Strange isn’t it – with what is probably one of the shortest videos of the preseason modules in the 30 Day Challenge comes with the biggest challenge to me so far. Let me explain…
For us old Internet vets (or ‘hacks’) that have been playing with the Internet technologies over the last decades, in particular stuff that has appeared as Google Labs or Betas over the years, a slowly increasing and annoying problem begins to emerge.
I expect others like me will have probably found that a Google Account schizophrenia has set in even when it was totally innocently done. Multiple accounts with multiple and differing services that never want to connect back together again.
So the 30 Day Challenge module just about setting up a Google Account becomes one of the biggest hurdles to leap. Something which I tried to ignore and have been putting off for years. But here it comes … It is time for a sort out.
It took a while gathering up all the different logins that I had possibly used and trying each one out at http://www.google.com/accounts to see what facilities were opened to it and what I had put in them. I found that I often needed to clear out my cookies each time I logged in differently to ensure it worked. A nice clean version of Google Chrome came to the rescue here with a complete clear of browsing data after each successful login.
I made a table with the columns username, password and one for each of the Google service used (except for browse ones like iGoogle, Google News etc). After logging into each account I found the link to the ‘Dashboard – View Data stored with this account’ to be a real time saver. I filled out the relevant information for each and added them to the table.
After a few hours of painful drudgery a fairly large table existed with all the mostly forgotten details of previous Google encounters.
This was something that was needed doing for a long long time.
What am I going to do with it now?
Well, actually I don’t know.
Having all the information there in one place though is useful and as soon as I find some source of advice as to really what to do – or Google actually produces a simple merge!!!! – then I can make more informed decisions as to what to do in the future, or what I can do to tidy them up.
For doing the 30 Day Challenge I am able to see which account will suit me best.
So anyone else in this position. Get out a big OneNote table or spreadsheet, (or ironically another Google Docs one) and go through the documenting.
The Google Schizophrenia can be cured.
And it is gooooooood….. 🙂