CNet News.com is reporting that many Gmail beta participants, who receive a number of “invitations” to forward to friends or colleagues, have been auctioning those invitations on eBay. Not one to ignore a chance to make a few bucks on something I didn’t pay for in the first place, I’ve added one of my own.

***>>>B!D N0W!!!<<<***

Edit: The auction closed in six and a half minutes, when someone used “Buy it Now”. The instant selling price? $99.99.

I’ve put the second invitation up now as well.

Wow.

Barnesandnoble.com to pay fine, boost security | CNET News.com

Barnesandnoble.com has agreed to pay $60,000 and boost Internet security after a flaw that exposed the personal information of some shoppers, New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said Thursday. The agreement stems from an investigation that found that a design flaw in the New York-based company’s Web site granted access to customer information such as name, billing address and account information but not credit card numbers.

So, to my B&N; membership pitch when I say, “…and we don’t sell your name or information to anyone,” I should add, “but we’ll let it slip out the back door without noticing.”

In this telling article about the differences between the Florida Marlins and the sad-sack Giants, we find out that

[Florida catcher] Mike Redmond, who watched platoon partner Ramon Castro hit a roaring home run into the left-field bleachers Thursday, revealed that to break a slump last year, he took batting practice wearing nothing but his spikes and batting gloves in a cage near the Marlins’ clubhouse. It worked, too. He continued taking nude BP as the Marlins reeled off six straight wins.

Here’s more on the Curves-owner-donates-profits-to-anti-choice-organizations story I linked last week.

Bottom line: There are lots of fitness clubs out there, most of which are not owned by fanatic anti-choice wackos.

My Mountain View neighbor Google has put an end to the waiting and speculation by, this morning, filing for an IPO. Coverage:

SFGate/AP

c|net News.com

Slashdot

Google News

I drive past the newly-expanded GooglePlex on my way to and from work every day. For the past couple of days, they’ve had security manning the parking lot entrances – no doubt to keep out gawkers.

I’ve actually been trying to think of another single company that has as much impact in my life as Google does right now. A few years ago I could have said Disney, but not so much since we moved north. I run or administer four Blogger sites (owned by Google), use the Deskbar and Toolbar, have it configured as the default search in Opera, and am more likely to use it to find a company site than guessing at the domain name.

It will be interesting to see how this news changes things here in Silicon Valley.

Edit: The home of PigeonRank, the G.C.H.E.E.S.E., holiday logos and numerous other geeky in-jokes has perpetrated another on the investment community. Google’s Form S-1 shows the “Proposed Maximum Aggregate Offering Price” as $2,718,281,828. This happens to be e times 10 to the ninth power. Clever.

This cute game is pretty simple but very well executed.

(Flash; Link courtesy Rita)

Cheyenne the cat, who was picked up by San Francisco animal control earlier this month, was reunited Wednesday with her owner, who was flown in courtesy of Ellen DeGeneres.

“Ellen is a huge animal lover,” said Michelle Gross, a spokeswoman for the talk show host. “When she heard about this woman being separated from her cat, she just wanted to help reunite her and have her on the show.”

After picking up Cheyenne from the city’s Animal Care and Control department, Pamela Edwards and her daughter went to Los Angeles to tape a future episode of DeGeneres’ show.

I mentioned Cheyenne here last week. Glad to see she’s going home.

Cow Tools is a very funny single-pane Web comic that brings to mind Gary Larson and John Callahan.

ALLOFMP3 is a Russian site offering downloads of thousands of music tracks, legally. I’m hazy on the details but apparently this firm has paid license fees for the music they’re offering and are just reselling it. $5 US gets you 500MB delivered in the format of your choice (MP3, MPEG4-AAC, OGG, etc.).

Here’s a page full of useful tips and tweaks for your Winamp 5. I haven’t upgraded from 2.91 yet, because I’ve been waiting for 5 to get past the dreaded dot-zero stage. Looks like it’s there, and I’ll be downloading and upgrading shortly.

Although we missed Ben & Jerry’s last night, Baskin-Robbins has free scoops tonight.

I don’t see Cold Stone doing this–pity.

The Mercury News today profiles Dennis Hwang, the “Google Doodler“. Hwang is the Google artist responsible for Google’s holiday logos, such as this one from Earth Day 2004.

Jennifer has a new car! It’s a 2004 Subaru Forester XS Premium in “Java Black Pearl”. We bought it from Carlsen Subaru in Redwood City, using AAA‘s Vehicle Purchasing Service, which eliminates haggling and negotiation and let us work directly with the dealership’s fleet manager. Here are some pics of Jen in her new car:

Lifted from Golden Notebook:

1. Grab the nearest book.

2. Open the book to page 23.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

Book: Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 by Eric Meyer (Osborne, 0-07-213178-0)

Sentence: First, if the property width has a value of auto, replace it with the intrinsic width of the element.

Probably not exactly what you had in mind, Rita, but the other choice was SAMS Teach Yourself PHP in 24 Hours and the fifth sentence on page 23 was even less interesting.

Food Network‘s Iron Chef America: Battle of the Masters kicks off tonight! I’ll be foregoing baseball this weekend.

Steve Kroner has excerpts of an interview with former A’s and current Giants broadcaster Greg Papa.

