I’ve been enjoying my Gmail account for some time now. All in all, the good people at Google have made some really great strides with pushing the Web mail envelope. Address importing, inviting your friends, use of filters versus folders; the list of goodies just goes on and on.

My use of the Gmail account was quite varied in the beginning. Then Google made the move that really scored points with me - it started offering full POP access to the account. This alone made my day, believe me. The only thing that really struck me as lame with this Web-based e-mail service was the extremely poor spam filtering Google offers.

Granted, the service is still in Beta, yet I still had some expectation that it would have a better handle on spam filtering. Look, I am not being unreasonable by demanding Bayesian spam filtering versus the weak blacklisting being implemented. If the good folks at Google would just take care of this one issue, they would make a lot of Gmail users very happy. Having said that, I continue to applaud Google’s efforts to make Web-based e-mail more user friendly.

Back on the home front, things are as busy as ever. With my workload, I have received interesting feedback on one of my main projects. Rather than getting too deep into that is right now, let’s just say that a very important lesson was learned from an important person within the comic strip industry. Thanks to some rather pointed input I received from this person, I am going to help my project evolve to the next logical step. I will fill you in on the details as they develop.

On the PC repair side of the fence, I continue to receive entertaining phone calls for repair assistance. My favorite has to be the client that called in asking for the installation of some ‘SUV’ ports. SUV ports? When I called to question this, I was told again they meant SUV, not USB ports. I had to snicker at this common mistake. To me, it’s a reflection of how overly complex PC terms have become over the years. While things have always maintained a certain level of complexity, I think that, recently, things have become so convoluted that it has really affected the way people are looking at the industry as a whole.

At any rate, I finally managed to convince that client that they were in need of USB - and not SUV - ports. As it turned out, offering a simple hub was the fastest solution that I could offer to meet their needs.

Well, I have a ton of work to attend to. I hope each of you had a spectacular Thanksgiving and enjoy the rest of your holidays!

Let’s get digital!