News from the Front

Update time. Yesterday Star Wars finally arrived - huzzah - and the cross I bought for Jayne for our anniversary next week. And the book she got for me arrived to, although the useless postman delivered it to the wrong house (the cretin).

Two websites of note to report... an insane German genius has built a Pong machine. The emphasis should be on machine - it's entirely mechanical, no electronics more advanced than relays are involved. It's awesome. The computer, being made entirely of relays, makes a lovely clicky noise, and sound effects are performed by solenoids hitting percussion blocks. It's a thing of true beauty.

The other website is a resource for distributing Gmail invites. In case you're not up to speed, a Gmail address is the current must-have in the world of the interweb. The thing is, you can't just go to Gmail.com (or rather gmail.google.com) and sign up, you have to receive an invitation to join, and invitations are passed to existing users after so long. So your only chance of getting one is to know someone with one already, hence the exclusivity at present. What this site does is accept invitations from Gmail users who don't know what to do with their allowance, pools them and dishes them out to visitors. Simple and effective.

As a result, I now have a Gmail account. And it's great! Most web-mail systems are a bit slow and clunky compared to their regular PC-hosted counterparts, and pump so many adverts down your eyes that it can induce nausea. Not so with Gmail - it's fast, clean and sleek. And the way it organises emails into threads is beautiful. So, I'm actually going to use it! I've even added the address to my blog header, so I can see how the anti-spam features work.

Rumours abound that Google are looking to develop a web browser as well, possibly based on Mozilla. If they're going to continue to develop things as swish as Gmail, and Blogger for that matter, I'm not going to be complaining.