August is here, and summer vacations are in their final stretch.

Digital cameras have become so common now that it has been unusual to see film cameras this summer.

When digital cameras first appeared, one of the big selling points is that there were no negatives or transparencies that could deteriorate.

Today, though, there is a bigger danger lurking.

Many people do not upload their digital photos to their computers until they have their first bad experience with losing the digital photo files on their cameras or with losing their digital cameras with hundreds of photos inside.

Others master the process of regularly moving their digital photos from their cameras to their computers.

Some go beyond this and master the process of uploading copies of those photos to websites such as WalMart.com for printing at local stores or at websites such as SnapFish.com for printing and getting mailed to their homes.

What I recommend, though, is to go beyond these two processes and make sure that the digital photos and other precious files on your computer are regularly backed up.

Please save yourself the heartache of future loss of your precious digital photos by reading my article “Online Backup Services” and then signing up for an online backup service such as MozyHome Unlimited.

You will thank yourself later, when you can still retrieve your vacation photos from this summer.

Carnegie Mellon University professor Randy Pausch died yesterday.

What is remarkable about this?

He was very public about his battle with cancer.

More important, he left a wonderful legacy, as my wife put it to me while I was writing this.

Pausch became well-known for the YouTube video titled “Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” — and what turned out to be his last lecture.

As I write this, YouTube shows that this video has been viewed 4,031,952 times.

Why? I believe that the reason is simple: Randy Pausch was a better communicator.

Watch the video; you will see what I mean.

For more inspiration, read his book The Last Lecture.

And, if you believe that you have time to neither watch the video nor read the book, then just remember this one quotation from Pausch: “We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”

If you use the Gmail from Google, you probably know that something called “Web Clips” appear near the top of the Gmail Inbox page.

A “Web Clip” is a link to an article in an RSS feed.

This website publishes (syndicates) the blog posts in an RSS feed.

So you can use the Google “Web Clip” technology to keep up with the KirkMahoney.com blog posts through your Gmail interface.

When you have set up Gmail in this way, you’ll see something like the following, from July 2, 2008, at the top of your Gmail Inbox page:

   Kirk Mahoney . com – “Bouillon” vs. “Bullion” – Jul 2

When you see this in the Web Clip row in Gmail, you can click the link to go straight to that blog post at KirkMahoney.com.

Here are the steps to putting these blog posts in Gmail:

1. Log in to Gmail.
2. Click the Settings link at the top of the page.
3. Click the Web Clips link in the row of tabs.
4. Enter “kirkmahoney.com/feed” (without the quotation marks) in the Search by topic or URL field.
5. Click the [Search] button
6. Click the [Add] button to the left of Kirk Mahoney . com

That’s it! Along with whatever other RSS feeds are set up for your Gmail account, you will now see clickable titles and their dates for KirkMahoney.com blog posts at the top of your Gmail Inbox page.

Tip: If you want to delete any RSS feeds from Gmail, click the My Clips link on the Settings tab-page and then click the remove link to the right of that feed.