Don't Back Down

For the masses of services, that is. AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, Yahoo! Can the list get any longer? Don't answer that.

While I don't necessarily mind having accounts on multiple services, I do find it a bit of a pain to keep up with all of them individually. So I've dropped a few over the years (accounts are still there, I just never receive anything since I don't turn them on). Mostly because installing software for each just pushes me over the edge. I'm not the only one.

I've used Trillian. I like Trillian okay, and I even registered the software at some point. It's worth $30, if for nothing else than the option it gives you. But just like all the individual applications, I find it getting too big for my needs. I only need the messaging, thank you very much. Everything else? Pretty much useless to me.

So I've been using Gaim for a while. Gaim isn't pretty (though some themes are prettier than others). But it does what I need. It connects to every network I need to use. It allows me to group contacts, in case you also have multiple accounts spread across multiple contacts. And perahps most importantly, it's fast. Even on my 2Ghz laptop with plenty of memory, Trillian is slow. It's slow to load. It's slow to respond. It crashes with some regularity. Gaim is speedy and it doesn't crash. It also doesn't have all the bloat of other apps.

For functionality, Gaim's the winner in this contest hands-down.

In 1961 (I hear), President John F. Kennedy said he wanted to put men on the moon. Something around 8 years later, in July of 1969, men landed on the moon for the first time. Now, President George W. Bush has said he wants men on the moon. Of course, he said it in 2004, and that he wanted it to happen by 2020. Now we see that it's apparently scheduled for 2018.

Let me get this straight. In the 1960s, we could do it in 8 years, but now it takes 13? What sort of sense does that make?

A couple of days ago, the alternator in our car died. Simply died. We could jump the battery, but it would run for varying times - perhaps a few minutes, perhaps a few seconds. So we tried to make it across town to the shop. The first jump was less than a mile from the hosue. Then we made it a couple of miles and had to jump it again. As soon as the cables were disconnected and the hood shut, the car died again.

At precisely this moment, a gentleman on a bike came by and asked if I needed a hand, offering to help push the car out of the way. Well, we were just uphill from an on-ramp to the shop, so I told him I realy needed to get it just a bit further down the road and should be able to coast in. So he jumped off his bike and helped me push. One time he even ran back to get his bike, rode it back to me, and jumped off to help push again.

After I hit the slope, he jogged alongside for a moment to make sure things were okay, and then took off on his merry way. Once we had dropped the car off, we returned to see if we could find him and thank him (some more), but he was nowhere to be found. He'll have to settle (!) for our prayers.

It's good to know that there are at least a few decent people in this world.