The WSJ has a piece on couples struggling to merge their digital lives (via). The missus and I have been merging digitally recently. Plus I’m always trying to upgrade her digital lifestyle.
- The article highlights a guy prickishly re-ordering their Netflix queue first thing in the morning to get his movies above his wife's. We've set up separate 2 queues for our 3 movies, usually split as 1 for her, 1 for me and 1 for us. And thankfully our TiVo's capacity is large enough to spare us fights over what shows to keep.
- Since I've convinced her to use Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs (all of which she likes), coordination has become simpler. Google Calendar allows each of us to add events to the other's calendar, handy when scheduling appointments. Similarly with Google Docs, it is easy to share a document/spreadsheet, see what the other has changed without stepping on each other's toes. Isn't revision control wonderful?
- We have a private PBwiki for todo lists, links to local restaurants, and other assorted wiki topics. As with every wiki I have used, it gets out of date and I'm often too lazy to do proper wiki gardening.
- The piece mentions people combining email addresses and iTunes collections. As for a joint email address, the thought had never crossed my mind. Of course we'll have individual addresses. When there are things we want to share, like when we get an email from Vonage saying we have a voicemail, I just use a Gmail filter to automatically forward the email. And the intersection of our music collections is likley the null set, which definitely live on separate iPods. </ul>