use Perl

You know the word is spreading when I got an offer of a GMail invite from a friend this morning.. He's not into tech at all, he's a doctor (well, an intern. Almost a doc). He had heard about GMail, he had wheedled an invite from somewhere and now he got a bunch of invites himself.

Which brought me to the question: I don't have an account.. I wasn't sure if I needed one anyway and I would prefer to run my own server/domain instead. I already have a Yahoo account (or two or three, each at a hundred megs). Do I need this ? Yeah, a gig of space would be nice, but people don't regularly send me large attachments anyway. My life isn't settled enough to go through the mechanics of getting server space somewhere (still belong to the starving student category). Even more puzzling is Orkut.. umm.

Ok, if I think about it, I WOULD like to see exactly what is so cool about the Javascript/DHTML UI that the GMail people have cooked up. I have *very rarely* seen Javascript used to actually make life easier, and most of the time, it ends up horribly breaking my usual browse patterns (makes the "back button" useless, makes bookmarking useless etc etc). Strange. Maybe I take him up on the offer (if it's still available).