inside aebrahim’s head

I decided to close the contest early. I’ve mailed out invites to:

sunilkgarg@yahoo.com
patel_arnab@yahoo.com
cya_at_hawaii@yahoo.com

Enjoy! Thanks for taking part.

See, I told you that I’d let you guys know when I had extra Gmail invites. However, because I’m feeling somewhat miserly, I’m not going to let you guys get them without doing at least a little bit of work.

So, in order to get a Gmail invite from me, you’ll have to write a short story (of at least 300 words) incorporating Firefox, a ring, a banana, an expired flight ticket, and Ralph Nader.

I have at least 3 invites to give out for those who write these short stories. Depending on the quality of entries, I may decide to give out more than 3 invites (since I have a little bit of a stockpile). Winners are determined at my discretion.

In order to submit your story, post a comment with the short story in it. If you post anonymously, you must include your email address (to which your invite will be sent if you win). If your Blogger profile does not include contact information, you also must include your email address in the comment.

Entries will close at 23:59 CDT on Sunday June 20th.

My fiancee’s Gmail account is showing 1000000MB (1TB) of space available now. Mine is still showing 1000MB (1GB). Weird. Apparently these aren’t isolated cases, as a lot of people on Orkut are posting that they’re showing 1000000MB of available space too, and many others posting that they’re still showing 1000MB. I wonder if this is just a temporary glitch in the Gmail system, or Google is trying something new.

As far as I can tell, there is no relationship between the way that the invite was received (from Google employee or via other Gmail user) and whether or not the account shows 1000000MB of available space. Account usage also doesn’t appear to be a factor. As far as I can tell, it’s completely random.

Some genius has set up a page where you can check if your preferred Gmail username is still available. This is almost certainly against the ToS of Gmail, but it’s cool nonetheless. Check it out while you still can!

Gmail has decided to grant more invites to some of its initial testers on the occasion of Mother’s Day. While it’s not 100% clear who this comprises of, I think that it probably comprises of those who were invited directly by a Google employee, rather than those invited by Blogger.com or by second-tier Gmail users.

So I got one of these invites today, and am posting a few screenshots of what it looked like:

In case you’re wondering, since taking these screenshots I’ve already given out the invite. So I don’t have any more at the moment.

I see that a lot of people are trying to reset my password on Gmail (since I keep on getting emails about it). I guess I must have picked up a highly desirable username. In any case, if you’re trying this, you may as well not bother. I’ve taken good care to write a decent question, with a completely un-guessable or un-find-out-able answer.

Google should start adding the IPs of the user who generates the password reset email to the emails they send out. That way at least I have a chance of knowing which losers are doing this…

A picture speaks a thousand words … even a doctored one :). This picture no longer surprises me after reading some of the emails I’ve gotten and after reading the Gmail Community forums at Orkut.

Thanks to Chris Hintz for sending that in.

Also, to those of you who are still emailing me for Gmail invites and to whom I have not replied: I don’t have any more Gmail invites. When I get them, I’m likely to get just two, and I already have some friends in line. So unless I get like more than 20 invites or something somehow, I’m not going to be giving them out to random people who email me. If I do get more invites than I know what to do with, my blog readers will be the first people to know about it.

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

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.