I have 3 questions. At least about tech things.

1. Is there any way to get gmail to show only conversations tagged with a specific tag?

2. Is there any way to delete all songs from iTunes that it can't find (ie, that have an exclamation point next to them). I moved my iTunes folder and I have about 3000 of these now.

3. Does anyone use Google desktop? Is there any benefit to it?

The Gmail I can answer: on the left gutter, there's a section labeled 'Labels' (they're so tricky that way). It's a list of your tags. Just click on the chosen tag and you'll see them all in the message area.

3. Does anyone use Google desktop? Is there any benefit to it?

My husband uses Google desktop and likes it. Integrated searches - you can search your files, gmail, and the web all at once (supposedly also over multiple computers, though he hasn't used that) and get reults in that familiar google format, mainly. Also things like the widgets OS X gives you. He says it's a drain on CPU for teh initial indexing but not so much after that (thoug that varies a lot depending on what gadget/widget/thingies you add).

There was some controversy about the security of Google Desktop, but maybe that was just fear-mongering. Anyway, the indexing-of-files feature is similar to 'Spotlight' on the Mac - both help you find files very quickly.

Raq, I think if you tell iTunes to consolidate your music it will copy everything it can find into its own folders so that it can access them again.

DH says the multiple computer option has security issues as the index of your files lives on the google server (I'm paraphrasing and my understanding pretty low, so interpret freely). W/o that feature, you need a firewall because google desktop "installs a little web server that you don't want to expose".

It seems, in practice, to give PCs some Mac functionality.

there's a section labeled 'Labels'

I never even considered that those might sort the mail. I've been poking things for hours, and kept looking at that list, and it just didn't look like the kind of GUI that sorted.

IOW, duh. And thanks!

DH says the multiple computer option has security issues as the index of your files lives on the google server (I'm paraphrasing and my understanding pretty low, so interpret freely). W/o that feature, you need a firewall because google desktop "installs a little web server that you don't want to expose".

See, this is my concern. I don't know if I need the Spotlightish feature enough to store my index with the GoogleGods, although occasionally it would save a lot of time.

I think if you tell iTunes to consolidate your music

Done that, and it found the new location no prob, but I still have a bunch of duplicate listings in my library.

If you don't use the search across multiple computers feature, storing thei ndex on google servers is not an issue. So says DH, who is a security administrator, so he tends toward the cautious. [link] for more detail.

Done that, and it found the new location no prob, but I still have a bunch of duplicate listings in my library.

I think if you just right-click on a duplicate entry, the pop-up menu has a delete option. This is the sucky, one song at a time method, but I think that would work.

There are scripts you can use to kill duplicate iTunes entries. Um, for Mac only.