FilePro Happy faces

[Fairlight]

On Tue, Aug 10, 2004 at 02:29:00AM -0400, after drawing runes in goat's blood,
Brian K. White cast forth these immortal, mystical words:
> 
> I always thought This was sunglasses  ß-)  or  B^)
> I have no idea how those render in graphics, and since I have no idea what
> characetr set you readers are using, the first one has a decimal 225, which
> is a beta sign like a stylized capital B in cp437 which I used to use for
> BBSing. (the emoticon and the charset)

The -first- thing I did, when I still bothered using official clients for
any of the IM services, was disable all graphical smileys and emoticon
toolbars and displays.  I can handle all manner of ASCII smileys, but I
find the graphical ones strangely unnerving and extremely unnatural.

> Rendering bits of code into pictures that have nothing to do with the code
> is truly idiotic. I blame Microsoft for putting computers into the hands of

Erm...I'd ask what you think of POVray, but I just rearead your line and
you -did- say, "...that have nothing to do with the code," so I thought
again.  :)

> the vacuous and the rigging up an OS that is nothing more than a show-floor
> demo that makes the user think they are actually operating their computer,
> which of course took off like wildfire in our something for nothing culture.

Well -some- people are having second thoughts.  You've seen the articles
where IBM (amongst others) are recommending -avoiding- WinXP SP2 because
while it increases security it breaks compatability in key areas, I trust?
They're not garnering much support with this latest service pack.

> not that I'm bitter or anything... :)

No moreso than I.  :)  My latest curiosity is over AOL's "repair engine" or
whatever they're calling it, where it will diagnose your computer's issues
and automagically fix them for you?  That's like asking International House
of Pancakes to fix your BMW, IMHO.  I can't fathom that -anyone- would
trust it.  But they do have a vast array of sheep to choose from.

I gave GAIM a try.  Didn't like it when it took win95 down with it when
it crashed--hard.  Trillian's ICQ is flaked on win95, period--the display
would switch to gibberish in the inbound ICQ and they said they'd never
fix it for win95, so I dumped that.  I don't like bloated GUI UI's anyway
if they can be avoided--especially since I dislike having to use the mouse
unless it's for gaming, and I don't like having to poke holes in the
firewall either.  

So I run centericq up on the shell server at the ISP.  ICQ, AIM, MSN, Yahoo
Messenger, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu (some Polish IM system I don't use), IRC, RSS
Feed linking, and LiveJournal weblogging--all in one curses-based seamless
universal interface.  It's truly a cool program, and since I got them to
fix a few Endian issues that showed up on Sparc, it's even cooler.

mark->
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