Boy, was I wrong.

First of all, the “Super Clean (BETA)” skin is a “Web 2.0″ take on Gmail; it adds a bit of flash while still maintaining the minimalistic feel that all Google products are famous for. It doesn’t add any bloat, but it definitely adds character. I guess for some people this might be one of the features they love most about all of Google’s offerings, but I think that after 6 or 7 years of every product looking exactly the same, it’s time to bring them into this century.

Second of all, they’ve added a feature to include Google Reader right in the Gmail window. For those of you who don’t have a lot of experience with RSS readers, I’ll give you a quick rundown of what they are and how they work. Websites (primarily blogs like this one, but some major news sites have them as well) publish what are called RSS feeds. These feeds are like a list of the most recently created or updated articles on the site. You would use an RSS reader to subscribe to these feeds (subscribe is a bit of a misnomer as there is no money involved) which would then give you the latest news from any of the providers of these feeds. You can subscribe to as few or as many as you like, which can make a day go by a lot quicker if you’re constantly bored at work, for example.

The add-on also lets you remove certain sections of the Gmail homepage that you may not have any use for, such as the Labels or Invites sections that normally take up the left hand side of the screen. I don’t have any labels that I use on even a yearly basis, nor are the invites really that important to me, since anyone can signup for a new Gmail account on the login page, so by simply checking a couple boxes, my eyes are no longer drawn to a portion of the screen that serves no purpose (to me.)

I definitely recommend it to anyone who uses Firefox and Gmail – it takes a great product and makes it even better.

Add-on Link @ mozilla.org

What makes this book different are two major points. The first is that it’s presented not in typical book form, but in the style of a court reporter’s transcript. Rather than being a one way dialogue that the reader is forced to take part in, they are simply observers in the courtroom, listening to the back and forth discussion of the witness, attorney, and occasionally the grand jury. Rather than “he said”/”she said” and all the other variations that authors are forced to used scattered over the page, it’s presented in a form closer to the following (excerpt from page 128):

Q. Could you please tell us, briefly, about your educational background and how you ended up as a Special Agent with the Department of Commerce?A. Yes ma’am. I graduated from Kalamazoo High School and went to Michigan on a full basketball scholarship – not to toot my own horn.

Q. Of course not. University of Michigan?

GRAND JUROR: Go blue.

A. Exactly. I was also the arm wrestling champion of Kalamazoo High in 1983.

As you can see, not only is there the technical side of it, but she lightens the mood by throwing in a joke or quip every once in a while, which I can only imagine happens in real grand jury indictment proceedings. They give the story quite a realistic feel, because you can very vividly in your mind picture the attorney asking the questions, and the witness responding as they do; it’s very human.

The other, and questionably the more appropriate reason why I really think that you should give this book a read, is that it wasn’t written by some crackpot conspiracy theorist who’s idea of “high fashion” is a tinfoil hat so the government can’t steal his thoughts. There are too many “BU$H SHOULD DIE!!!!” books out there that really have no basis in fact outside of the fact that Bush is in fact the president of the United States.

How do I know this? Because Elizabeth de la Vega was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Minneapolis, not to mention being a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Branch Chief in San Jose, California. She isn’t writing this as some paranoid delusion while she spends her last days of life in a 6′ x 6′ cell padded with cloth and rubber; no, she has lived and breathed doing case research for her entire career. By using those same research skills, she presents a very compelling argument for pressing real honest to goodness charges.

Yes, the “witnesses” in the book are fake. That is the only part of the book that is fake. Every fact that is presented in the book has been carefully researched, checked, double checked, and then re-checked one more time to verify its accuracy and she even says on her own website she would testify to these facts herself, given the chance.

Whether or not there really is a case against Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Powell (the 5 defendants named in the suit presented in the book) is up to a district attorney to decide. Ms. de la Vega retired in 2004, so she is unable to bring charges herself. Then again, seeing the blatant abuses of power in the past few weeks by the current administration, I’m sure any charges brought by any would be ruled “unconstitutional” and be dropped by one of Bush’s cronies.

