Doron has written an excellent Firefox extension for notifying users of new Gmail and enabling them to check it with a single click. It is extremely low rent resource-wise, and simply does what it should do, no surprises or annoying side effects.

There have been rumors of Google penalizing people for using it, some by shutting their access down for 24 hours, but I personally have never experienced anything of the sort. Google has now released a beta version of their own Gmail Helper which resides in the Windows system tray, and pops up a little box when you receive mail. It works just like it should, but uses almost 10 megs of ram. Thats a pretty big chunk for such a small app.

Since it is still in beta, it is unfair to judge it as though it were a product heaved at the masses, however, I genuinely hope that Google either allows third-party extensions to work smoothly with their service or tones up their official version so that anal retentive people like myself will be willing to use it.

Reuters reports today that a 29 year old Iraqi by the name of Sarmad Shamael has opened what is Iraq’s only tattoo parlor in a basement studio in downtown Baghdad. Traditional designs like skulls, dragons and pinup girls are apparently the most popular of the 100 or so designs the young artist has laid down so far.

To complement all the do-gooding going on in various rebuilding and re-culturization projects in Iraq nowadays, most of which are spearheaded by Americans, I think someone wicked like Paul Booth ought to head over to the fertile crescent and lay some world-class ink down on Iraqi metalheads pro-bono. Thoughts?

Information Week reports today that Google has launched a chinese language version of its Ad Words service, meaning that advertisers can now potentially reach 280 million or so Chinese internet users. Yet another reason I need to start pawning shit in anticipation of Google’s IPO.

This week’s Ask Slashdot is from a girl wondering what to buy her geek boyfriend for Valentine’s Day. The responses manage to mix hilarious, pathetic and other descriptive adjectives in a rare fashion. A must-read.

For those of you who may be considering revenge in the form of a venomous snake sent to your enemy’s door, learn from the lesson provided by these idiots. Lesson 1: copperheads kill less than 1% of bite victims. Splurge on a Black Mamba. At just $400.00, Dendroaspis polylepis are priced to move, and unless your victim is very lucky and/or a very experienced handler, chances are they’re gonna croak. Lesson 2: leaving fingerprints on the box you mail the snake in is just asking for trouble. Lesson 3: if you fuck up, and it doesn’t work, some redneck cop is going to shoot the snake. And it really isn’t fair that it should die when it was trying to do you such a dangerous favor, is it? So think this out.