Randomn3ss

More than three years ago I got a Gmail account for no other reason than it was the cool thing to do. Gmail was in beta, invite only and fairly exclusive. The first month that invites started to be sent out, each user would get five to give to friends and family. I’m not kidding when I tell you that people bought and sold these invites for upwards of $100 and a secondary market started on eBay selling already registered Gmail email addresses of famous peoples names, companies and single letter addresses. It was nuts. I’ll also admit to selling a few invites myself and no, I don’t feel guilty for it. I didn’t use the email address for more than a year, I just sat on it. I wanted to make sure I got the one I have before someone else did and figured I could always use it as a backup if needed.

Since 2000 I have been using email hosted with my own website, mikepanic.com and had very few issues with it. I enjoyed using Outlook and had nearly no spam issues. This changed about two years ago. After using the same email address for nearly 6 years, the spam started to pour in. Clearly I had signed up for something somewhere that sold my email address or, more than likely, spam bots captured my email address which was publicly shown on my website and started to use it. There is virtually no way to combat spam outside of shutting down an email account. What is out of control? Try 600+ spam messages a day. Try not logging into your email for 9 months and seeing 17,000 new messages! This is when I started to use Gmail on a regular basis.

After a painful week or so of going through and switching over various forums, online bill paying and bank account sites to my new Gmail address, confirming them all and getting it roughly squared away, I all but stopped logging into Outlook and figured I’d deal with the spam later. Gmail it was, and web based too!

Going web based was pretty normal to me, no real issues there, I lost a few minor things in Outlook that I liked, but overall I’m happy, really happy with how Gmail works and have been for the last two years now.

About two months ago I logged into Gmail and saw something I hadn’t seen in a long time, waiting emails in the spam folder. Now don’t get me wrong, Gmail isn’t perfect, there have been a handful of false-positives going in there, but it only happened once ever few months. Over the period of the next few weeks a few more came in and a few more and a few more. It’s not overwhelming yet, as seen here in the screen grab from this week, but it does make me wonder about those sites I give my email address too.

I have been and continue to be really cautious of who I give my email address to, I’ve gone as far as setting up forwarders for different websites I own that filter back to Gmail and can kill them off if they start to become abused. What market is really available anymore for spam email? Do people still fall for the false Paypal and bogus credit card phishing scams?

The iPhone just keeps getting better. I updated my phone just two days ago. This update has been the biggest one since September.

The new features on the phone are even more exciting than the new season of American Idol!

I can now rearrange the icons on the homepage. They do a cute little jig on the screen when you hold an icon down for a second. Also, I can make “web clips” enabling me to add a website onto the main page.

Google Maps now accesses my location by cell phone towers and wireless internet. It pinpoints your location on the map which you can save. There is also a new feature to view the map in a hybrid function. This means the map shows a satellite and street name perspective. Real time traffic is a fantastic feature added as well.

The strangest new function that has come to Apple is iTunes movie rental. You are able to do this via computer or iPhone. I don’t understand why anyone would want to watch anything on a such a small screen. I can hardly make out the videos on YouTube. In anycase, you are able to rent it through iTunes. The rental will download onto your phone with an expiration date when you sync it.

The best thing about the January ‘08 iPhone update is multiple person text messaging. I can finally send one text message to a ton of people. This would have been handy on New Year’s when I had to send about a million different text messages to a million different people.

I am now waiting for a copy and paste function.

I honestly can still say this phone treats me well and I have no regrets still. I can’t wait for the next update!

After more than thirty minutes of seeing errors while trying to send a message in Gmail, whatever was ailing the server seems to have been fixed. Being that Gmail is still beta, it makes me reflect on an earlier article, what if Gmail shuts down. I rely on Gmail probably more than I should, but for some reason I really trust Google. In the grand scheme of things, these 30 minutes of downtime is probably less than one tenth of one percent of total downtime since the service was launched. I’m just happy it is back.

