I have a 4 hour layover in Chicago, from 3:45PM to 7:20PM on Sunday, July 25, if anybody there wants to see me. Of course, with Amtrak in general, the times are very rough.

I'm a big fan of taking the train - a lot less money than flying, a little more space, and you get to see some neat countryside.

So, hotel reservation (check), conference registration (check), and transportation (check). I'm in good shape to go!

I'm ryanwilcox@, for those who want to email me. (and you all do, I know)

I like it much better than any other webmail client I've tried - shortcuts for the power users, spam filtering, a nice interface, and it doesn't take itself too seriously (for now anyway). It also lets you assign stars to email messages - like assigning stars to your favorite tunes in iTunes. You can also label messages.

However, it is short one critical thing - I can't figure out how to create new mailboxes. Given all the mailing lists I'm on, this is pretty important.

Two things I think would make Gmail really shine:

• An RSS feed for unread messages
• Some sort of social network built in - maybe being able to track the chain of invites (I got an invite from Todd, but where did he get his invite from, and who else has he sent invites too?)

That's my thoughts on the whole thing. Later I'll post a screenshot as to what happens when you try to reuse a invitation you've already used up.