Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

Google is (supposedly) about to launch a new IM service. It looks like it will be using the Jabber protocol, which is an open protocol and way cool. It ties to your Gmail account, so if you don't have one, start pestering your geekie friends, who no doubt have scads of invitations to join Gmail. You can use any Jabber compatible client, of which there are many. I just set up with GAIM using the following instructions . Have fun!

Got back from Long Island last Friday after spending the week tucked inside a tiny training room surrounded by a dozen aging computers. My one fellow classmate was a young (to my aging eyes, anyway) woman about to start working for the NY Times who would be using the same software system I'm overseeing. Boy, was she smart. Don't believe all that crap you hear about boys being the UberGeeks of the world. I allowed myself to get pleasantly lost a couple of times in the evening so I did a little sight-seeing. Not the touristy stuff like Oyster Bay, Teddy Roosevelt's old digs and the like, but neighborhoods. Interestingly enough, Long Island is much more wooded than I would have guessed. I wandered in a shopping mall build on the site of Roosevelt Field, where Charles Lindbergh set off for Paris and history. While there I made reasonably good progress on The Novel; I don't think I turned on the TV once during the six days I was there. I did watch a movie on my laptop, but I...