a case of mistaken identity

oh gmail ... oh gmail

so i have found it quite interesting that i tend to get a lot of mail for other ppl in my gmail account. for mike or for mildred or matt or martha ... (my gmail account is m.lastname@gmail.com) ... among these, was a flyer for some junkmail ... so i tried to unsubscribe. i put in my email address and it told me that it didn't even have me on record (it's apparently impossible to remove someone from a list when they're not on the list to begin with). this lead me to be a bit more of a detective.

i looked at the address that the email had been sent to - it was just mlastname@gmail.com ... no dot. i found this puzzling - the dot is the defining feature of my gmail address! it's cute, it's perky and it separates my first initial from my last! this lead me to go and look at other emails that i had received for other ppl ... again, the email address entered was just mlastname@gmail.com. (weird) there was a little link to "learn more" ... so being the curiouscat that i am, i double clicked. oh how i learned!

APPARENTLY, gmail does not recognize dots. it recognizes yourname@gmail.com the same as your.name@gmail.com the same as y.o.u.r.n.a.m.e@gmail.com . since when is a dot not a character? and does this mean that ALL my gmail has been going into someone else's inbox too? if there are two almost identical email sign-ins (aside from the dot) does the email get sent to all the accounts? or is it a random lottery to figure out who gets it each time? my two concerns are now that either i don't receive all emails that are sent to me ... or more distressing - all of the emails addressed to me are also being sent to mike (with the same email address as me). it makes me wonder ... i don't get *all* that many emails for mike (it is just usually mike that i get emails for) ... so either he's not a very popular guy, he doesn't use his gmail very much or i just randomly get sent some of his gmails.

i'm ever so confused.

do i change my email address? i was almost finally switched over from my hotmail to my gmail ... i almost had everyone trained! this is a definite oversight on google's part ... not necessarily the fact that the dot does not count as a character, but more in the fact that they did not really make it known/apparent that the dot did not count as a character when i signed up for this service 2 years ago!

oh i'm bitter - bitter and distressed (although, the distress is more a product of oliver being in critical care- but that's a story for another time. i don't want to assume the worst, until that assumption has been confirmed. p.s. just so you don't get overly worried, oliver is my laptop - but again, more on that later).

p.s. after some light tapping, jiggling and other good love, oliver has turned on again! YAY! but ... for how long?

hippity hop

so exciting!

the easter bunny visited me last night. that's all well and good - he usually does (if i'm with my parents for easter ... which i almost always am. gotta put in the good quality family time, right?) so i got my sugar and spice chocolate bunny (her name is daisy ... it says so on the box - i find it a little disconcerting that my chocolate bunny has a name. it makes it seem a little wrong that i will eventually have to eat her) and my mint smoothies and socks of course (i do love my socks). it almost made up for being woken up at 9 (by my father who has decided that the most effective way to wake up slumbering children early in the morning is with a spray bottle full of water) bearable. i was walking to the kitchen to get some caffeine when i noticed it - a chocolate egg hidden on the edge of the piano. then i looked at the cabinet - another egg! it was a real live easter egg hunt! i haven't had one of those in years!

i hurriedly ran around the house trying to grab all the eggs i could - elbows up of course (i had to make sure i got more than my little cousins - it's my competitive nature). you'll be glad to learn that i won. even better, i conned the youngest (just so i don't seem completely evil - the youngest cousin is 15) out of some of her eggs - i told her i didn't get any (she apparently didn't notice the giant bulge in the pocket of my sweater *snickers*) and she felt bad and gave me some. now that's what easter's all about! the spirit of giving (to me ... that is, hehehe).

hoppy easter!

the mr. men

the other day, my co-worker and i were talking about pac-man. for some rreason, whenever i think about pac-man, i start thinking about the mr. men. do you remember the mr. men? they were funny shapes (one did look like pac-man, just with legs and arms).

i could never get enough of the mr. men. unfortunately, we only had a select few mr. men books in my school library. and to make matters worse, there was only one little miss book! it was almost a tease to open up the back of the book and see the list of all the other mr. men and little miss books that existed, but that i would never be able to get my hands on.

so for a joke, i typed in "mr. men" in google (one of my best friends - google can find *almost* anything). and up pops http://www.mrmen.com - apparently it's their 35th anniversary! they're 10 years older than me! the site is all fun and interactive stuff. there's also an area where you can meet all of the mr. men and little misses. some of them look like they might be new and were probably created after my childhood, but most look like they've been around for quite some time.

so i began going through the list of little misses and began wondering which one was i. usually you don't get such a large and thorough list to play the "which one am i" game ... like the "which friend am i" or "which sex and the city girl am i" ... so i've narrowed it down to this list:

• little miss curious - spends her life saying: how? why? who? what? where? when?
• little miss brainy - knows a lot about a lot of things
• little miss dotty - is the dottiest person you'll ever meet. definitely.
• little miss shy - if anyone at any time says anything at all to little miss shy, she blushes like a beet root
• little miss splendid - thinks a lot of herself. in fact she thinks of little else (ok, i just want to be splendid .... i don't know how much this really fits ... )
• little miss stubborn - as you can imagine, is extremely stubborn
• little miss whoops - is simply one of those people who has accidents all the time.

so how about you, which one(s) are you?