instant message) service where you can chat with a salesperson. Great idea! Doesn’t work. Responses took many minutes and my contact at NetRegistry ‘mbaker’ was obviously ‘mshangrahanasingh’. (see update below)

Here are the screen dumps of the chat – they don’t show the time stamps but the period from comment to reply was in each instance several minutes. That’s not instant. And particularly annoying when he was asking questions that I had already answered.

UPDATE @ 10:18 on 16/12/09

Just got this email as a response to my complaint to NetRegistry.

———-

Hi,

We don’t offer the service, hence the sales person had no idea about it.
Probably a better question to put through support rather than sales.

Regards,
Brett Fenton
Chief Operating Officer
Netregistry Pty Ltd.

———-

I unreservedly apologise to ‘mshangrahanasingh’ for implying he is in anyway associated with NetRegistry.

Each year in Australia there are about 10 mega draw lotteries. These are the ones where the first division prize is more money than God.

Last night one such draw for $40million took place and was one by a single individual who will now have more ‘friends’ than God.

Mostly people who win these prizes are broke again in a short period of time. They may have some trinkets and some cars and some property but generally the lion share has been pissed up against a wall or given to family and friends.

The only way IMHO to act when something like this comes your way is to do nothing.

My emergency plan for what to do when a multi multi million dollar lottery prize comes my way:

1. As the money doesn’t actually arrive for a couple of weeks (Police checks and anti-fraud test are conducted) it’s planning time.
2. Create a team: lawyer, accountant, financial planners.
3. Have the lawyer and accountant create a charity.
4. Get the financial planners to start looking at investment options. Step one here is to open a margin account offset against 100% of the winnings. You’ll see why this is important later.
5. The aim of this plan is give away 100% of the interest earned every year. But remember, we now have two piles of cash; the winnings and the margin loan.
6. Invest both, not conservatively and not outrageously risky either. A little risk is good. A lot of risk is heart attack city.
7. Now create another team of advisors from business, charity, science and the arts. Three from each area are required.
8. Promote the charity and ask for submissions from the public as to where the money should go. Remember, it’s just the interest that’s being given away not the principle so you can do this every year.
9. Have your team review all submissions and vote on two winning entries from each category.
10. The president of the charity can award an overall winner to one of the eight semi finalists.
11. Each winning submission (2 from each of 4 categories being 8 in total) receive 1/10th of the interest earned for that year. Another 1/10 is given as the presidents prize. 1/10 is reinvested so that the principal always grows so each year there should be even more money to give away.
12. Eg assuming a lacklustre 10% return on $40mil each recipient would get about $400,000 dollars. The next year they would get $410,000. SImple figure only and counting taxes or fees etc.
13. The other $40mil margin loan is earning interest at the same rate but costing 5% in interest making a gross return of $2million pa. Who couldn’t live, very fucking happily, on $2M pa and have given away over $3.6M to worthy recipients.

So some back story. In June 09 Stephen Colbert packed up his late night political satire show, Colbert Nation,  and took it on the road to Camp Victory, Iraq. It was brilliant. Just 4 eps but each one brilliant. On night one he interviews General Raymond Odierno (Commanding General, Multi-National Force—Iraq). Watch it here from Comedy Channel. Then watch the video below. And wait to the end to see what Stephen does…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_DbNu5OlFE]

Great article from the masters of mischief about PepsiCo ceasing its US$1.3 Billion dollar advertising budget.*

*This article proudly brought to you by our sponsors. That’s them, just under the ‘Print’ button in the ‘Article Tools’ box.