GP: I think Jon (Miller) is a star because of radio. Vin Scully is on TV because of radio. I’ve never done baseball on radio. … I’ve done it on TV and you shouldn’t be a star on TV. The analyst should be the star (on TV); Mike Krukow should be the star. … My job is to facilitate on television everybody else’s job and to make it easy to watch. My call on TV is sometimes nothing. It’s very simple. They can see everything.

With Joe “the schmuck” Angel gone to his reward (or Baltimore), the only remaining problems with Bay Area baseball telecasting are Bip “hey guys” Roberts and Hank Greenwald’s incessant “uhhh”‘s–but I think that’ll go away when he gets fully back into the swing of it. He’s not exactly inexperienced.

Of course, this doesn’t include the horrible, awful, very bad Tim McCarver and Joe Buck of Fox’s national telecasts, but I just turn off the TV when they’re doing the game, ’cause it usually means Krukow and Kuiper or Jon Miller is on the radio.

BBspot reports Paramount has released the highly anticipated Service Pack 1 for Star Trek: The Original Series.

Paramount used the latest in digital editing technology to correct the errors and scoured newsgroups and interviewed fans to find all the problems they needed to correct. The service pack is available in DVD, VHS or in digital format from the Paramount website.

Paramount President Franz Pike said, “We fixed everything, from obvious errors like the glaring differences between Shatner and his stunt double to more obscure fixes like removing Spock’s ‘third ear’ in ‘The Immunity Syndrome.’ We think fans will be pleased.”

I wonder if this will be available as a patch, or if you have to get the whole thing fresh?

California State Senator Liz Figueroa (D-Fremont) has introduced legislation to block Gmail, Google’s new free text-ad supported email service.

“Telling people that their most intimate and private e-mail thoughts to doctors, friends, lovers and family members are just another direct-marketing commodity isn’t the way to promote e-commerce,” Figueroa said in a statement, which called Gmail customers’ correspondence “a direct-marketing opportunity for Google.”

Figueroa’s bill says an e-mail or instant-messaging provider can scan outgoing messages from its users, but not incoming ones. It includes a narrow exception for spam and virus filtering.

I honestly don’t see the problem she has with this. Google is being very up-front and straightforward about how the system works–it’s not like they’re hiding the fact that their system will scan your mail for relevant keywords. If you can’t deal with that, don’t sign up. It’s that simple.

Meanwhile, Blogger‘s front page is now offering Gmail beta accounts (Blogger is, of course, owned by Google). I signed up but am having difficulties logging in with my user-agent of choice. Hopefully that will be resolved soon.

The second book in Neal Stephenson‘s Baroque Cycle, Confusion, was released last week. Of course, Slashdot has a review and discussion; beware of spoilers, though, and remember to read at +2 to avoid the worst of the trolls. I was given an advance readers’ copy at the store and am currently a few hundred pages in.

“[The Windows API] is so deeply embedded in the source code of many Windows apps that there is a huge switching cost to using a different operating system instead. It is this switching cost that has given the customers the patience to stick with Windows through all our mistakes, our buggy drivers, our high TCO [total cost of ownership], our lack of a sexy vision at times, and many other difficulties. Customers constantly evaluate other desktop platforms, [but] it would be so much work to move over that they hope we just improve Windows rather than force them to move.” — Microsoft C++ general manager Aaron Contorer explains Windows’ greatest selling point in a 1997 memo to Bill Gates.

From the Mercury News‘ “Good Morning Silicon Valley” email newsletter.

No uncoded messages on an open channel.

(Flash, cached from /.ed site)

Missing Florida cat shows up in S.F. — 7 years later

Today’s happy cat story comes from the SF Chronicle.

Florida resident Pamela Edwards was certain her new cat had been eaten by an alligator.

She adopted 3-year-old Cheyenne from her local animal shelter in the summer of 1997. By Thanksgiving that year, the cat had disappeared from Edwards’ condominium in Bradenton on Florida’s west coast. She hung flyers and ran ads in the newspaper, received no response and concluded the worst.

Cheyenne was just a distant memory when Edwards got a call from her county shelter three weeks ago. The cat had been found — 3,000 miles away, in San Francisco.

There’s a full-size photo of Cheyenne linked from the article. This proves, again, the value of those implanted ID microchips. At their last regular vet visit, Watson and Rita received theirs (Linus already had one).

Ars Technica today features a review and comparison of three alternative AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) clients for Windows. I use Trillian exclusively at the moment, and tend to agree with some of the UI criticisms leveled at it by the article. It does seem to me to be the best choice for now, and it’s miles better than bog-standard AIM.

For just $4.99 CDN, you too can guard your banana against damage or accident.

Bush Makes Three Mistakes While Trying to Cite One — Yahoo/Reuters

While struggling unsuccessfully this week to think of a single mistake he has made since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush committed three factual errors about weapons finds in Libya, the White House said on Wednesday.

Bush, long known for his grammatical conundrums and confusing phraseology, told reporters twice during Tuesday’s prime-time news conference that 50 tons of mustard gas were discovered at a turkey farm in Libya.

The linked article includes a full-size version of that picture. That’s the best picture ever. Print it out, make posters and t-shirts, spread it around everywhere.