So today Mike was kind enough to use one of his allotted invites into the Gmail beta on me, and I responded without haste of course. I couldn't however quickly sign-up for an account because I took much time deliberating on what my username (or in other words, what my new Gmail e-mail address) would be.

I really wanted to get erik@gmail.com, or e@gmail.com. I had also pre-considered eg@gmail.com, epg@gmail.com. But non of these were considered valid address because Google requires usernames to be between 6 and 30 characters long. I couldn't even get erikg@gmail.com. So then I accepted that I would have to use a hyphen and I tried erik-g@hotmail.com. Oh but no, that didn't work because google.com only allows letters, numbers, and periods. So OK, I tried erik.g@google.com, and I got the error that it was too short.

I originally thought that this might be some type of error in the validation, and it wasn't correctly counting the period as a character. But there was nothing I could do, so I went on and started playing with joke name accounts. Here are some of the results:

Available:

• between6and30characterslong
• butthead
• bigdump
• georgew
• bobdole
• babysgotback
• nintendo

Not available:

• atari2600
• billgates
• boobies

In the end I decided that nintendo was a coolio username and that was my choice. So all you people out there feel free to e-mail me.

Since using my Gmail account I have discovered a little more about the periods in the account names and why erik.g didn't register as 6 characters long. The periods are completely ignored by the Gmail system. You can send me e-mails at nintendo or nin.ten.do or even nin...ten.....do - it doesn't matter, I will get them all.

Gmail is cool... I wish it had a built in option to suck out a Hotmail account and import all the messages directly into Gmail.

Slashdot linked to this News.com article about how the Pepsi iTunes 100 million song give-a-way promotion has only had about 5% (or 5 million) of its codes redeemed for free song downloads.

I would bet on that Pepsi new this would be the case from conception of the promotion. Since from what I have heard is that Pepsi actually has to foot the bill for the downloads (so the labels/artists get paid still), Pepsi would favor a low response on code redemption.

I do wonder however if sales increased at all. Do companies like Pepsi run these promotions to increase sales, or just to increase their presence in the market? Or just to say, "Hey look at what we just did!"

It's kinda crazy, Pepsi could have given away ONE BILLION codes, and if they had the same redemption rate, they would still have only given away 1/2 of the 100 million songs they had promoted.

Below is a tally of places we visited and/or spent money at.

7 x Family's Homes Visited

6 x Freeways we drove on

3 x Friend's Homes Visited
3 x Del Taco

2 x IKEA
2 x Fry's Electronics
2 x Philly's Best
2 x The Mall
2 x Georges
2 x Target

1 x Taco Mesa
1 x Irvine Spectrum
1 x Boating
1 x Edwards Theatre
1 x Don Jose
1 x Islands
1 x Disneyland
1 x Burger King
1 x The Block
1 x Scion Dealer
1 x Ate at Family's

0 x Wahoos
0 x Rubio's

Not only did I have to spend a good portion of my day working on getting my server back on-line, I had to do it with a "joke" keyboard that had the keys re-arranged to spell out "I HUG MEN".

Today Amazon.com launched A9, a new search web site based off of Google's results*, but with extra features. I will report back in 7 days (or so) what I think of the service. For now I can say that it was good enough to make me even consider switching away from Google.

*It can't be completely base off the same results because I get different listings when I use the same search terms. Examples:

So if you check out the screen shots page on the Sims 2 web site you will notice that the majority of the captures are very adult oriented.

Examples:

• Young boy staring at nude woman bathing
• Caption reads: This office has spectacular views.
• Video games hurting the relationship?
• Girl kissing girl
• Role playing (OK honey your turn to be the female cop)
• this is just funny
• Prostitutes in Simsville?
• Money digging whores and their Sugar-daddy
• Three's Company
• Titanic anyone?

So I just got up because I couldn't sleep. I wasn't really all that tired, and on top of that I started having a crazy half-dream*.

In my dream I was being sued by Metalica for having downloaded Cheap Cologne's "Double Black Album: Jay-Z vs Metalica" where he mixed together Jay-Z's Black Album with Metalica's Black Album (much in the same vein as "The Grey Album" by DJ Danger Mouse where the Beatle's White Album was mixed with Jay-Z).

My dream had me pitted up against a judge arguing my case, which was, that I had downloaded a "Cheap Cologne" album, not a Metalica album. And that I couldn't be held liable for Cheap Cologne's unauthorized sampling of other artist's music. In my dream of course I had done my homework and had cases of music was sampled without permission, and then sold to the public, and argued that no one who ever bought these albums was ever punished, but the artist themselves had to be held liable. I also pointed out that no where on my computer network would you find a single genuine Metalica MP3.

So the short of it is that I sold Cheap Cologne out to the judge, rather than argue the case that Grey Tuesday was promoting which is:

This first-of-its-kind protest signals a refusal to let major label lawyers control what musicians can create and what the public can hear. The Grey Album is only one of the thousands of legitimate and valuable efforts that have been stifled by the record industry-- not to mention the ones that were never even attempted because of the current legal climate. We cannot allow these corporations to continue censoring art; we need common-sense reforms to copyright law that can make sampling legal and practical for artists.

So as I got onto the computer I checked out FARK.com to see if anything new had happened, and there was a tagline to an news article that read: "Metallic sound heard on space station. Lars Ulrich threatens to sue". This stuck out to me of course because of the half-dream I just had. If you didn't know, Metalica is the butt of a lot of jokes ever since they pioneered efforts to sue file-swappers over their songs a few years back. They have such a rep, that when some Canadian band released a fake story on-line about how Metalica was suing the band over a usage of a guitar chord that news sources picked it up as fact.

*Half-dream - like when you are still awake but dreaming stories.

So here is a partial running list of the April's Fools of the day:

• Google offering 1 gig of free web mail storage with new Gmail service (not a hoax)
• Google needs people to work at their lunar office
• Thinkgeek.com to begin selling devices that generate power out of ambient engry that is everywhere
• FARK.com being hacked - mirror
• Suprnova.org to only track Japanese language torrents
• This domain www.homestarrunner.com is coming soon
• leaked audio commentary by Goerge Lucas for the upcoming Star Wars trilogy DVD set
• March for web standards
• Two-Headed Ogres Added To World Of Warcraft

Other lists can be found here, here, here, and here.