diffusionOFregeneration

I am very fortunate in that I actually know what my favorite word is . . . . Free. How many people can say that? The problem is, most of the things in life that are free tend to reflect in value what you have (or haven’t) paid for them. But somehow, Google seems to have found a business model making truckloads of money by offering free products and services to people, and they are exceptional tools.

Recently I have been exploring the calendar application Google created. I am so impressed with how useful and feature rich this program is. I am currently using it in combination with Google desktop, another free application that allows me to run a plethora of tools called gadgets (there is a gadget for pretty much anything you could think of) on my desktop. I have Google desktop running on both my home computer and office computer, this allows me to access my calendar from both places (or you can access is from any computer with an internet connection online) without any importing or synchronizing. I can add or view daily events right from my desktop without opening a browser and navigating to a site. I can even set reminders to appear on my desktop to remind me of events when they come up.

I have found this to be an extremely useful ministry tool. I have created a calendar for the Wesley at WTAMU and integrated it with the home page on our website. Once I have entered all of the events for the Wesley, I can add the Wesley’s calendar to my personal calendar, and all of those events show up without any extra work. Not only can students click an event on the calendar to find out the details on what is happening, they can also add that event to their own calendar (if they have a Google account) as well as click on a map to the event site that Google automatically creates for you when you enter the address and zip code of the event.

As if that wasn’t enough, don’t have a computer or internet connection handy? Desperately need to access your calendar or add an event? No sweat. Just grab your cell phone and sent a text message to ‘gvent’ and you can either add an event or view the events you have entered. To add an event, for instance, I sent a text message to ‘gvent’ saying, “lunch with Amy on Friday at 12:00pm”. Google calendar automatically created an event for me on that time on that day with that information. I have my calendar set up to automatically remind me of an event 45 minutes before it occurs, so I will receive a text message sent to my phone for every event I have entered unless I have specified otherwise. In order to receive by text message all events on my calendar for the current day or following day, I simply text the word ‘next’ or ‘day’ or ‘nday’ to ‘gvent’ and it will text back to me whatever information I have specified I want to receive.

How cool is that?

Google is the number one company in the US to work for. No wonder they are coming up with such cool products. Happy energized people do the best and most creative work.