A typical evening in my house consists of me shifting between the T.V., kitchen and my computer (in my room) while Scroop fidgets on the Internet. The ambient noise is that of Scroop's constant and insistent utterings of amazement and jocularity, and I swear he probably does it even when I'm not around. The first few months living here had me running to the technology room at every exclamation, but now it's merged with the character of the house itself to something my subconcious filters out.

Nevertheless, a couple of nights ago I found myself intreagued by the festive whooping and cheering coming from Scroop's room, and couldn't help investigating...

PAUL yells from his computer, not willing to make the investment of going to Scroop's room

Paul What are you going on about?

SCROOP, ever the performer, enjoys drawing out the expectation

Scroop Oh man! Yippee!

Paul ...

Scroop Gmail just got multiple email address management!

Paul Oh sweet!

PAUL quickly visits gmail to check out this new functionality

Scroop Yeah, isn't it!? Now I can respond to confirmation emails in gmail and can send work emails from my work address!

Paul Wow! This rocks! And they've added a delete button!

SCROOP abruptly stops dancing...

Scroop Pfft. There was a key sequence before, so it was easy enough.

Paul Hey fuck you man! You browse with your mouse - a delete button was called for.

SCROOP turns and walks back to his room

Scroop Whatever.

Our house is a constant stormfront of joyous excitement and heated arguments.

Some people look at an email like an sms message. It's useful but transient. Read, reply, delete, do a little dance. I keep pretty much every email that gets sent to me... I have these hoarding instincts that make me protect my communications like little tasty chocolate treats with bits of honeycomb in them. I still have my emails archived from when I first started work. Perhaps even when I first started using email.

I see these communications as a kind of alternate diary. No matter how impassionate or automated a message may be (other than SPAM of course) they capture a meme of what was going on in that particular moment of your life. While this hasn't proven useful to me yet, I'm holding out against the day...

I just deleted this whole rant about how none of my email clients were providing what I was looking for and how gmail offers this new... well, I found myself about to say something like paradigm and that really stopped me short. That would make me some kind of marketing person and that just will not do. So I'll cut a long story short here and just say that I'm trying to get all my emails redirected through gmail, for various (usability) reasons [1].

Skeptic that I am though, I must point out that there have been privacy concerns with the service. Although Google try to asuage everyone's fears, they are getting their profits by having bots scan your emails for key words to create a profile for individually targeted adverts. You gotta keep a constant eye out for sneaky bastards...

I just want to spread the love. So to that end I have 6 accounts to give out, so if anyone wants one, email me at cechner /at/ gmail /dot/ com. You want one. You need it. Until recently these things were traded for impressive sums of money (and other things) in what became a kind of black market. Google added clauses to the licence restricting the sale of accounts for money or for-profit ventures, and eventually just decided to flood the market with accounts, dropping the bottom out of the gmail trading business altogether.

[1] For posterity, the coolest features of gmail (that come to mind) are:
- No stupid 'folders' that you have to come up with neat filters to push your mail into. Folders are a pain in the ass to manage and search.
- Emphasis on email archiving. You don't just read-delete-read-delete.
- Conversations. The way gmail handles threads of conversations (email backing and forthing with the same subject line) is really intuitive and tidy.
- Sweet key bindings that allow you to navigate without using the mouse.
- Of course, the 1 Gig disk space is also sweet. And by sweet I mean totally sweet.

My name is Paul, and I am a technology addict.

I have come to this realisation over the last year or so, and I find it extremely perturbing. I used to pride myself on my utilitarian independence, but somewhere along the way I developed an insidious technological dependency.

This weekend I was dismayed to discover that I'd left my mobile phone recharger at work. The full repercussions of not having a functioning mobile may not be immediately apparent, but they quickly become obvious when such a situation arises.

I completely take for granted the fact that I can immediately contact, or be immediately contacted by the people in my social circle. I actually harangued Schmee until he got one for himself because the fact that he didn't have one was a discordant note in my personal sense of harmony.

This evil device has me at its mercy. It is some Machiavellian puppet master, and I the soulless marionette, dancing to the monophonic notes of its somber cadence. When I don't have a functioning mobile in my possession I get sweaty palms worrying about my car breaking down, or wondering if someone is right now trying to contact me for some important reason. Being dependent on a piece of machinery really emasculating.

It will be the death of me, I can see. It rings at exactly the wrong moments - usually when I'm about to negotiate a nasty bit of traffic, forcing me to scramble around in my jeans, groin in the air and right leg as straight as possible so I can squeeze it out of my pocket. I must do this because I cannot leave its siren song unanswered.