i'm in austin right now for becky's wedding--i've known becky since kindergarten. crazy. i don't think i've seen her in about two years...never even met her husband-to-be. should be interesting..i know so few people that are going to be in attendance at this wedding--i know jessica, the maid-of-honor, whom i was also friends with in junior high...and becky's family. that's about it. oh, and dana from bahrain. but i haven't seen her in over ten years. the weather here is great--i arrived and it was 82 degrees. all evening, it's been in the 70's and breezy, so comfortable to stroll around in. knowing practically no one, i headed downtown after checking into my hotel and got dinner at stubb's, a barbeque joint recommended to me by the cab driver. i ate some baby back pork ribs while melissa etheridge was belting out "come to my window" live downstairs. pretty surreal. definitely in texas. i then strolled over to sixth street where it brought back memories of my last and only other visit to austin--when i was getting recruited by trilogy in my last year of college. it's a cool street. i forgot how cool it was. there are bars everywhere with either free or cheap covers, live bands, tatoo parlors on every block, and your pick of bratwurst, fajitas or gyros by street vendors. hope to head back tomorrow night with some people...being by myself and a single female, i didn't think it'd be a good idea to hang out at a bar by myself.



it's funny to travel around the country and hear the accents change so drastically. i can see myself already swelling back into my kansas drawl just hearing the texas twang so much around here.



last night, eugene took me to the Air concert--we sat in the 2nd row...it was awesome. great music.

i take back what i said about not being able to see images in emails sent to my gmail account---just a beta user blunder on my behalf. the gmail team directed me to a link that i didn't see: apparently, as a default they never load up images. i have to explicitly click on a link that says "display external images" in order to properly view an image-filled email.



here's a screenshot of the email conversation UI that i like so much:

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".

i had a fun girls night out last night. dinner was with phoebe, jeanette, sri, sandra & aileen at perche'no where we ate yummy italian food. then we walked over to the oliver mccaw hall where susan joined us to see the pacific northwest ballet's version of carmina burana. quite interesting and just as i would have visualized the choral piece---starting off very raw and then evolving into a frolicking dance with lots of colors..and then to a harem-like setting. overall, i loved it; however, i wasn't very impressed by the seattle choral company. i felt like this piece needed twice the amount of voices that were present. the sopranos were weak, the tenors were overbearing with individual voices sticking out too much. i was especially disappointed by the tonality of the sopranos during tempus est iocundum with the recurring "o o o...tortus floreo.." passage. i'm curious how well the choral company could see the conductor down below. in the beginning, i felt like there were many synchronization problems between the voices and the instruments. hmm. otherwise, the soloists had magnificent voices. overall, truly a performance that i enjoyed. i'm just picky with voices ;-) after the show, sri, sandra, aileen & i got a drink together at the sitting room until it closed. so much fun!



i haven't done as much prep work for my party tomorrow night as i had hoped this week. eeks. need to take a trip to costco tonight.

Today:

Top downloadable songs at iTunes:

1. The Reason ~ Hoobastank

2. My Band ~ D12

3. I Don't Wanna Know ~ Mario Winans

4. This Love ~ Maroon 5

5. Roses ~ Outkast



Top downloadable songs at wal-mart.com

1. Redneck Woman ~ Gretchen Wilson

2. This Love ~ Maroon 5

3. Toxic ~ Britney Spears

4. Tipsy ~ J-Kwon

5. Hey Ya! ~ Outkast



I wonder how the demographics of both services vary.

830 emails in my inbox this morning. only 7 which were real emails. it's ridiculous how much spam my work account gets. i have to check my email using exchange-web on monday mornings because the amount of spam is an overload for my client-side spam program when i open up outlook.

A9 finally launched the other day. check it out. here's an interesting search blog on the feature. congrats to betina and all the other folks down in palo alto who've been working so hard on this for the past couple months. last night, i said adieu to john, who is in his car right now, towards yakima, on his way down to san fran to become yet another engineer for a9. he needed to borrow a vacuum as the moving company had already packed everything he possessed, including many crucial cleaning supplies....so i went over with mine and hung out with him for awhile. smart kid, good friend. too bad i only recently started hanging out with him. best of luck down there...



speaking of goodbyes, two really great friends from work recently left amazon in the past week: eugene and guy. it feels like people i know are leaving constantly. it's strange how when someone makes the announcement to leave nowadays, the immediate reaction from most everyone is "wow, congratulations man!" the two of them are on to pursue drastic changes in their lives. good for them.



brendan came back from sydney on wednesday: welcome back :-)



i have a big housewarming party planned for a week from today. lots of cleaning and organizing to do this weekend in preparation for it....



sri & i finally bought our tickets to spain--wahoo! i can't wait. my whole month of may is all accounted for now, weekend-wise. it's crazy. the combination of two weddings, spain & debbie's visit has already filled it all up! speaking of weddings, i need to buy my plane ticket for austin soon...