As of about 10:50am EST, Google’s web based email Gmail is dead is not responding. What makes it worse is that Google Groups are giving a 500 Internal Server Error when trying to view them. It took more than 10 minutes to get my email to load properly, trying to send a message has resulted in this cryptic message.

Searching Google for this term has proved all but useless, since the first 10 pages of results are links to Google Groups pages, which are dead as well. If someone kicked the plug out of the wall that runs the Gmail & Groups servers, please plug it back in.

AIM, also known as AOL Instant messenger, is still my instant message software of choice; I’ve been using it for what seems like forever and have several hundred contacts in it. Google’s Gmail has a chat feature built in, no need to download software, so this works in a pinch, but only if the person you are talking to has Gmail and is logged into their email account and / or has a chat client that supports Google Talk. But what if you want to talk to someone on AIM but don’t have the client software installed on the computer you are sitting at, say at work, because your network nazi has prevented you from installing time wasting software.

Don’t fear! Google has integrated AIM into their Chat program, allowing you to login to your Gmail account and contact people on your AIM buddy list. No software to download, it just works. They do suggest you have Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2 installed in order to get all the features and functions to work properly, skip IE and go for Firefox.

So after what I thought was a clever message to the masses regarding the demise of OiNK turns out to be a subtle hint for a new, member only, invite only bittorrent tracking site. Waffles.fm is, from what I understand, very similar to how OiNK was run, only they were never quite as big and are now feeling the strain on their servers as their membership grows.

From what I’ve read around the blogsphere, they are a bit more strict as well, which is fine, I never had many problems with OiNK and honestly, I’ve been able to find almost everything I need on Demonoid as of late. That said, I am interested in an invite, so if anyone has one to share, or wants to trade a Demonoid invite, please use the contact form to get a hold of me, I’ll gladly show you my ratio on Demonoid.

Even with invite only, closed membership, free to use private tracking sites, more than a half dozen other torrent trackers have popped up to fill the void that OiNK has left. All have been open to the public and all are gaining in popularity. This is not the end of torrent tracking site, and as mentioned before, searching Google will often lead you to just about anything you are looking for.

Just two weeks after Google hit $600 per share, they’ve surpassed the $700 per share barrier, and seem to keep on moving. I’m kicking myself for not buying at $400 per share, but I have nowhere near enough money to purchase enough shares to make it worth it. A stock split has got to happen at some point soon though.

More detailed information available at the Associated Press, which is ironically hosted by Google.

The stock market is not my thing, although I’d like to sound cool and say I have a diversified portfolio, sadly I don’t. What I do spend a few minutes a week on is checking what stocks are hot and what stocks aren’t. Why bother if I don’t have the money to invest right now? One day, I will have money and knowing the history of companies helps aid in decisions on who to invest in. One stock that has been an anomaly has been Google. Their stock, which was an IPO free-for all and never looked down. About this time last year a co-worker and I were discussing the GOOG stock price crossing over the $400 per share mark.

Monday October 8th at 9:48 in the morning Google’s stock hit $600.28, a 50% growth in a 12 month span, an amazing feat, even a more amazing feat considering this is not a penny stock and taking into account Google’s very publicized 1.3 billion dollar purchase of YouTube, a company that never even turned a profit.

Closing time on Friday the 12th had the stock at $637.39, it was $4 higher earlier in the day, but this is still an amazing growth.  Personally, I don’t own any of this stock, I thought about buying four share in hopes that it would split last week when it was at $600, but that is $2,400 plus broker fees, as of this week it would have only made me about $140, not a great return on such a large investment, but not a bad one either.  Where is the limit with Google though?

Out of curiosity, I wanted to find out what the highest price stock on the market was here in the US, Google doesn’t even come close.  Berkshire Hathaway Inc. closed Friday at $127,100, up $1,600!  NUTS.

Now that I have had my iPhone since it came out at the end of June it is time for my long awaited review.

