So today Mike was kind enough to use one of his allotted invites into the Gmail beta on me, and I responded without haste of course. I couldn't however quickly sign-up for an account because I took much time deliberating on what my username (or in other words, what my new Gmail e-mail address) would be.

I really wanted to get erik@gmail.com, or e@gmail.com. I had also pre-considered eg@gmail.com, epg@gmail.com. But non of these were considered valid address because Google requires usernames to be between 6 and 30 characters long. I couldn't even get erikg@gmail.com. So then I accepted that I would have to use a hyphen and I tried erik-g@hotmail.com. Oh but no, that didn't work because google.com only allows letters, numbers, and periods. So OK, I tried erik.g@google.com, and I got the error that it was too short.

I originally thought that this might be some type of error in the validation, and it wasn't correctly counting the period as a character. But there was nothing I could do, so I went on and started playing with joke name accounts. Here are some of the results:

Available:

• between6and30characterslong
• butthead
• bigdump
• georgew
• bobdole
• babysgotback
• nintendo

Not available:

• atari2600
• billgates
• boobies

In the end I decided that nintendo was a coolio username and that was my choice. So all you people out there feel free to e-mail me.

Since using my Gmail account I have discovered a little more about the periods in the account names and why erik.g didn't register as 6 characters long. The periods are completely ignored by the Gmail system. You can send me e-mails at nintendo or nin.ten.do or even nin...ten.....do - it doesn't matter, I will get them all.

Gmail is cool... I wish it had a built in option to suck out a Hotmail account and import all the messages directly into Gmail.