I logged into Gmail for the first time since about noon Wednesday, I saw that there was something new. THEMES! I am not sure how I feel about them really, I know that there are a few things I would like to see happen prior to these. However, most people like to make things pretty before they are fully functional yet. I know my sister is certainly that way, she is constantly changing her MySpace display picture.

Anyway, I looked at a handful of the themes, and I was undecided. The ones I looked at pretty much got a thumbs down. The one that would bring out the inner geek, Terminal, was disappointing. I could not tell which e-mails were new versus which were read due to the very slight change in greens. The others had similar issues, not enough contrast. This especially came out with the links into e-mails. The color was just too light, I cannot tell if it just was that it matched the background too closely or what. I have it on cold shower right now, but I will see howthe planets theme looks later today when it will be lighter. Planets is the theme of my personal Google page, so hopefully the theme will look decent around 10/11 am.

By the way, hello. I was on a long hiatus from blogging, I don’t have any real excuse why I didn’t this summer, I have been quite busy with school since the end of September. I have been working on a post about the election, hopefully I can get that done in the next few days.

[edit]: While I was little bummed to see that the planets theme did not change, it gets a thumbs down. Google or whoever made the theme, did not apply a new color to the active arrow. So a black arrow on a black (or dark navy) background, doesn’t work too well.

Technorati Tags: blogging, google, gmail, themes

Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.

I checked with a friend and they could log in fine, how weird is that? Is anybody else having an issue with it? I joined Facebook not too long after it launched, this is the first time I can recall not being able log in due to maintenance. Can you log in?

Some coverage about this:

• Seattle Times
• Washington Post

Technorati Tags: google, google maps, government, maps, military, military bases

inCampus is getting ready for a version 2.0 launch in just over a month, some of you have joined the band wagon and signed up! For those that haven’t I suggest that you do. inCampus should be a very large and exciting thing for people that are in college. The one thing I ask for is if you are going to sign up now, please contact me saying you did. I want to keep track of who used me to sign up. Please include what college/campus you are at.

One thing people tend to not know very widely is that if your browser’s default search engine is Google, you can just type G in your address bar, and boom you are ported to GMail. Pretty snazzy trick, huh? (I actually removed GMail bookmark from my toolbar because of this.) It’s pretty nice if you have a notifier so you don’t have to monitor a tab.

Well, for some reason starting yesterday at work, this trick doesn’t work anymore. When you go to “G”, you are directed towards a search result of g. Yesterday when I started this post, I found nothing in my feed list about this. I am quite shocked. I am also a bit bummed that something occurred which made this nice Easter egg vanish.

Technorati Tags: gmail, google

However, I will probably let it convert some of my music to mp3 once I dig through my library and find the non-mp3s. For a while I was using iTunes for that.

Technorati Tags: conversion, file conversion, zamzar

I was just brought on board a new start-up company, inCampus. It is an e-commerce site that is geared towards the college student. inCampus.com provides students the opportunity to post free classifieds to buy, sell, exchange, and rent items. inCampus.com is similar to a physical bulletin board made available for students at campuses to post information and announcements. 3,800 universities and community colleges across the nation are represented on inCampus, connecting students who are looking to buy, sell, trade or find anything – from a salsa partner to a blender. In addition to products, the Web site also allows students to find housing, books, jobs and more.

Right now, we are focusing on the Seattle area, and will be expanding very soon. If you are a student at ANY campus I would check it out. One thing I have heard as a downfall is that you have to sign up for an account to post anything. As of now the use of the account is for the ability to post ads, but that functionality will be increased shortly.

LINK: inCampus.com

Technorati Tags: inCampus, college, e-commerce, student

Say I am a well-known programmer in some language, let’s just say Eric Meyer, I may have a book or two under my belt, but I found a new trick to do. Where would I probably put my finding? My blog. Pushing out a new book for one or two things may not be worth it. But then again we have textbooks with new editions for subjects that always doesn’t have new material, rather new editions that have a few errors corrected, maybe a few new problems corrected.

This could be extrapolated to a larger audience. If you think about it everything that is ever communicated, initiated as an idea. Yes, most things have been based on something from the past.

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, jakob nielsen

Technorati Tags: second life

One year ago I bought a domain and started blogging at this sub domain.

Happy Anniversary to me.