I’ve had a plethora of cell phones and cell phone providers. Ranging from Verizon to Virgin Mobile to the Sidekick III to an old school LG phone. Hands down the iPhone is the best.

Of course there are cons to having the iPhone. For starters, I had to change my phone number again. If you know me, you will know this is about the 100th time I’ve changed my number. There are no games on the iPhone, no audio recorder (or video recorder) and you must use only the iPhone ringtones. Also, there is not a copy and paste feature on the iPhone’s internet (which my Sidekick had). Lastly, the alarm clock on the phone has failed to wake me up on more than one occasion.

I believe the price and service provider (not for George Hotz who hacked the iPhone to work with any cell phone provider) is a con to most people. In my opinion, it is well worth it. In the long run, I will be saving money month to month compared to being with T-Mobile. I got lucky because I joined a family plan rather than being on my own. Obviously not everyone has this option. These are the only few problems I have found with the phone, which are not that big of a deal to me.

The things I love about the iPhone are the camera, having tons of music without having to carry a separate MP3 player, amazing internet and its graphics. I throughly enjoy the fact that I can scroll through my music with my fingertips (same goes for my photos). The photos actually turn out pretty extraordinary on my laptop. I can also use my wireless internet on my iPhone whenever I am home. The most impressive thing of all is Google Maps on my phone. I am new to Seattle and often find myself in need of directions. I can also search for restaurants, grocery, music and clothing stores on Google Maps. I showed off Google Maps to my cousins by searching for their houses using satellite mode. They thought looking at an aerial view of their house on a phone was the coolest thing since Bratz.

I am stoked that the iPhone has been hacked recently. I will be trying out the hacks in order to load games and my own ringtones onto my phone. (I knew the hacks were going to happen someday so the drawbacks didn’t seem so bad.)

All in all, I don’t see how anybody wouldn’t love the iPhone. It is geared towards all ages for all different lifestyles.

For more then seven years now I have been using email hosted through one of my domain names, if not several. I made the move for several reasons, one of which was when I started photography on a more serious level; having a Hotmail account didn’t seem so professional. I enjoyed a spam free life for several years as a result and have loved the ability to use Outlook and custom scripts.

About two years ago is when the spam started to get really out of hand for me, today I receive upwards of 1500 messages daily and my web hosts says they are doing everything they can. While I doubt they are really doing everything, I’ve had the need to be more mobile with my email. Dealing with that much spam through a web based interface sucks, so I got a Gmail invite shortly after it was announced. Back then, one could actually sell invites to Gmail, strange, I know.

In any event, I mostly wanted it so I could get the email address of my choice and not stick a bunch of numbers or underscores or dumb stuff under it. For more then a year, it sat idle; I had no use for it. I dealt with the spam, tried to run custom scripts, and just got overwhelmed. After not checking my email for about 4 months I logged in to see close to 70,000 emails download from my server. That’s it, I was done, and it was my breaking point.

During this time I also needed a way to get a hold of people outside of social networking sites and text messages, in addition to paying bills online and getting a few email newsletters I truly enjoy. This is where Gmail came to save the day.

While I tend not to jump on the bandwagon when new products and services come out, this is one I should have jumped on earlier. I love the ability to be back to a web based email, checking at work, forwarding to phone, etc. I could run it through Thunderbird, my favorite mail application now, however I don’t. In a previous article, I’ve mentioned my love for a Firefox add-on that allows me to upload files to my Gmail account, comes in very handy as a personal server.

My concern now is that Gmail is still beta. Google has a long running habit of keeping products in beta forever. Blogger took several years before it was a final release and Google very rarely dumps products that have passed alpha and made it to beta, but they could.

Millions of us are now addicted to Gmail, what if it ups and closes tomorrow? What if it goes to a fee based service? I wouldn’t pay for it, I already pay for my own domains and web hosting, but I like Gmail, so maybe I would. Not having control over the final outcome makes me a bit weary.

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