But I’m getting off point, and a little upset. Back on topic, this really is a great book as it presents the material in an incredibly easy style to read, not to mention brings up some facts that I’m sure many people weren’t aware of. Whether they were secret memos, or issues that mysteriously weren’t covered in the media in North America, it sheds new light on the issue and should be read by everyone, Democrat or Republican. It’s quite short (237 pages, not to mention smaller than most other paperbacks) so even if you don’t like it, you haven’t wasted a lot of time.

What really gets me is that I may not be American, but the goings on there do affect my daily life, and this book definitely cleared up a few things for me about what Mr. Bush had said and what he had done, and why some of those things weren’t necessarily the same thing. It’s interesting to get the full behind-the-scenes story, ranging from internal memos in the White House, to notes taken by an aide’s secretary in London’s Downing Street.

To quote the author’s final word:

We, the American people, relied on the truthfulness, integrity, fullness, and completeness of the information about Iraq that the president provided to us. We were, just like the Enron fraud victims, entitled to know the truth about Iraq so we could make informed choices about our lives.

Love him or hate him, this book is quite interesting and if nothing else entertaining. Yes there’s an obvious bias towards Mr. Bush, but in a grand jury, it’s only one side presenting their case; there’s no defense present, they’re simply trying to get a group of people to decide if charges should be brought. In that sense, it’s quite real if a bit unfair. Does it over-do it? Not at all. It’s not some 900 page behemoth that you spend 5 months reading, but something you can easily read on a single rainy Saturday afternoon (if you put your mind to it.)

Rating: 4.5/5

Purchase at Amazon.com

Within 2 minutes, I found my saviour: mozy.com. I read a few reviews of their service, all of which were nothing but endless praise – apparently everyone seems to love them. They have software that runs in the background and only when the computer is idle, and encrypt all of your files before they even leave your computer as well. That was enough for me; I opened up Mozy’s website and started the application process.

What they offer

2GB of free storage for any data you wish to backup. They have a small application that runs in the background of your computer and (configured correctly) will upload any updated files to the Mozy servers almost instantly. The application also encrypts all your data with a very high encryption level (448-bit Blowfish, for those technical folks out there) before it leaves your computer so you don’t have to worry about someone gaining access to your tax information.

For those of you not-so-technical people, the software is incredibly easy to set up, so you have nothing to worry about. In fact, for most people, every single default setting will be more than adequate to store all of your documents, as well as a good chunk of your digital photo collection. The standard settings essentially backup your entire My Documents folder and all of its subfolders, however, when it gets to the screen where it shows what it would like to backup, it may give an error if the total size of these folders go over the 2GB limit. At this point you can de-select certain folders if you don’t require them to be backed up.

The other great thing about this software is the way it does the backups and how it saves time. Once you go through the wizard and select what files are important enough to store offsite, the first backup can take quite a bit of time (depending on the size of the files and your internet connection, this can be upwards of a few days). This may seem like a lot of time, especially since it means that you really shouldn’t shut your computer off in the middle of the process (the documentation for the backup client says you can but I wouldn’t necessarily risk it). Once it’s done the first full backup, every single subsequent backup will only be backing up the changes to the file, rather than the whole thing. For example, if you selected to backup a file that simply had the sentence “Johnny was a boy” in your initial backup, but 2 weeks later changed the file to say “Johnny was a big boy,” it wouldn’t re-upload the whole file again, but rather just upload the word “big,” which obviously takes a lot less time.

All in all, I had my account created, the software setup and my first backup underway all within a 10 minute period. The account creation was simple, non-intrusive, and straightforward, and the software is very self-explanatory, even for the most computer illiterate of us – you click next a few times, enter your user name and password, next a few more times, verify that the files it wants to backup are the files you want to backup, and next a few more times. Presto finito, you’re on your way to having your documents stored online just in case disaster strikes and your computer ignites into flames.

Signup Link | Signup Link (Non-referral)