i take back what i said about not being able to see images in emails sent to my gmail account—just a beta user blunder on my behalf. the gmail team directed me to a link that i didn’t see: apparently, as a default they never load up images. i have to explicitly click on a link that says “display external images” in order to properly view an image-filled email. here’s a screenshot of the email conversation UI that i like so much:

extremely fun weekend. friday, finally saw eternal sunshine of the spotless mind with brendan. more of a love story than i expected. charming. i liked it. saturday, spent all day prepping for my housewarming fiesta which was a blast. i had a huge variety of friends show up, in total maybe 50, 60 people or so. there was a lot of people meeting new people, music, salsa dancing, shisha, shots of absinthe and overall good times. thanks to everyone who was able to make it! i had a blast just seeing some good friends that i hadn’t seen in ages–liz and joelle particularly come to mind. way too much time…

i had a fun girls night out last night. dinner was with phoebe, jeanette, sri, sandra & aileen at perche’no where we ate yummy italian food. then we walked over to the oliver mccaw hall where susan joined us to see the pacific northwest ballet’s version of carmina burana. quite interesting and just as i would have visualized the choral piece—starting off very raw and then evolving into a frolicking dance with lots of colors..and then to a harem-like setting. overall, i loved it; however, i wasn’t very impressed by the seattle choral company. i felt like this piece needed twice the amount of voices that were present. the sopranos…

Today: Top downloadable songs at iTunes: 1. The Reason ~ Hoobastank 2. My Band ~ D12 3. I Don’t Wanna Know ~ Mario Winans 4. This Love ~ Maroon 5 5. Roses ~ Outkast Top downloadable songs at wal-mart.com 1. Redneck Woman ~ Gretchen Wilson 2. This Love ~ Maroon 5 3. Toxic ~ Britney Spears 4. Tipsy ~ J-Kwon 5. Hey Ya! ~ Outkast I wonder how the demographics of both services vary.

830 emails in my inbox this morning. only 7 which were real emails. it’s ridiculous how much spam my work account gets. i have to check my email using exchange-web on monday mornings because the amount of spam is an overload for my client-side spam program when i open up outlook.

A9 finally launched the other day. check it out. here’s an interesting search blog on the feature. congrats to betina and all the other folks down in palo alto who’ve been working so hard on this for the past couple months. last night, i said adieu to john, who is in his car right now, towards yakima, on his way down to san fran to become yet another engineer for a9. he needed to borrow a vacuum as the moving company had already packed everything he possessed, including many crucial cleaning supplies….so i went over with mine and hung out with him for awhile. smart kid, good friend. too bad…

whew. i just figured out how to enable WEP.

super fun weekend with having wil come to visit me here in seattle. i haven’t seen that boy in maybe two years with him being out in germany, macedonia & iraq lately. our whole weekend was jam packed with activities so that he could see as much of seattle as possible. plus, with the amazingly warm weather (sunny & in the upper 70’s!), i wanted to take advantage of being outside as much as possible. upon arriving, i whisked him off for a stroll along golden gardens beach, which was followed by a dinner at ray’s boathouse and then meeting up with eugene, lynn & bill to see the brad…

ack, i just got my hair highlighted. oooo boy. it’s not quite the subtle red that i expected. adjust adjust adjust.

hmm, stumbled across some random posts on program management from another pm’s blog that i just discovered tonight. how pms came to be at microsoft and starting out as a program manager by chris prately comments on non-technical pms by andrej joel’s rant on non-technical pms. i disagree with this statement: Number one required skill in a program manager is learning to make software developers do what you want by making them think *it was their own idea.* that’s just ridiculous and not what the job is about. the thread that follows here is an interesting read…especially of the several mentions of the social capabilities of ms devs. some snippets…