Hooray Jabber! Victory for open standards!...I need another cup of coffee.

Google Talk is minimalistic and is functional for simply sending messages, but there just isn’t a compelling reason to switch just yet. Most proponents of open standards are pretty excited about it since Jabber / XMPP sorely needed something to drive widespread adoption. And these days there’s irrational excitement around anything that Google touches…that should die down when people realize that the experience of IMing on Google Talk is roughly equivalent to IMing on AOL ten years ago. At any rate, I already had a GMail account and GAIM already supported Jabber so I’m connected, but not really talking that much to anybody.

See more progress on: try out google talk

moved my blog

I decided to move my blog off of my self-hosted Typo server to Blogger for several reasons:

1) integrated Google search
2) under-the-hood CSS templating
3) I hate running a web server on my development box
4) I needed an easier way to integrate my posts from 43 Things to my blog
5) no worries about backup

And so here I am. Time to fiddle with my CSS template.

Auto repairs

I dropped a big chunk of change to fix my car this last month. It started with a routine oil change. Then the radiator motor started flaking out. And in this year’s sweltering Oklahoma summer, it didn’t take long for my car to start complaining. I showed up at a friend’s house one day and it sounded like I was frying bacon on the engine block. I’ve lost all my freon charge so my A/C doesn’t work either. And my car’s old enough that it uses Freon-12, which is now banned. Yesterday, I discovered I needed to replace the power steering pump b/c the seal was worn out (why can’t they just replace the seal?).

I may be in line to buy a new car within the next year so I need to learn how to drive stick or ride a motorcycle here pretty soon.

In the Studio: The Commission (Part 2)

For the last two weeks, I was cooped up in the studio getting the last takes for The Commission’s first CD single off their upcoming album. Despite some stumbling along the way for the other A-side, “Scanlines”, I squeezed out some great performances from everyone in the band. Though I am amazed I got through this last week without bitch-slapping one of them.

“I love it. Now make me hate it.”

Spending a month in the Pacific

I’ll be in the Philippines and Hawaii so I really must grab a board and do nothing but surf for days. Hopefully I’ll have a digital camera by then, so I can check this off and have picturesque photos to show everyone.