This one is for Wendy Lin.


There is a Calvin & Hobbes story in which Calvin get's completely obsessed with a cap with a rotor on top of it, called "beanies". All he has to do to get it is to collect something like 5 empty boxes of his special cereals with chocolatte, which he does in no time, driving Hobbes sick just by watching it. Most of the rest of the story is he waiting for the so much desired beanies to come by mail, in memorable scenes such as his daydreaming at school about flying with the beanies, with a silly and cute smile in his face. Every day he arrives at home completely hyper with a ear to ear smile asking for confirmation on his beanies arrival. When, weeks after, he finally gets depressed and gets home saying he doesn't want to hear about beanies, his mother has the box for him :-). The story goes on with him breaking his beanies, his father fixing them for him, and finally, his discovery that the beanies don't actually fly, which ends up with him putting the whole obsession aside and going for his regular business with running around with Hobbes playing calvinball.

Well, I got sort of like that with Gmail :-). I had had to chose between usernames at Gmail, spent a whole night looking up cool people's emails, such as Steve Jobs steve@mac.com and Linus Torvalds torvalds@transmeta.com, but in the end, having no tonepti@gmail.com left to use, I failed miserably and did a tonetpipoteco@gmail.com. I do believe in the format, and use it with yahoo.com.br, but come on, where is the flair of being earlier in the Gmail game, and having all those user names open yet to use? In Yahoo everything was already taken, tonetpi, tpoteco, poteco, spharion, I arrived late so it was ok to be spharion3 or tonetpipoteco. But in Gmail? Well, soon my sister dignosed me with having the beanies syndrome, which helped me to cool down a bit and realize my tantrum was not that bizarre. Well, at least not to me, if Calvin has it, the silly it is, I understand me having it. I've never grown up much since I was, say, 13, and I'm getting used to enter my 30's that way.

But there was nothing to do, and I found myself between having to rationalize my obsession away, or think a way to just give in to it and get another Gmail ID. I tried to act cool, but here and there I would Google search for an invitation, Gnutella search, and so on... I would never ask for a new one in the list where I got it, too silly. That was when I found Gmail Swap. It sounded cool and silly at the same time, the type of thing people like me would be in. You go there and offer something you have to swap for a Gmail invitation. They have a quite convincing justification for the thing:

Why the rush?

For lots of people, there's no rush; they're happy with their email
service. Some of us, however, are over-eager for Gmail's ease and
elegance. Furthermore, we want to snag a good email address
before the barbarians make it through the gates. Why settle for g_r_a_m_o_p_43fp@gmail.com
when you could sneak in early and nab gramophone@gmail.com?

So, I offered the little I had on the net: An entry on my (completely obscure) blog, and an invitation to Orkut (though most people now would have easy access to it, at least it would mean an extra legitimate friend). There are so many swap offers, and they only show the last 20 or something, so for a very short while my offer was visible, and got me two answers. One didn't contact again, but the other is Wendy Lin, who got her invitation for Orkut and this sorry excuse for a blog entry :-) I hope to know her better, I bet she is a very nice person. Anyway, I owe her my shiny new Gmail account.

Now I think I'll try my talents to get one for my ex-girlfriend :-). She is still using her old NYU account, with meager 50 mega or something, and she used up all the space since I keep getting automated messages about them not being able to deliver my mails to her, which is annoying. Yeah, I can't let go of ex-girlfriends, just like any other beanies. Note how she is still in my Yahoo Profile even though we've been separated for a year and a half, and been living as
far from each other as Israel and Brazil for that last half year
period. Anyway, isn't she cute?