Thing 3

This, as demonstrated by the post labelled Thing 2 below (are you following me? I realise the continuity's reminiscent of Memento: feel free to tattoo a reminder on your torso), is where I learned something. Something oh so simple; so much so that I really feel I ought to have known it already. It's that Paint (formerly Paintbrush for Windows, if that rustles your mental archives) can save as a jpeg. Really, I'd written off that simple program that nestles on almost every computer years ago, as only producing bitmaps that were never what I wanted. Times have changed, and next time I need a simple crop or screenshot I won't be waiting five minutes for Photoshop to fire up.

Thing 2

iGoogle is something I use a lot; I particularly like being able to have a homepage with sticky notes and simple tools like a calculator close to hand. Of course I could find a calculator easily enough by typing one word into Google, but I like it to be there waiting for me. I had however forgotten how irritating it is to set up. Half of the gadgets work intermittently or not at all, and often it says something has been added that doesn't appear, until you do it again when it appears twice. Still, once it's right it's right, and I think of it as a friendly space that works for me.

Thing 1

Blooming annoying this was, mostly because I have so many Google IDs and email addresses and couldn't remember what I'd used where. Eventually I managed to set a new Google ID up with my work email address, verify it and log in using that same ID. For a while I was doing Thing 2 with the wrong, unverified login, and couldn't understand why all my efforts disappeared into the electronic ether. A mixture of stupidity and it being Friday afternoon most likely.

23 Things

While I'm not new to many of these things, it's always useful to have a refresher and see how other people approach them. Although I have many different IDs, pages, blogs, profiles and albums scattered across the interweb, I'm starting from scratch. You don't want to see my baby photos or meet my schoolfriends anyway. I'm hoping I'll pick up some useful titbits - indeed I already have (see Thing 3, which doesn't exist yet, but it will...)