Postal Mail from the Comptuer via the Internet

In my quest to create a better address book of my current and past acquaintances, I've discovered L-Mail, a service that will send postal mail for you. Hold it!!! Lasso those thoughts about laziness and keep reading. I was looking for contact information online for an old elementary school friend and discovered a physical mailing address, but no email address. I'm reluctant to spend the time to hand-write a letter (I'm not near a printer currently), address an envelope (after finding one), put a stamp on it (after finding one) and then, finally, walk forth and back to the mailbox only to find out that I had the wrong address. Wait! Tighten the lasso on your laziness thoughts and start pulling ... there's more. I found three possible addresses for my friend. Now we're talking about hand-writing and addressing envelopes for the same content three times. The list of mental and physical obstacles to a reunion is growing longer. I certainly don't need this to be more difficult than it needs to be. As it is, I've not made an effort to get in touch with him for over 15 years. So, for whatever reason, I've already demonstrated a considerable lack of motivation. All of this work creating letters to be mailed out would easily tip the scale in favor of remaining out of touch. If you read my post about "The Personal Growth Manager 1.0," then you'll have an idea of how I feel about our reasons for staying out of touch.

This leads me to my point. Let's make it easier to reconnect with people. I don't have the desire to spend money on a personal investigator to hunt down my friends, classmates.com is still too new to be very handy, and I don't have a next door neighbor that's personally vested in my getting back in touch with old friends like Bill Murray had in "Broken Flowers" (great movie, by the way). So, if I can spend a little more money than the cost of a typical postal letter to conveniently and quickly send letters to these possible addresses, I'm down. It would be great to reignite a good friendship, find out what's been happening in his life and our mutual friends' lives that I've also lost touch, and to spawn any healing and growth personally. Lazy, no. Priceless, yes.

https://l-mail.com/scripts/static/features.php

Personal Growth Manager 1.0

Recently, I've become rather hyped up on maintaining the contacts in my address book. Despite the controversy, I'm a big fan of Plaxo (http://www.plaxo.com/). I only wish there were even more services to facilitate the creation and maintenance of contacts for me. To take the idea to an extreme, I'd like to have an address book with everyone that I've met throughout my life that I thought was interesting and/or effectual in my life. You never know when you might want to get in touch and, more interestingly, it could keep you in touch.

So many contacts and relationships become, shall we say, discarded. It seems like an awful waste. Perhaps it's natural and healthy, and perhaps not. Maybe it's really only a relatively new phenomenon in the scope of human existence. Just a few hundred years ago, I doubt that the average teenager was threatening to move out and take off to become an actor on the west coast of America. I'd bet that people were more inclined to have relationships that reached back farther into their past. I'd also wager that this tended to improve the quality of their lives.

Think of losing touch with people for no good reason as analogous to purchasing something and only using it once and then purchasing the same type of item again because you've forgotten or misplaced the first one. It's very uneconomical. Even more interesting, I believe the mind favors those that we've known the longest. There's a bond there that doesn't exist for similar, yet newer, relationships. So, I say stay in touch. I think there are a lot of rewards to be had in the realms of business and personal growth.

I think the advantages that you could reap in your business life are more obvious than your personal life. There are a lot of people that we probably never speak with anymore because we'd like to forget about the type of person that we were during that phase of our life or maybe something happened between us and that person that doesn't make us feel so great. I think it's sometimes better, actually most of the time I think it's better, to communicate and confront these fears that are typically irrational. It would force us to deal with our issues and become more in touch with ourselves. I can't believe I'm saying that ... yuuk!

"The Automated Address Book 1.0?" No, I think not. Try "The Personal Growth Manager 1.0." Combine this with a diary of embarrassing moments linked to people in your address book and bam!, you could have it bug you with pop-up alerts reminding you to spend some quality time with this acquaintance and patch up that emotional pot hole! Huh! Huh! Yeah, now we're talking.

Remote Control Postal Mail!

I've just come across a service that will handle your postal mail for you. This is interesting to me as I have begun spending most of the year in Hawaii and the rest either at my home in Maryland or traveling. There's always a certain amount of mail that isn't forwarded properly and I end up not seeing it early enough to respond. These guys will scan the outside of the envelopes and the contents if you make the request. It would kill two birds with one stone in terms of going paperless. http://www.remotecontrolmail.com/

An information revolution right under my nose ...

You may or may not have stumbled onto Wikipedia articles when you've performed searches on the Internet. I finally took a moment to read about the service. It turns out that it is an encyclopedia that ANYONE can contribute information. There's processes in place to mature the articles. There are downsides of misinformation due to the open access, but the upside is huge ... examples: no censorship, no corporate or political biases, multiple languages. I've been amazed at the information I've found. It's always so relevant and current. This approach to culling information together and organizing people is as noteworthy as the creation of the printing press, in my opinion. If you would like to read more about it, here's a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About

This "Wiki" approach is also being applied to a dictionary, thesaurus, books, textbooks, manuals, directory of speciies, news, media, and more.

Now, I think "The Age of Information" is very appropriate for the time that we live.