I could have gotten a GMail account a long time ago. Being a nerdly person myself, I have a handful of nerdly friends who started using GMail back when it first came out. They offered me invites right, left, and centre, and every time I would refuse. I was, after all, quite content with my deirdrakiai.com e-mail address kindly provided by Dreamhost.

Now, GMail is ubiquitous. You can get invites from anywhere, almost defeating the purpose of a small elitist beta-test in the first place. (Some say they might just do the invites forever, to track down spam and that sort of thing.) And, when everyone’s doing something, I tend to try and stay away from it, being the true non-conformist I am. (For example, I developed severe allergies to Hotmail around 1999 or so, and haven’t touched it since.) Therefore, you’d think that I’d be strong enough to resist the GMail hype. Well… you’d be wrong. I caved into the pressure last night.

Not only is GMail way better than Squirrelmail, the interface I was using to access deirdrakiai.com’s webmail, it’s even better than Mozilla Thunderbird as well. It’s fast. It’s clean. (Even more so than fastmail.fm, the last free e-mail provider I ever used, to boot!) And it’s ever-so-much easier to organize. For once, the masses are right, and I’m pleasantly surprised.

Alas, due to the ubiquity of GMail, I couldn’t get an e-mail address that was better than my current one. “squinky” and “deirdra” were taken, and they wouldn’t let me use “dkiai” because it was too short. I finally settled on “callmesquinky”, which I had used for my Yahoo account many years ago, in reference to the actual Monkey Island line. Yes, I could have used “deirdrakiai” or “deirdra.kiai”, but my full name only looks good AFTER the @ sign. I have a weird sense of aesthetics, hmm?

What I did, therefore, was have all of my deirdrakiai.com addresses redirect to the GMail account, and have the GMail account use “me at deirdrakiai.com” as the From field by default. No one’s ever going to notice the difference. *evil grin*