I seem to be on an email binge at the moment. Besides my old old college account, which nobody remembers (thus defeating the purpose of retaining it all these years), my defunct anonymizer account at Hotmail, and my current active account at a different provider, I now have two more. The first I set up last week to act as a secondary filter, because none of my accounts apparently filters incoming mail by people in my address book. I just started noticing that some personal mail was ending up being automatically tossed. So now I have a mirror account where Outlook Express filters my email, and I can have a quick way of knowing if I have to be careful in leafing through my spam folders or if I can get away with a half assed job. Tonight, because I am apparently an active Blogger member, I got an (apparently) coveted invite to sign up for Gmail. So far it doesn't look too impressive. But then, wait until I fill it with 5 years worth of email, and then we'll see how it holds up. I'm eager to see how this conversation thing looks, with replies to emails being grouped with the originating email (although back in my ancient internet days ... which was 10 seconds ago, we used to call that setup a BBS). At first I worried about my privacy, but considering that my current spam is addressing me by my full name and street address (no, I do NOT want v1cod3n or to refinance my mortgage, thank you very much), I suppose I don't have much privacy to protect anymore anyway. Anyhoo, if you feel like dropping me a shout out, my handle is LarimdaME. :: Besides The Best Blimp Story Ever Told, I was reading up on Metafilter on the Erdos Number 5 Sale on Ebay. And I got to thinking, the movies have the Bacon Number, science has the Erdos Number, what do blogs have? In the Blogmuck, isn't there a person we could use to track our degree of separation? Perhaps an Ernie Number might be a good idea. Sure as hell beats Technorati.