Freeze! Keep your hands off the Mouse... my continued love affair with the big G

Because the world is a good and decent place, my friend Charlie, who I met during orientation my freshman year at CMU, is currently in town visiting. C used to live in Chicago, but now he works for Google in Mountain View. He makes servers work, I think. I'm sure that there is more to his job than that, but that's the gist of it. He moved out there a year ago, and I have missed him quite a lot, especially when I want to go out to dinner or see a movie, as he is good company for both of those activities. Tonight, I was on the schedule.

We met up, wandered around the vicinity of N. Michigan Avenue and then decided to retrieve my car from the parking lot it was in from my appointment, drove up to my place and had dinner at Thai Pastry. Afterwards, he came over to hang out, and as usually happens, showed me some new tricks that my computer can do, which, also as usual, involved seeing the clever new things that Google is up to, since I had mentioned that I couldn't figure out where they were hiding Reader, and I wanted to give it a try.

Here are the clever new things:
-Keystrokes are now enabled in my Gmail... way faster, its like using Pine or an old-school library computer card catalog system, but with a way better look and, sadly, no cheat sheet row at the bottom telling me all the choices.
-Google Reader, which is where I intend to read all bloggish things, in an attempt to increase productivity by not clicking through my entire list of things I read multiple times everyday, hoping for an update. Also, provided that I update it based on my link list at work, I won't have any more regularly read things that I can only check from one computer or the other because I don't actually know the web address.
-Personalized Google homepage is another thing that I have known existed, but never really explored in any depth, since the last time I had something like that, it was when the MyAndrew thing (is that what it was called? I just know that the SquirrelMail changed) at CMU was launched and it was a mess, so now I was wary of that sort of thing.
-Google Apps for Your Domain makes me want to go and get a domain, just so that I can use this product. In fact, I just might. Does anyone want to get in on a domain for something? I just want to try out the service and such. It comes with private label email...

Clearly, I am a Google fangirl, and there is not much that can be done about it. Someday, maybe, if I am lucky, I will find a job at Google that this theater major is qualified for and maybe I'll even get it. Suggestions? Let me know. Also, go and try out these new toys! Switch to keystrokes. Keep your hands off the mouse!