geeky crapola for 8/4/2008

Monday Aug 4th 2008

instant messaging

I’ve discovered the only instant messenger I truly give a shit about is AIM. At the present time I’m of the opinion that if someone wants to contact me via IM and doesn’t use AIM, I’m not going to use another service just for them.

What I’m using now is AIM Lite. It only does AIM. It’s tiny, free and awesome.

As far as those who don’t use AIM, they can send an e-mail to me or Twitter me.

twitter

Speaking of Twitter, I’ve been using twhirl and seriously dig it. This is the app that got me using that microblogging service again. It’s good. Real good.

Although I have no proof of this, it would appear that many people prefer Twitter as a means of instant messaging (even though it’s not truly instant) rather than IM itself.

e-mail

Even though the Windows Live Mail e-mail client is really, really good - ever since the full version of Hotmail became supported in Firefox 3 I’ve been using that and nothing else. Being that I do pay for Hotmail (yes I did flip over 20 bucks for a year’s subscription) I don’t see any ads. When you do that Hotmail is lightning quick.

document stuff

Still using OpenOffice. I don’t even have Microsoft Office installed on my box and don’t see any reason to install it. There is no advantage to having it anymore. I even use the native ODT file format instead of DOC (I’m not using MS Office so why bother?)

blogging

My mainstay blogging tool is still Windows Live Writer. It’s like a miniature document editor and it’s got awesome quick image editing tools in it that beats the crap out of anything WordPress has with its editor.

photo stuff

All my photos are on Flickr and have been for a little while now. I actually like it much better than hosting images myself. Yes, I flipped over some cash for a year’s subscription so I can upload as much as I want. I don’t know if I’ll bother to renew the subscription after the year but at least I know when it does expire my photos will still be there (very important).

computer stuff

My box is still the same box from last year, save for the fact there’s a new video card in it. She runs good. A plain ol’ Intel Core Duo 1.8GHz with 2GB RAM and Windows XP Service Pack 3.

I thought about moving to Vista but said “fuck that” and am going to stay with XP until Windows 7 is released. By that point I’ll probably just outright buy a new computer as it won’t appear until late ‘09/early 2010.