extremely fun weekend. friday, finally saw eternal sunshine of the spotless mind with brendan. more of a love story than i expected. charming. i liked it. saturday, spent all day prepping for my housewarming fiesta which was a blast. i had a huge variety of friends show up, in total maybe 50, 60 people or so. there was a lot of people meeting new people, music, salsa dancing, shisha, shots of absinthe and overall good times. thanks to everyone who was able to make it! i had a blast just seeing some good friends that i hadn't seen in ages--liz and joelle particularly come to mind. way too much time has passed since i last saw either of those girls. and surprisingly, my place really isn't that much of a mess. i just need to clean up my hardwood floors downstairs and that's about it. sunday, got yummy brunch at 611 supreme with brendan and then later saw agatha christie's black coffee at the act theatre with him and ben--fun sunday evening murder mystery. what a full weekend!



i recently finally got an invitation for a gmail account, mainly because i use blogger for this weblog--and blogger is owned by google. anyhow, so very curious so i signed up. ooo--very cool. things i very much like:



conversations: gmail will organize an email thread into a UI that's similar to a discussion board, making it extremely easy to read an entire email thread without having to dig through tabbed, chopped off paragraphs with lots of little carrots. you can expand/unexpand a particular email within an email thread. it also automatically removes the "quoted text"--or the text that most email programs include as part of the reply (the previous email). this is kind of hard to explain without providing an actual visual. but trust me--it's oh so cool. i have a total of 17 emails back and forth with brendan about the feature and then later about making plans; however, in my inbox, it appears as ONE email.



search: as expected, google incorporates search into the email. for the time being, since i don't have a ton of email, it doesn't mean that much. but hey, it works and i can see how it'll be very useful.



labels: instead of using the concept of folders, google has come up with "labeling". you can create as many labels as you want. any given email can have as many labels as you want to attach to it. for example, let's say i get an email from jigna and it's about snowboarding. and let's say that i want to be able to always see emails from jigna..but also see emails that have to do with going snowboarding. i can immediately tag that email as both "jigna" and "snowboarding". very cool.



keyboard shortcuts: while i have gmail open, i can, for example, just push "c" on my keyboard and it'll immediately open up a "compose message" window. neato.



it's still in beta mode and definitely has a ways to go. i'm curious what sort of features are getting prioritized (i.e. POP retrieval). things that I would like to see:



images: right now, emails sent to gmail are simply text mails (or so it seems). so if an email with images within the body are sent, the email appears horribly in gmail. i like how hotmail usually shows images within the body of the message...much easier than having to individually open up images. i even forwarded an email from my hotmail account with images in it--and the images never even transferred to my gmail account! not even as an attachment. i immediately reported it as a bug. didn't have the same problem when i sent emails with images from my work account. even with images attached, when i click to open, it opens my Windows Picture and Fax Viewer with no image. wonder if it's my computer or a strange bug. i can only see the image if i save it to my computer and then open it.



rich text/html formatting: as i said, emails can only be composed as regular text. so i can't send an email and format it at all. i guess it's not a huge deal, really...but seems like such a minor minor basic feature. i'm surprised it's not part of the original beta release.



contacts importing: once again, a nice to have.



there's a spam filter but since my account is so new, i don't know how good the filter is. anyhow, it'll be interesting to see how this takes off. i'd like to see them improve on some of the more basic features of any web-based email service. they definitely have some very cool features of their own...and i don't really mind the ads to the right of my emails. i barely notice them. i found it quite cool that within the email conversation that i had with brendan that there was an ad for pacific place--just because somewhere in my email i mention "movie" and "seattle".