g-happy g-accidents

When I went to click on my weight-training site this morning, I missed the bookmark and hit Blogger, the one above it, instead. And this little Gmail icon caught my eye.

Do you see where this is going? I have Gmail. Rejoice and make merry, fair citizens! (If you are a Blogger user, I'd stop reading this immediately and go sign up for one yourself. If you aren't a Blogger user, I apologize, but maybe you could start a new account if you feel it's worth it...)

I was just discussing how Google's marketing hype is so good that I want the damn thing even though I barely know anything about it, and apparently all of California is screaming about privacy rights because of the AdSense text search, and Alissa read me the part of the service-terms agreement about how machines will read my email, and woo! Who cares! Now I know some things about it: 1000 MB of space! Search function! Cool labelling system that lets you group all your messages! Clean, spare, lovely Google-esque interface! Automatically generated contacts list!

Honestly, the privacy thing does trouble me, but deep down I don't believe there's privacy on the internet anyway -- this is just putting my metaphorical nonmoney where my mouth is. Not like I say anything so controversial in my email anyway that Big Brother will really be interested. Big Advertising Brother doesn't fool me, and he doesn't distract me from not ever buying whatever he wants me to buy. I know that's not the point, and I respect the point, but the point doesn't let me save all my email messages. The point doesn't let me never again have to call up a publicist, shame-faced, to ask her to resend her author's phone number because all messages older than 30 days are automatically deleted and I didn't know.

Speaking of Verizon and its evil email from hell, surprise surprise -- none of the "advanced" (ha) features on my account are working right now because they're "doing service" (double ha) to the e-mail "program" (triple ha). Which means that I'll be changing my email address again, and for that I sincerely apologize, but not that sincerely, because I have Gmail. To make sure all is well with the account, I'm going to wait a few days to send the official address-change email, but the new address will be g[mylastname] at gmail.com. Sadly, I couldn't do gg at gmail.com because it had to be six letters long, but it's still g-tastic.