Majik's Blog

“There’s this really weird line in Sleepless in Seattle: ‘I heard when you can’t sleep you should drink a glass of water from the other side.’ It’s right before the boy suggests holding sugar in your mouth to cure hiccups. So uh, does acquiring a glass of water ‘from the other side’ require a seance?

I use Trillian every day, 24 hours despite some small hickups. It’s always running because it’s the most economic way to allow people to contact me on so many mediums. Here are some things I’ve noticed:

-Trillian steals focus
If you have the main window restored, Trillian will steal the focus every time the logo animates, which means that if you try to do, for esample, alt+file+save in Notepad you will get alt+file, then drop an S into your document because the file menu disapears when Trillian steals the focus..which leads me to another niggling problem:
-The logo won’t stop animating. And you can’t uncheck “animate logo” in the options. This is fabulously annoying. I mean, animating on activity might not be so bad but when I have Trillian running on monitor 2 and the logo is animating and animating AND ANIMATING… It’s distracting when I’m doing other work. …And it steals the focus just to animate, like, “Here I am! Pay attention to me!” It’s as if the option was placed in the options menu and greyed out to taunt the user with the message “I am the programmer. This item will animate constantly and there is nothing you can do about it so there.”
-Resource hog
Sure it’s doing a lot of things, but the memory usage just doesn’t stop. It sucks and sucks resources until I can’t even restore a window without an “out of memory” message and when I drag a window I get ghosts of the window all over the screen and have to wait about thirty seconds for the screen to update. This forces me to reboot, which means I have to unload, Trillian (which doesn’t release resources on unload, by the way); unload my web cam; close my MUCK client; unload any other applications running and sometimes I can get my PC to shut down without a kernel fault, but not often. When I got a Duron 850 and 128 megs of RAM I didn’t think I’d be using it all for one program.

I guess the point I’m getting at is that while there are a few ‘features’ I’d like to change, Trillian is still the best IM/Chat client out there. I’ve used them all and none of them compare. I like what I’ve got and like any good consumer, I want more.

Ah, by the way, I’ve found a couple of things that make Trillian easier to endure until the features are fixed for real. Using Windows Sniper from http://www.unhuman.com you can do the following hacks on Trillian:
-Hide the logo animation using the Hide Window feature with Actual selected (as opposed to Parent or Application)
-Hide the utterly useless My Stuff box
-Encapsulate and resize Trillian to show only the Connections box

Optimally one would be able to show or hide these items at their option (ala PHPNuke) allowing the ultimate in useability and function. But until this becomes a reallity maybe you can use Sniper to make your own work-arounds. Windows Sniper happens to be good for adjusting other programs, too.

When I call to find out what is going on with my weekly claims, I am told that the reason I’m not recieving my checks on time is probably because I’m using a cellular phone and “the system isn’t picking up [my] beeps.” However, the ‘system’ always tells me my inputs are correct and always reapeats them back to me exactly as they were entered, and I always stay on the line through all of the advertisements and insults until “THE SYSTEM TELLS YOU GOODBYE.” Supposedly if you hang up before you hear all of the advertisements for the website and the employment department’s services (that you hear every week) you don’t get paid. I have always listened to the whole thing and always put in what I am asked for on Sunday of every week. However, when I call back a half hour or a day later to find out if my claim has been processed the system always says that I haven’t made a claim for the week. For some reason, when I call to speak to someone at the employment office, the computer ‘magically’ has all of my claims and JUST sent off two checks for the two claims I’ve made over the past two weeks. But the problem is, I can’t wait two weeks to get a check. I have prescriptions to fill and I need money for bus fare to get to job interviews. Waiting two weeks for a check that I should be getting every week is unacceptable and the answer “I don’t know what is wrong sir” is not acceptible. If I had given that answer to a customer at my previous job, I would have been fired rather than laid off.

[23:18:02] ~FoxMajik/ I think I’m going to need a stripe set to use Winamp and rip newsgroups at the same time while moving files.

[23:21:21] * Brimstone nods. “Or run a real OS…”
[23:21:41] * Brimstone shrugs and pets your head. “I’ll see you about fox… Have fun.”
[23:21:50] ~FoxMajik/ Ohkay…

[23:22:10] ~Brimstone/ (It’s fun watching RipperX under Linux rip CD’s in multiple threads…)
[23:23:18] ~FoxMajik/ The things those kids come up with.

[23:25:03] ~Brimstone/ It rips with one thread and encodes with another. Doesn’t cause problems under Linux and ripping is all CD I/O whereas compression is purely CPU, so it’s acutally faster.)
[23:25:08] * Brimstone hops off.

Faster than..?

[15.03.36] ~FoxMajik/ In Oklahoma, the air always smelled wet before a rain.
[15.03.43] ~FoxMajik/ It’s unusual here because it rains so much.
[15.05.54] ~FoxMajik/ Also, you’ll find that if you binhex that statement, then convert it to binary and divide the result by the sum of the digits, you’ll get the number ’42.’
[15.09.09] * x nods. “Sure… ”
[15.09.12] * x chuckles.
[15.09.52] ~FoxMajik/ Don’t believe me? Try it.
[15.10.30] ~x/ Don’t have a binhex converter handy.
[15.27.46] ~FoxMajik/ We search new programs for your pleasure.
[15.28.01] ~FoxMajik/ You can use perl to binhex.
[15.28.16] ~x/ Not really interisted in doing so.
[15.28.34] ~FoxMajik/ fyi
[15.28.45] ~FoxMajik/ You could even use grep to binhex.
[15.28.53] ~FoxMajik/ Binhexing can be very erotic.