NYC was fun (see pictures here...I forgot about my camera so I took only five...), but that's expected when you have the kind of company I had. On Friday, moments after parking my car on Broadway in Soho, I saw Ashanti and Muhammad Ali, while on Saturday Randy from "The Real World: San Diego" walked past us in the street. Ashanti was driving a dark red Mercedes SL500, while Muhammad Ali was driving a yellow cab. I don't think it was the real Muhammad Ali.

The $100,000 Benz drove past me on Prince St., trailing a black Escalade while blaring music. It had chrome rims and as it went past me I could see a young black woman inside. It stopped at a light, and as I caught up and walked by I saw it was Ashanti, before she drove off behind the Escalade. The weird part? She was blaring her own music. I'm not sure what to make of this. It seems kind of egotistical, but then again she is a famous musician. And you would hope she likes her own music, right?

Muhammad Ali was the cabbie who drove Melissa and I up to Cathy's apartment. It's probably a good thing it wasn't the real Mo Ali, given he's an old man with Parkinson's, though that'd be a fucking amazing story. I didn't know Randy's name (though Cathy/Melissa/Danielle obviously did), but he was instantly recognizable to me, having seen about an episode and a half of this year's Real World.

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So I got a gmail account about a month ago and I like it a lot. Asides from being able to get fmadden as my user name (vs. having to settle for famadden for my yahoo account), the interface has grown on me a lot. Rather than treating emails like individual files archived in folders, gmail groups using a "label" system, so that you can easily find emails from people even when it's on a list or things like that. I guess the more "innovative" thing (not sure if it really is) is the "conversation" format. Back-and-forth correspondence is grouped together, with the emails themselves stacked in such a way that it's easy to jump between them and look back at the flow of the convo (unintentional rhyme, sorry). The auto-complete address feature makes it so that I don't even bother with the address book. And of course the biggest draw: 1000 MB of storage. Pretty awesome.

An amusing sideshow to the service itself is the "exclusivity" of having a gmail account. I got my gmail account through Blogger; it's owned by Google and they decided to let people who've used Blogger for a while get gmail accounts. Apparently a lot of people want gmail and there's even a gmail swap website that Rosa told me about. I'm currently fielding offers if anyone wants an account...

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I'm still debating with myself whether I feel comfortable putting the exclamation point on the end of Yahoo. In general I like Yahoo, so I'm inclined to go with it, but because it's so gratuitous I will decline it until further notice.