Miles to go …

I installed Google Talk today. It provides an integrated interface for email, IM and phone. I can correlate the quality of this product to early Gmail days when I used to report atleast a bug a day to .

As with Gmail conversation, Talk seems to maintain the entire thread as well. I tried sending a message to a friend who was away at that time, signed out of Talk and then logged back in again. When I tried sending message to that friend again, the earlier message was still available. I’m not sure how Talk is going to maintain message archive, sort them by date, month etc.. None of my friends in the same time zone have configured it yet so cant really comment upon the chatting experience.

Clicking on "Help" tries to open this link which gives a 404 in my browser window (aaargh!).

There is a "Connection Monitor" in the connection settings. This window can only be started from Settings -> Connection -> Start Monitor (not sure why?). It probably is meant to monitor network traffic but I did not see any updates in it when trying to send some bogus messages.

Talk crashed once without giving any clue about what happened and asked whether it’s ok to report to Google.

The cool thing is that Talk uses XMPP protocol and thus can be configured from GAIM (my chat client) or any other XMPP client. Here is the list of clients that an be used to connect to Talk. Another good feature in the planning is that Talk can be used to communicate with non-Gmail users. Could Google Talk possibly replace GAIM or other such clients is need to be seen ?

Here is a link from Google blog announcing Talk. Here is the article from 8/24 Mercury News.

And last but not the least, as with numerous other Google products (Gmail, News, Groups, etc), Talk is launched as a beta as well.

Technorati: topic:{technorati}[google+talk] topic:{technorati}[im] topic:{technorati}[Google] topic:{technorati}[Talk]

2008 – Hillary for President animation … http://www.grab.com/fun/toons/f/49651

Technorati: animation

Technorati: topic:{technorati}[dilbert] topic:{technorati}[manager] topic:{technorati}[comics]

via Paul Jakma

Technorati: topic:{technorati}[quiz]

Charitable organizations, political groups, organizations with which you have an established business relationship and companies that do not encourage the purchase, rental or investment in goods or services, such as those conducting a survey or seeking a donation or contribution are exempted from the Do Not Call restrictions. Here is the official list of exemptions. And I tend to fall victim to this mighty loophole almost 2-3 times a week. Sometimes local sheriff organization, phone survey, or even companies with whom I had a past business relationship tend to call up at my dinner time.

FTC and FCC launched this registry with a great intention but I wonder why they left these loopholes. I always ask the individual telemarketers to put me on their do not call list and that seems to have helped me reduce the spam calls further.

Technorati: topic:{technorati}[telephone+spam]

Technorati: topic:{technorati}[dilbert] topic:{technorati}[comics]

Space Adventures is selling tickets to moon for $100 million dollars. The trip might happen as early as 2008 and what I find interesting is that there are already a few potential clients interested in this mission.

Technorati: topic:{technorati}[space] topic:{technorati}[vacation]