Muzyka’s Musings

A few weeks ago I had some trouble with my smart phone, which runs Windows Mobile.  It wouldn’t sync with my computers.  My attempts to get it to sync to the office computer resulted in the phone losing all of the information in my contacts.  I realized the contacts were gone when I was on my way to a lunch meeting and wanted to contact a student about a makeup lab.  The numbers were gone – all 1200+ of them.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the numbers that I was worried about.  I also keep my grocery list and my calendar on my phone, in addition to all the other to-do list items.

I was devastated, and realized I needed a new system.  I spent the better part of two days searching for alternate software that would allow me to sync the phone with the computer.  I felt very vulnerable and irritable during those two days, realizing how dependent I am on the organizer features of my phone.  Maybe the problems were caused by my insistence on using two different computers and wanting current information on both of them.  It doesn’t seem like a unreasonable demand to me.  (And it used to work when I was using my Palm Treo.)  Finally, I found a solution, thanks to Google and the cloud.  I hadn’t been using Google to keep track of all of my contacts or of my calendar.  But thank goodness Google Sync will do just that.  I used some trial software whose name I don’t remember in order to get the contacts to Google initially.  Now my computers and my phone all talk to Google.  They do it automatically without me thinking.  What would we do without Google?  What happens if something changes and we can no longer depend on Google?  That’s a scary thought.