gmail goodness

I had been waiting to sign up for Gmail ever since I heard about it earlier this month. I didn't really care what features it had, mostly I wanted to pick an email address that I really wanted (like one with my name in it), rather than one I had to think up because your previous ten choices were already taken. I went to the Gmail site, but you couldn't just register as it was still in beta stage.

Then I logged in to Blogger today, and what did I see? An offer to help test Gmail! Woo! Thank you Blogger. So I got a new email address (just my name. Kinda boring, but I didn't have any real neat ideas), and I have to say I was pretty impressed with Gmail's features. I'd heard about the 1 gig space and the 10 mb attachments, which I didn't particularly care about since my SBC/Yahoo DSL account gives me 75 megs in Yahoo, which is way more than I need. But what really impressed me were these two features: email conversations and labeling system. Email conversations group together the back-and-forth replies in one topic so that everything you and another person is under one "thread" instead of scattered all over. Kind of like an online forum thread. I remember one time wishing that email did this, so it was a pleasant surprise. The labeling system is a different way of organizing your mail. Instead of dropping messages into different folders, you group them by labels, and each message can have more than one label. [added later: When you delete a label, the messages with that label don't get deleted. Yahoo, on the other hand, requires folders to be emptied before deletion.] I guess the usefulness of this feature depends on how you sort your own mail, but all in all I like their innovations. Good job, Google.

homemade naan

I just finished making naan bread for the first time, and it was a success! Woo! Okay, it doesn't quite taste like real naan, but it has got chewy bready goodness. You'd better make it here this Saturday, Marianne, or I'm eating all of it.

Today I went and handed in my admissions application at Rio Hondo College. I'm taking Accounting 101 this summer -- as a result of reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad and its sequels. I'm too lazy to really sit down and write about the whys of it, but in short, Robert Kiyosaki inspired me to become financially literate, and taking this class will be the first step. I also turned in a volunteer application at my local Boys and Girls Club today, for a number of reasons. One, I wanted to help with a charity's fundraising to practice my sales skills. Two, it'll help me practice dealing with kids for when I have my own (not that I expect to any time soon, but I will eventually). And three, it beats sitting home and waiting for the Department of Insurance to tell me when I can pick a test date for my license. I have to admit, this move was also inspired by the Rich Dad books. Kiyosaki himself started out as a shy person who was a really bad salesman. He told this story several times throughout his books, but only in the last one I read did he say how he overcame that obstacle -- by doing fundraising phone calls for charity (and doing sales pitches at a much faster rate). I started out looking for any charity near me (Red Cross was the other close one), but chose the Boys and Girls Club because of the other challenge -- dealing with kids (if you didn't know this yet, I'm not real good with the kind that talks back). I say it's a challenge, but it's not like I'm nervous about it. Mostly I wonder about the right things to say and do when I have to resolve a conflict or something like that. Watching Dr. Phil has really been a lot of help, both in this regard and in general. I've watched him enough now that I can diagnose some problems in relationships around me (including my own), and that's pretty cool.

stuff

I know I haven't blogged in a while -- not that I don't have stuff to say, I've just been lazy (and jetlagged). I went to Taiwan for a week for my grandmother's funeral, and switching back and forth between two disparate cultures is incredibly taxing. The 14-hour plane ride didn't help, either. The first few days I was like, "god, I'm lonely and I don't want to be here away from my life." And then we settled in and my mom's friends took us sightseeing and eating lots of good food. Then we came back and I was like, "god, I'm lonely and I don't want to go back to real life." Well, I guess it's good I don't have school or a 9-to-5 j.o.b. to have to plunge back into.