Instant Messaging and Voice client. It looks like it is based on the Jabber protocol, so you can use it straight away in GAIM and Trillian if you have them clicky for instructions
See you on there!
Blog
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Feel good factor
Well that was a useful evening, watched the third episode of Lost, which is moving at a beautifully slow and brooding pace. Wrote a couple of shortform ideas for a writing project I have on the go at the moment. And set up a new website, well just the start of it. It is somewhere for me to place programming stuff which I have written.
So that feels quite good 🙂
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Waiting for various things to run and work here
So just a quickie. Watched Lost last night, up to episode 2 thus far, hopefully getting to see 3 tonight. There are plot holes, corny acting, yadda yadda yadda. And yet I love it. Something that gets me about a tv show with a proper sense of brooding mystery. It doesn’t quite have the shine of a Twin Peaks, not yet anyways.
Speaking of which, the remastered DVD box sets of that are due out soon, and may have to go on the flotsky shopping list. Can’t wait frankly.
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Nice mellow weekend
Quiet one with mrsfb on Friday night, then Saturday my niece T came to visit. Fun day catching up, then mexican food and lashings of Singstar in the evening. I am better at being Beyonce than all reason would dictate. Lots of good fun.
Today my sister E leaves the country for good, she is moving to a new life in France with her husband. I’m going to miss them a hell of a lot, but I’m happy for them, going off to do something new in their lives.
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I am not going to write this post
about postscript. I am not going to talk about my weeks-long battle with it to make it print out something relatively straightforwards in the manner I had asked it too. I will not complain that it is an archaic language and Adobe needs shooting in the arse.
There. I feel better for not posting that.
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The Shamanistic Factor to Technical Support
We have built computers, in part, as a reflection of ourselves. They have brains, they have memories, several parts of a computer are our own electronic version of a human. When we make a human, as well as passing on our genetic data to that child, we are also passing on an element of soul, not just through education, but that spiritual attachment to one another. So in creating, building or installing a computer, do we achieve the same in a tiny way? Pass on our “computer genes” in some small way, in what we build, what we choose to purchase, or perhaps more importantly, what we put on there ourselves?
The first thing we do with a new computer is to teach it a language. Either you install it yourself, or someone has for you (consider that adoption in my book 😉 ) Then you decide how you want it to look, put your favourite programs onto it, copy over data you have stored. Having created, you set out to teach it, then nurture it in your own image.
What I am interested in here is does this process imbue the actual machine itself with some sort of soul?
Technical Support is a role I did for about 2 years. Knowledge is all important, as is hands-on use of computers, and lots of it. Yet about a third of the time minimum, I wouldn’t touch a computer. I would talk to the user, stand near their computer. And it worked. What didn’t work before, did now. It wasn’t anything I did myself, except be in the vicinity of the machine. The machines liked me, and would behave for me. Partly because I had set them up myself.
Now I can break this down into lots of sane rational factors. Of course having my presence reassures the user. I would encourage them into thinking through the steps they had taken to arrive at the problem, repeat the process with me. When they thought about it, they themselves could often see the stage they had missed or followed incorrectly. And there are several more straightforwards reasons like this.
The darker more mysterious area is where things don’t work in any rational way. Why do reboots make things better? Well, don’t things look better generally after a little nap? But also I could walk over to a “broken” computer (in user terms, I’m not claiming to be Uri Geller here) and just encourage it to work. I can’t explain it any better I’m afraid.
So if the computers have this little element of soul, did this make me a channeller of souls, a shaman to computers?
Probably not. However, if someone ever asks you why it worked when they did it the same way every time, put your coffee down, lower your voice, and tell them that…
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I have a dream…
Last night I dreamt about a word. Keope. I also dreamt about it a week ago. An odd dream, all about searching, both in the literal and spiritual senses. And technological, can’t explain it, but it was all very important.
Anyways, in last nights dream I met a journalist who had written about keope, and hadn’t got to the bottom of it, but encouraged me to keep searching.
So I came into work today, and get onto google. First hit, keope.com. It is in Italian, but it has an english part. I was very excited now. Looked at the first page, and it becomes apparent that they make floor tiles. Nice ones I’ll grant you, but it is hardly a spiritual awakening…
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Not been feeling very bloggy this week
Sorry. I know my tales of coffee, niche browsers and videogames are enthralling to all three of you, just not been very enthusiastic this week. Will pass, just a bit tired I think. I will try and sit down tonight and write something a bit more exciting. Well for me anyways.
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GooOS, the Google Operating System
Speculation about what Google is doing. Actually makes good sense, the way this is explained