So, for almost 5 hours, my “main” gmail account has been unavailable, but other accounts are fine.I did a little bit of web searching and found some people saying this has happened for days at a time…… Let this be a lesson to you kiddos: never trust anything you don’t own, and certainly don’t trust the stuff you don’t even pay for!All that aside: anyone got a contact at Google that wants to sort this out for me?

In the last 24 hours, I’ve received at least three distinct offers (via three different forms of communication) from Vonage to get in on their IPO, an offer being made to existing customers who meet a certain set of criteria. While this certainly sounded tempting when I got the first notification via e-mail yesterday, especially to someone who was investing in the market “back the the day” when “tech IPO” meant “gravy train to the bahamas,” by the time I got my second notification in the PO Box this morning, I started scratching my head.

…otherwise they’ll just keep on stealing, and that couldn’t possibly be good for them or their general karma, could it?I’m referring to the add/drop scheme, described in great detail by Bob Parsons, CEO and Founder of GoDaddy. In a nutshell, folks “in the know” can register domain names (by paying their fee), sit on them for 5 days (earning search engine affiliate revenue all the while), then cancel the registration and get their money back.

My friend, Ron Marks, posted a great note in his blog that really highlights the fact that, as a society, we’re way too over protective and litigious than we used to be (and yes, obviously the two go hand-in-hand)…. protect them TOO much, though, and I truly believe you actually wind up *hurting* them, and in a very big way.

this thing is bigger than all of us. We all need to take a big step back and accept that the pie is going to get sliced up, the direction is going to be decided by everyone involved, and some things may happen that piss some of us off…. Hell, The Mac Observer shows up, too, and we throw our own kick-ass party, but that doesn’t mean we don’t invite the folks from Macworld to it.

The RIAA and the MPAA are frantically trying to thwart anything that gets in the way of their stodgy old business model…. heck, it’s a mafia.In between your downloads on bittorrent, Kazaa, and Gnutella, go tell ‘em we’ll break their kneecaps if they try anything like this again…

With all the flack we give them, it’s not the RIAA that’s the problem. They’ve mostly lost the battle (enough to where the consumer still has *some* choice, anyway). It’s the MPAA that’s the huge problem. They’ve successfully (and, for the most part, quietly) squashed hundreds (if not thousands) of products [...]

Well if this just doesn’t say it all. The band, “Cruisebox”, named after their word for the iPod, has a tune called, “On a Podcast”. Yeah, the lyrics are “explicit,” but so long as that doesn’t bother to you, it’s about the best summation of what podcasting is (and isn’t), all rolled up [...]

I feel like I need a shower. I just finished going through my spam folder on Gmail. It got a little large because, well, I just moved and things have been busy. It’s been about 10 days since I cleaned through it, and had about 1200 messages to scan for “real” mail. [...]

Train your spouse on your alarm clock: don’t let technology ruin your marriage