Like bad Whitney crack? Or addictive chocolate crack?

Whitney crack. It's just been veeeery erratic, illogically so. Like, every once in a while it completely forgets you have an account. Disappearing chat rooms. Buddies appear and disappear.

I will say, when we used to use AIM on Gaim, we never had this problem, so it must be Jabber's fault.

Well, Jabber in the sense that they're protocols on service-specific servers, yeah. Livejournal's Jabber server drops more than Gmail's for example, at least for me. But that's weird... one more reason to stick to what I know, I suppose.

I couldn't use LJTalk (which is Jabber-based) on Gaim, and ended up using Miranda instead. Which I don't like all that much, actually.

It's too bad they don't make Adium for windows.

I'm looking into getting a new laptop. (My four-year-old Dell is slowly turning evil. First it stopped communicating with the iPod, then it stopped communicating with the printer, and now it throws a hissy fit before it will communicate with the internet.) I think I've settled on the 1.83GHz MacBook, with an 80 GB hard drive rather than the standard 60. People who know Macs better than I do -- good choice? Anything else I should be looking at?

I'm pretty much going to be using it for internet, music, maybe downloading some movies and TV shows, some photo editing, some word processing, basic money software like Quicken, maybe playing around with basic video editing, and I'm most likely going to buy the Mac version of Maple (math program) for some stuff. Last time I worked with Maple on a Mac, it seemed to run much slower than the PC version, but it could have just been that particular computer or the computation I was trying to get it to run, which was admittedly quite ridiculously long and should have been done with Monte Carlo methods rather than what I was trying to do, but I didn't know how to program that at that point.

Is Maple a Universal binary? If not, it's definitely going to be a lot slower than the PC version.

Maple appears to be part universal, but much faster on Intel Macs than it was on PPC.

For the stuff you want to do, a MacBook will work great. It's good for pretty much anything but 3D graphics. For that, you need a MacBook Pro.

Make sure you get 1GB or more of memory, though, as the MacBooks share the same memory for graphics and everything else.

Definitely invest in 1GB of memory. It's the most useful thing you can get for your computer. I think the 80GB of hard drive space is a good investment too.

Speaking of GTK ... for those who still read Usenet, check out the Pan newsreader. It runs under Windows using GTK and is a great program.

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