Starting this blog

This is my first blog entry, having used Picasa2 as the entry to the blogging system. That (Picasa2) really seems to be a remarkably good piece of free software from Google, and it integrates really well with blogger.com and the blog site blogspot.com. You can see my pic in the "About Me"on the right.

How did I get started on this? I suppose it really all started some months back when I was invited by my son to open a Gmail account. I held the view that Google was becoming far too ubiquitous on the Net, and perhaps even predatory in the way it inveigled itself into search bars in browsers - especially in my favourite browser, Firefox. I don't like the way large companies start to become ubiquitous and predatory in the IT world - for example, that well-known company Microsoft. Why? Because it potentially limits the freedom of choice that we consumers have, and I have long disliked the way large corporations try to dictate to the market exactly what they will consume. That's why I am a strong supporter of consumer rights, consumer protection laws, consumer associations, and things like privacy - for example, I use JunkBuster to help to keep the ad-men and their annoying noise from my Net experience.

Anyway, I opened up a Gmail account, and was grudgingly impressed. Having initially been suspicious, I became assured that:

(a) my much-valued privacy was not going to be lost or exposed to the advertising spammer world, and

(b) I was not going to be inundated with advertising junk, either on screen or in my mailbox.

Then I started to check out the increasing number of utilities that Google offer, and I installed the Google desktop utility, and then Picasa2 onto my laptop. I'd recommend both of these to readers of this blog.

Why "The Song of the Lily"? Well, Lily was my mother's name, and the picture here is of my daughter Lily, taken in October 2003, and that little flower likes to sing.