Oxford
Well, I’ve been here in Oxford for about a week and a half now, and as per usual, everything apart from work has gone slightly to pot. Indeed, even work hasn’t been going totally swimmingly. I’ve not yet got all of my collections (Oxford’s word for start-of-term exams) back, but in the quantum mechanics section, I received my lowest-ever exam result, a rather stunning 8/35!
I’ve had my hair trimmed by my college wife to get rid of the prevalent split ends I was experiencing in the ‘grow my hair quite long’ experiment (a mere centimetre of what isn’t yet a particularly impressive head of hair…rather dull, really), learnt why food cooks more quickly in the microwave than the oven but comes out with an unsatisfactory lack of crispiness (I would explain, but it requires a couple of pages of rather complex vector calculus to do what can be done far more easily by empirical experiment) and installed the MSN Messenger 7 Beta (with MessengerPlus! 3.4 Beta), which is surprisingly dull, especially as most of the new features aren’t accessible unless all your contacts are geeks with it installed, too.
Meanwhile my experiment into why people don’t flick notes was largely successful in proving that notes were rubbish things to flick. Both sides are heads, the note tends to sway without turning over if dropped from a small height and, unless your wallet is huge, the notes come out folded and land in an indeterminate state of crumpledness on the floor if dropped from a great one. Concerned people will be relieved to note that the experiment was conducted in Christ Church Hall, where vagrant numbers are at a minimum thanks to the heavily-armed custodians.
Anyway, the time has come to go eat deep-fried potato skins. Later.
January 24th, 2005 at 09:23
Real geeks don’t have MSN Messenger installed in the first place. I explained why a couple of years ago.
January 24th, 2005 at 09:40
You and your ICQ!
A few friends and I tried ICQ having read your rant about MSN and found it rather annoying! It doesn’t really have any functionality which MSN Messenger lacks after addition of the MessengerPlus! add-on, and while it’s a shame that it must rely on this, combined with its ubiquity, MSN is on to something of a winner.
ICQ is probably just as usable for those who started on it, but the whole pressing-shift-and-enter-to-send-a-message thing is pretty annoying for those who used to use MSN (where that means ‘new line’). The other most annoying thing is the approximately four million spambots each day which ask to be added to your contact list. Presumably their requests can be automatically denied, but this rather defeats the object of searchable whitepages etc.
Of course, if Microsoft do eventually plan to charge for Messenger, I’ll be straight on the ICQ bandwagon. Indeed, the beta of MSN 7 has a special “billing information” menu item for emoticons and theme packs and things. However, I suspect that they will rake in a fair bit of cash from such fripperies, the little advert at the bottom of the contact window and anything else they can dream up…
So, if MSN remains free (except of course for lemmings who wish to pay for a ‘theme pack’!), and MessengerPlus! too, I’m afraid even the call of genuine geekiness won’t move me!
January 31st, 2005 at 14:05
Then use Trillian - www.trillian.cc
It allows you to use ICQ, MSN, IRC, AIM and Yahoo! Messenger (not that anyone does use Y! Messenger, right? Anywho, Trillian’s free, contains no spyware and is only 2% fat.
January 31st, 2005 at 17:49
I once used Yahoo! Messenger precisely because no-one uses it. Consequently, Aberystwyth had not blocked the port and I could send a file to JTA.
I might go as far as to give Trillian a try…but I might miss MessengerPlus!.