Online Email Bounding: Fill & Download for Free

We began writing to our kid when he was about one. At first, the letters were on Microsoft Word document files and short notes. I was the one who wrote almost all the notes.A couple of years later, I created an online email address and we began emailing the letters to that address. My husband would start and edit email drafts over the course of a week or month, then email the completed letter to that email address. I usually sit down and type out everything I'd been noodling in my mind in one go and email the letter to that email address.My husband and I would copy each other on that email. Often we'd talk about what we shared in that email. These letters gave my husband and me a new way to communicate and learn about/from each other. We learned about each other as parents and how we identified with parenthood.I noticed that our letters focused on different aspects of our experiences: he would describe the daily life, cute little moments, and notable things that happened. My letters described the emotional lives, how we (or I) felt about a particular situation in our family life, and my feelings around my role as parent and growth as a person.We expected these to be read when our kid is grown. Thus we were brutally honest about our hopes and fears, dreams and disappointments, angry times and happy times, confusion and struggles as humans (and parents). We hoped the letters can answer questions our kid may have about our parenting choices, or why we thought or acted as we did around a particular situation or life stage.The letters were not so much a record about our child, as a record of rationale and motivation and thinking behind many of our choices, such that he would not be bound by any false equations of "mom and/or dad's mistakes = my destiny or identity"... which means this practice could scale (i.e. if we had more than one child, we'd still create one email address and write letters to one email account.)These letters can be the start of a different kind of family tree: one that describes the family environment and parents' worldview and choices.Recently I decided to compile 5 years' worth of letters into a physical form: a book an inch thick and over 400 pages. That's a lot of letters, and we've only just begun.

Yes, they can be very good. They really depend on the lecture, the lecturer, and the effort that went into preparing the lecture notes.To be clear, you should never buy the lecture notes — I know they are (or may be were) bound up into books and then you can find them on Amazon. There is no reason to read these lecture notes unless you are a graduate student or postdoc (or even scientist/professor) in physics and therefore you should have access to an academic library that either has the notes or can get them. You can also find the individual lectures (frequently) online. If you can’t find the lecture notes online, email the author and ask if you can have a digital copy.

It’s advantageous to Google to collect as much information about people as it legally can because their revenue is based on selling advertising targeted at very specific and carefully analyzed groups of people. They have every reason to want to keep it that way, and no motivation to constrain themselves in any way not required by law.Current laws are so weak that Google is able to invade people’s privacy in some extremely intrusive ways. For example…Google uses a potent technique called browser fingerprinting to identify a particular device, in conjunction with a service called Google Analytics, which is hugely popular with websites all over the world. Anytime you visit any website that uses Google Analytics, your browser is fingerprinted and a note is made that you visited it, including a page-by-page of each and every page on that site you browsed. If it’s a website that requires you to have an account, Google will then be able to associate your browser’s fingerprint with your account information. Later, when you browse some seemingly unrelated site, Google will again fingerprint your browser and it will know who you are even though you never logged into that other site. About half the websites in the entire world use Google Analytics.If you use gMail, the content of all your email is scanned, including the content of all the files you attach to an enote, including pictures and videos, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and everything else. It is all opened and scanned. The core purpose of this is to detect keywords (such as “vacation”) and phrases (such as “my mom’s sick”) that will assist them to target very specific ads from advertisers at you. There are secondary reasons they do this, including to scan for illegal content. Even if you aren’t a gMail users, if you email someone who is, Google also does this with whatever you send them.If you use Google’s Chrome browser, a myriad of information is sent back to Google, including a browser fingerprint, your browsing history, detailed geo-location information and details about your device. This information is used to establish your identity on any site that uses Google Analytics (about half the internet, as mentioned above). If you use Chrome you are directly plugged into Google’s vast data collection ecosystem.If you use Google Maps or Google Earth, the places you view are all logged by Google, and associated with your device, and thereby you.If you use Google Drive, your data is very safe from external threats, but completely open to examination by Google (but no, it cannot be sold, see this Quora answer).And then there’s the Android operating system, with more hooks to Google than a fishing boat.One thing to be especially aware of is, you may be using one or more of Google’s services, such as gMail, without even being aware of it. That’s because many domain hosting companies sub-contract the email services they provide as part of hosting packages to… wait for it… Google. The purchaser of the domain hosting services will be aware of that fact, but most email users will have no clue that email bound for xyz dot com is actually flowing through Google’s servers.The list goes on, but I think you get the point… Google will not regulate itself to collect less data or intrude less into people’s lives. That must come from the outside.