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IM, OS and Pirates, Oh My

Google Talk

If you haven’t already heard Google released Google Talk Beta on Wednesday, Google’s answer to AIM and MSN. As a nerd I feel it’s somehow my duty to talk about google even though I’m sure this has already been “blogged” about 10,000 times since Wednesday. Wired has already written a review. My two cents: the classic google simplistic design is sheer brilliance as always, I couldn’t be happier with Google’s choice to to use the jabber protocol – open protocols are where it’s at – fo shizzle, voice sound quality is superb – the use of cellphone style connect quality bars is brilliant, i hope they implement file transfers soon, multi-chat is overrated – i hope they don’t include it, tabbed chats would be nice. That’s a quick rundown of my thoughts on gTalk. Next up, windows Vista…

Asta la Vista

I installed Windows Vista Beta 1 (legally obtained, I assure you) the other day. I am definitely unimpressed. Granted I didn’t take a super close look at it. I’m convinced that Vista is going to be to XP what ME was to 98, especially at the rate they’re removing features. The main features I noticed where silly GUI ‘improvements.’ I suppose GUIs are what desktop OSes are all about. But the Vista GUIs features fall into to categories 1) ripping off Mac OS X, 2) stupid/pointless. blah….i can’t talk about this any longer

Pirates of the Spanish Main

I recently moved in close proximity to a Geek Games Store. While waiting for my bus the other day I noticed an interesting looking game in the window, Pirates of the Spanish Main. The publisher is calling it “world’s first constructible strategy game.” It’s essentially a miniatures game, wrapped in the facade of a collectable card game. You purchase the game in packs of cards which punch out like paper dolls. The cards consist of ship pieces, crew members, islands and treasure. The empty cards can then be used for in game measurement, all measurements are in S or L (short or long side of the card), pretty brilliant. The rules are dead simple and the ships are fun to build. So in conclusion, add me to your gtalk list and buy yourself some Pirates! cards i need someone to play with. (cards are water and wine proof btw)

PS. Check out A List Apart 4.0, interesting layout.

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From The Archives Websites

Mutton Button

The old adage about wolves in sheep’s clothes is probably applicable to my new favorite interweb site, start.com/1/. Start.com is essentially a really simple web based rss reader (really simple really simple syndication?) combined with the recently improved MSN search engine. I like the page so much that i’ve made it my homepage, causing me to feel a little dirty every time I load up firefox. I’ve always been a really big fan of RSS, but I’ve never really been able to justify running another application just to check RSS feeds. Things like konfabulator widgets and the firefox ‘live bookmarks’ (or whatever) are ok, but they lack the ‘description’ contents. Unlike most other web-based RSS readers, start.com is completely cookie based, no login required. blah, blah, blah, i love microsoft, send me to hell.

[a few site updates, and probably a news update later.]