Okay, okay, my bad. Rachel's birthday was Saturday, May first, May Day, Beltane, whatever you want to call it.

We had friends over and had a wonderful time in our backyard, our sanctuary, our hummingbird paradise. Rachel pulled off a wonderful party (I helped a little) and everyone had a great time. Rachel even went above and beyond and took some absolutely beautiful portraits of the guests as we spent hours talking, watching the hummingbirds scurry, the light fade, and the glow of food and fun continue on after bringing the party inside. Six hours never passed so quickly.

Happy birthday, Rachel! May this year be your best yet, and may you bask in the glow of all those who love you as I do. Okay, well not as I do but, you know, love you lots, too.

If it's Tuesday, it must be Randompixel! This week we follow Bob, from Berkeley to Stanford to parts unknown.

For those of you in the SF Bay area, watch out for a piece on Randompixel in tomorrow's San Jose Mercury News! I can't wait, and I'll post the link to the online version when I see it.

To those who have been sending me their beta-testing pedigrees, to those who have lamented their awful experiences with Hotmail and their desire to switch, to those who found this site on a web search for 'gmail invites', to those who simply sent email saying 'gimmie!' To those literally hundreds of strangers who have been asking me for beta Gmail accounts, I'm really sorry to disappoint, but I'm not in a position to give Gmail accounts to everyone who asks right now...

The many stages of my cool day (elapsed time: 15 minutes):

• My friend (and my best friend's sweetie) Paul got offered a job here at Google!
• The Gmail team had a small a one month anniversary (mensiversary) party!
• Al Gore showed up at the end to say 'hi'!
• I got to shake his hand!
• I gave him a Randompixel camera!
• He took a picture of Sergey and handed it to him!
• Sergey asked me, "You're a part of this Randompixel thing? I saw that and it looks neat"!

Oh yeah, and there was cake. :-)

A bunch of us on the team had watch lists for 'gmail' on Ebay, and were starting to get disappointed that nobody dared give up their invitation. Now that second-order invitations (invitees are getting invitations of their own) it was inevitable. Yesterday, people started auctioning Gmail invitations on Ebay.

Any guesses on what the first one will go for?

It's finally happened.

I want Kerry to win more than anything, which is why the following is so frustrating: A few weeks ago I got my first ever piece of real, physical political correspondence from the Kerry campaign. The first sentence reads, "All our hard work and determination -- all the energy and enthusiasm that you and so many other dedicated people have brought to our campaign -- are finally paying off."

Are?! Admittedly, this is a difficult sentence, since 'all our pennies are shiny' but in that case, 'our pennies' is plural. In the above case, "our hard work and determination" is singular, and the modifier 'all' doesn't group together many disparate items, but rather refers to the grand sum of a single item, as in 'all our work was for naught,' as opposed to 'all our work were for naught.'

Ugh. I hope part of my campaign contribution goes to a proofreader. In a battle like the one running for the next six months, it's stupid to miss points for something like this.

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Update: Thanks to Andrew, for convincing me that the letter was correct after all. Hard work and determination are two individual things, so 'all' groups them together, making the total plural.

Nevermind!

In a remarkable feat of sticktoitiveness, today I post Ammy to Randompixel:

Hah. and the real Ammy didn't think I could do it. :-P

It's so frustrating when webloggers ask questions but don't facilitate a way for users to provide the answer. Today's example compliments of Dave:

Dave Winer: "Google knows I'm in the Netherlands. This is irritating. I may be in the Netherlands, but I don't speak Dutch. How do I tell it to stop being so smart and just give me Google-As-Usual for a guy from the US who likes the Mets."

Dave's blog doesn't support reader comments and doesn't appear to contain his email address. A feedback-email page (three clicks away, it appears) to contact the Blog author yields a 'relaying denied' failure after I tried to submit.

Dave, I hope you get this. In answer to your question, you click on the link that says "Google.com in English".

Nearly six years in the making, today marks the debut of Randompixel!

For those of you who haven't heard about the project before, Randompixel is a collection of disposable cameras, each swaddled in stickers instructing the weilder to take some pictures, then hand the camera off to someone else, a stranger, a friend, anyone. They take pictures, hand it off, and so on.

When the camera's full, they drop it in a mailbox and it makes its way back to me, where I get it developed and scanned, then post it for all the web to see.

Today the first camera, 'Emily' is posted, journalling a trip from Berkeley to the very corner of the nation. new cameras will be posted every Tuesday which means, among other things, that I need to gear up and ship out a bunch more cameras soon, because I only have enough returned cameras for a few months worth of galleries.

There's still a lot more to be done to the Randompixel site, but I wanted to get a camera up there and learn from the experience. I hope you enjoy it, and spread the word!