I'm riding the \/\/ave, but I don't know what that means yet

Happy new year everyone! Yeah, a few days late I know. And "everyone" is about 3 people. But that doesn't stop me!

I got a Google Wave invitation this week, and I've been playing around with it a bit. So far nobody I've sent an invite to has responded, so it's a bit lame at the moment. Did spend some time tonight following a conversation on Google's open letter to China that came out today. You know, where they're dropping their overt censorship and threatening to pull out of China completely if the government continues to hack their database to steal information on so-called dissidents?

If you actually haven't read about this, go read the letter NOW. This could be all smoke, or this could be the single most important tech development ever. Interesting read, nonetheless.

Ever since starting on at my last job, I've been maintaining two Google accounts, one primarily for gmail, and another for applications. My employer wasn't keen on my username ivanvector showing up in online corporate documents, so I made another "professional" account. I used the new account to do things like start this blog, and now I'm having issues having to switch back and forth between the two accounts, especially since getting on board with Wave. I've learned over the last couple years that developing an online identity is just as important for us tech types as developing a professional identity is for one's career, and creating a second account to hide my username was a big mistake on my part.

So, given that I no longer have that job, I'm attempting to reverse that decision. Google doesn't make it easy - at present there is no way to merge two Google accounts, and I cannot link my gmail to another existing account. So I'm stuck with two accounts, and deciphering which login to use on a multitude of sites I've signed up for over the last 2 years, with the explosion of social networking.

I took my first step tonight, and it was an easy one. I installed Google Chrome on my laptop running Ubuntu Karmic Koala (featured as my Twitter background!) and then enabled posting to the blog from my gmail account. At present the two accounts look identical but I'll eventually be filing the old one away as a sort of archive of old posts, or deleting it entirely if that ends up being feasible. But for now there are a bunch of blogs that I am following twice.

I will reconcile that. But not tonight, it's 1:30am and I'm fresh out of awake. I am looking forward to seeing someone online to Wave with though.

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