Let us again praise great software

Today's honoree: Gaim.

See, there's this annoying thing going on in the online world. Many, many chat clients, many networks, many protocols.

For us consulting types, this frequently means: Client A likes Yahoo. Client B likes AIM. They'd all kinda like you to be around on chat, now and then... So you could wind up with a lotta crap running behind the firewall you'd rather wasn't there. Many little bits of software by many occasionally shifty organizations, many of them either not much into security or not much into jes' being plain polite about things.

Enter Gaim. Gaim does all the major protocols, all the major networks, all in one client. And it's open-source, so there's no nagging ads, no silly chrome, no spyware, none of that rot. Just connectivity.

Chat, fundamentally, is an evil. But a necessary evil, in my biz. (Holds up product, smiles for camera)... With Gaim, at least, it's that little bit less evil. Download your copy today.

You've probably been in tech too long

... when you find yourself eating cold Chinese take-out... and liking it.

Today's WayLay

I think I'm in love (warning: Salon thingy... might need ad clickthrough if you're not a subscriber).

'Reality TV'. Bleagggh. Urgggh. Argggh. Thpppt.

Hums Gilbert and Sullivan... 'They'd none of them be missed/They'd none of them be missed...'

Memories in the making

As it turned, after all, into a lovely sunny afternoon, and it is, after all, just a ten minute walk, I took our lovely daughter to the local Exhibition thingy this aft, took her on all the rides that didn't scare her... or me. And managed, for a few hours, not to think about deadlines and letters and forms and account balances.

Good call; fun stuff. She's four, so it's all the little kid rides—carousels, little trains and cars, bees and flying elephants where you push on a bar to make them go up or down, a big air-filled trampoline, a two-stories-high slide thingy. Some of it, Daddy has to go with her, somehow squish a six-foot frame into various fibreglass and metal contraptions not really built to that scale.

Memories in the making, I guess; she obviously had fun. But damn...$70 over two hours, and that's almost all rides, with Daddy being smart, walking past the carnies running the various 'spend $5 to win an inflatable toy worth 50 cents' things... Sure, this is like mandatory childhood memory stuff, and I'm not so much griping, but they're serious money sieves, these things.