inside aebrahim’s head

Apparently, someone thinks so. Check it out! Amazing what people will spend money on these days.

So the United States is going to pull out of Falluja, and leave its protection to the ‘Falluja Protection Army’, comprised of Iraqis. What this effectively means is that the United States thinks it has no prospects of successfully controlling the city, so instead, they’re just going to cut and run and let the locals deal with the mayhem they created instead.

I guess the Bush administration is at least smarter than the Vietnam-era administrations, in that they know when they’ve lost and when to pack up and run away. Having said that, I still think its amusing that the most powerful nation in the world is having such huge problems maintaining security in Iraq. Cakewalk indeed. God forbid, should Bush be re-elected (please no!), at least he’ll think twice before trying to flex America’s muscle elsewhere in the Middle East. Bush and the brain behind him (Rumsfeld) certainly get failing grades for their performance in Iraq. Pretty sub-par, guys. Don’t you think?

Well it was bound to happen sooner or later. I’m just surprised it didn’t happen sooner. There are Gmail invites available on eBay. If you’re really desperate, go and check them out. I just can’t believe that some idiots are trying to have one week auctions on these. These are 24 hour auction material, if even that. In a week these things will probably be worthless (not that they’re worth paying for right now when they’re so readily available for free).

Anyway, here’s the link if you feel like checking them out.

I just read in a BBC article that Google is about to float its shares on either the NYSE or Nasdaq in an IPO! So the rumours have finally been confirmed. I must give these guys my compliments for creating the hugest and most amazing hype imaginable around the time of their IPO. Sheer genius.

Wow, the first four of the Gmail accounts I signed up for (mine, my fiancee’s and my two brothers’) just each got two invites available to send to others! Because I still hadn’t turned them over to them yet, I had 8 invites I could give out to people. So, now all 12 people in my extended family have Gmail accounts with the optimal username (either firstname@gmail.com, or if that was too short, then firstname.lastname@gmail.com), plus a second account for me for good measure. For now I’m all out of invites, and am going to turn the accounts over to each of their respective owners soon. So from now on I’m only going to ever have two accounts’ worth of invites.

When I get the next round of invites I’m going to start inviting my friends on campus and other people I know who I think would enjoy having a Gmail account. If I’ve never heard from you before, please don’t email me asking for a Gmail account. I’m not going to have enough invites to satisfy all of you plus all the people I know. If that situation changes, and Gmail gives me more invites than I know what to do with, I’ll post here and let people know they can get in touch with me for an invite. This means that if you email me right now asking for an invite, and I have no idea who you are, your email will most likely be ignored. Unlike the Google/Blogger employees who get hundreds of invitations to give out per round, I do not, and am therefore unable to give them out as liberally as I’d like.

If you do know me, or we’ve spoken before in some non-Gmail context, feel free to drop me a line and let me know that you’d like an account. That way I won’t forget about you when I think about who to give out my next round of invitations to.

Due to some intense procrastination tonight, I only just finished my six page paper, which should not have taken anywhere near this long. In the end, I decided to unplug my ethernet cable while working to avoid distractions. Anyway, now I’m going to sleep for four hours. Then I’ll wake up and turn this thing in.

Unbelieveable. Just got another Gmail invite. This one just created an account for my mother, who is currently battling it out with Hotmail, where she has a 10MB account that costs about $20/year, and is still way too small for her. Hopefully she won’t mind migrating over to Gmail, which is clearly superior to Hotmail. firstname@gmail.com again!

I think I’ll post a little bit about the Gmail interface, which is pretty sweet. First of all, here’s a screenshot of a random conversation I was having with a friend (who also happens to use Gmail, but it would work with anyone else the same way, even if they weren’t):

So lets go over a few things. First of all you’ll notice that the conversation is in a threaded format, which is different from the traditional way of organising things in folders. In Gmail there are no folders. Everything is organised by thread (”conversation” in Gmail speak) and by label. Basically, the entire conversation shows up on screen, in expandable format. If I click any of the message titles, that email will expand inline. If I hit reply, a reply box will be appended at the bottom of the same window (as can be seen). The interface is pretty slick, probably the best I’ve seen out of all the webmail interfaces.

Another thing you’ll notice is the complete lack of graphics, apart from the Gmail logo and a few spacer images and the star. There are no popup or popunder ads, and there are no graphical ads at all, actually. This makes Gmail ideal for modem users who are sick of waiting for sites like Hotmail to load their numerous ads. Because of the way the interface is set up, you’ll find yourself not having to load too many pages, and the pages load very quickly because they are so small. So yeah, for modem users this is a great thing. I wish more web companies would pick up on the simple-yet-functional design ideal, instead of the lets-bomard-users-with-pretty-graphics-so-they-think-we’re-cool design ideal.

At one point I was considering doing a more detailed review of Gmail, but firstly, I’m too lazy to do that, and secondly, countless people have already done the honours, so why duplicate their effort? So instead, I just made a screenshot and wrote a little bit of stuff about Gmail. If you want to find out more about Gmail, I suggest you use Google (see a theme here?) and do a search. I’ll let you be creative and figure out the search terms for yourselves.

Anyway, I should probably get back to what I should be doing, which is writing a paper on what China’s foreign policy will look like in the year 2020. Isn’t that fun?

Fourth Gmail invite is here, which goes to my other brother! Also firstname@gmail.com :).

I really think that Firefox is now ready for primetime. I’m starting my push to get certain groups of people using it.