So now that I’ve used Gmail for a couple of days, I can say that it is without a doubt the best webmail client I have ever used. It is fast, it has lots of keyboard shortcuts, and it’s really designed with the power user in mind. It disables html images by default which is great to prevent stupid web bugs.

That said, it may not be enough for me to switch to using it exclusively. The keyboard shortcuts are great for dealing with lots of junk mail, but so much html email is meant to be used in a browser that you still kind of have to rely on a mouse to navigate.

The spam filtering is not as great as my current solution, but it may just require a bit more training.

Google is giving blogger users an opportunity to beta test Google Mail because Blogger and Gmail are both owned by Google and they need some people to test it out.

The first thing that catches everyone’s attention about gmail is that you’ll get a whopping 1GB of storage for free. This is 10x larger than what Yahoo Mail charges $50/year for.

But Gmail is more than just a lot of storage. Gmail aims to change the way people read email. For instance, there is no concept of folders. There are only labels, which are tags attached to individual emails. There are also filters which will change how incoming mail is handled. Filters can archive(which only moves it out of your inbox), apply a label, or trash email.

Eliminating folders and using labels makes a lot of sense. The biggest issue with folders is that they categorize an email into exactly one category, so if I get an email about both poker and java, I don’t know what folder to stick it into. Then when I need to search for that java poker email again searching is easier if I know which folder I archived it to. With Gmail any number of labels can be attached to an email solving this problem.

And of course because search is what google is all about, gmail has fast excellent search capabilities.

Gmail is ad supported, and they will send you targetted ads based on your email. People are complaining that it is an invasion of privacy, but I it’s not really any worse than other free ad supported mail services in my opinion.

I’m going to cc all mail to me to gmail and see how much I like it. Maybe I’ll even switch completely. But I dunno, I have a pretty weird way of reading email so my preferences are not exactly like the average user(I actually read html email with the E-links text browser).

I hate it when my web browser crashes while I’m doing a blog entry.

Anyways. I was home to Seattle for the weekend. I didn’t do too much, mostly just hung out with the family and had a lot of food.

I did get to play in a $2/5 limit hold’em game at a pretty crappy cardroom near my house. A lot of them have appeared in the Seattle area in the past 4-5 years. Most of them are small and seedy, but some of the Indian casinos are large and they have some big games. I didn’t seek out any of them because I didn’t want to drive too far out.

I got my new bike. It’s a Felt S-22 as expected. I went for a ride today. In my usual about 1 hr ride. I rode it about 2.5 minutes faster than my previous fastest ride and probably about 4-5 minutes faster than my average ride. So the speed improvement was at least %3+ and probably more like %5. That’s about what I expected to get out of it. But more importantly I feel cool. I am pretty sure that red is the fastest color.

Yay. Lucky Chances has a new baby no-limit Hold’em game. The blind structure is the odd Northern California 1-1-2, with a $1 button, $1 small blind, $2 big blind, $4 to go. The house cut is a $6 time charge per half hour. This is really going to be popular I’m sure. I hope to get a chance to play in it this week.

I’ve been coding lately to keep up on the latest tools. Among the things I’m using… Eclipse is a great IDE. I’m very impressed with the quality of the plugins in particular. I’ve been using plugins for Perl,Junit, Hibernate, the JFace JDBC client, and more. Also Hibernate in particular deserves some special mention because of all the cool things it does. It’s an API and an implementation that allows developers to easily persist Java objects. It’s powerful and fast.

I borrowed a Softride bike from a dealer. It’s their mid priced Softride Qualifier. It was cool of the dealer to let me demo it for several days. It definitely lives up to it’s name. The bike provides a significant improvement in ride quality over my traditional steel bike. It’s definitely a nice upgrade from my bike. It also handles a lot better. But I couldn’t really notice the supposed aerodynamic efficiencies provided by the beam bike. After this weekend I have to make a decision quickly because Wildflower is only a month away. I expect it’d take a week to get the bike built and then I’ll only have 2-3 weeks to ride my bike before I have to race. That’s cutting it pretty close. The current bikes being considered are a Cervelo P2k like Kojo’s, a Felt S-22, and now the Softride Qualifier.

The good news about being unemployed is that it looks like I’ll actually get a refund this year.

My wireless network is pissing me off. It’s giving me a lot of disconnects. My software shows that there are 3 Wi-Fi networks in range of my PC including mine. I really can’t believe that there are 3. 2 maybe, but most of my neighbors are a bit far away for my machine to detect another wireless AP.