Life of Brian

Last week some time I noticed the “Invite a Friend to Gmail” link was back at the top of the page when using Gmail. I ignored it.

Later in the week I noticed the “Invite” link was gone. Oh well, I figured if I wasn’t giving them away to “friends” fast enough, they were passing them along to those who would. Turns out they weren’t gone, just moved. The invite think has its own little block on the lower left of the Gmail page right below the labels menu. I have 50! to give away. Ha, I don’t have one single person to give a Gmail address too, let alone 50.

I have pestered everyone I know, I have offered them up free to strangers who have stumbled onto my blog via the Insane Giveaway Nights, I’ve tossed a few to fellow Miata.netters and I have even given them away philanthropically via gmailomatic, so how the heck am I to rid myself of these?

Even though it is against the Gmail Terms of Service I am going to sell them that’s how (what are they going to do, take away my account?) So if you want one of my Gmail Invites, just paypal $1,000.0 US to me at brian AT mr-miata DOT com. I figure if I sell enough of them I can buy one of those brand new next generation Miatas that they are going to introduce in about a week at the Geneva Auto Show.

If not at the joke in the previous post, at least at the man who took over an hour to post it to his blog.

About mid-morning my email alert chimed and when I opened it I got a little joke from one of the usual suspects. I thought it was cute and I hadn’t blogged one in a while, so I went online and hit “new Entry.”

Because it came the way it did there was of course several right brackets and extra carriage returns to remove, so I cut and pasted into an empty txt file. After sprucing up I cut and pasted it into the Entry Body area and hit publish.

I was greeted with a 404. Huh? Back button, try again, 404. Maybe there is some sort of hidden escape character that I can’t see and the cutting and pasting is just inserting it, which makes the entry fail. So I open the txt file in word and save it as a word document. I close out Word and open it back up to the file. I then save it to a plain txt file again. Open the txt file, copy and paste that into the Entry area again and hit publish. 404. Dang.

Next I try and paste in each of the 3 paragraphs one at a time publishing after each one. First one goes fine, second one too, but number three is the culprit. So I try pasting it into the Extended Entry area to see if it would work there. Nope. Dang, Now I’ve got 2/3 a joke online and no punch line. I delete the post and rebuild the blog. I’ll try again when I get home, maybe something at work is causing it…

I forwarded the email to home and did the whole clean and prune exercise again before attempting the posting. All three paragraphs at once netted the same results, 404. (which reminds me, I need to make a custom 404 page for here) So I plugged in the first two paragraphs and published. I then started adding 3 or 4 words at a time from the punch paragraph until it failed. Which turned out to be right after the word python. I tried skipping the word weally when pasting and that didn’t work. I then tried typing in the word weally, nope. How about if I spell it correctly? Really didn’t do the trick either. So then I went back to my original txt file and pasted it in. That worked! There was a line break after the word python in that file, so I cleaned up the text file and I left the extra carriage return in after python and that worked too. The thing that I did to solve the problem and not have a misplaced carriage return was I placed a no breaking space in html code between python and weally.