Hayfever, Jabber, MBP 2.6 Ghz

Over the past month I have been stricken with a serious case of seasonal hay fever. Apparently Pine hay fever season is mostly passed and now is Japanese Cypress hay fever season. If that is the case, then I may very well be allergic to those trees as well. Itchy eyes, ears and nose stuffed, and watery blurry mornings...

Okay, now what is it with getting Jabber working on anything? I go to www.jabber.org and try to sign up for a Jabber account, but jabber.org has not sent a 'prompt' response mail to my enrollment and any of the other free services listed are either not in English or the registration interface is not intuitive enough for me to figure out where to sign-up! The frustrating thing about this whole experience is that I did have a reliable Jabber connection up until about one month ago with www.amessage.info - but this service is up and down, then up for a while, and now has been unavailable for about three days consecutive. So I go to find another Jabber service. Hold on! I will boot up Psi and see if I can get anything to work this morning since my last attempts last night. BRB.

30 minutes later ....

Still a Jabber die hard, but starting to give up for other solutions.

2 hours 30 minutes later ...

Okay, now I have settled with something else - Adium. I tried this software about four years ago and was not too impressed with it, which is exactly why I went through the trouble of setting up Jabber before. A few minutes ago, I downloaded Adium and was thoroughly impressed. Especially, if you use this Skype plugin , you can even get rid of Skype from your desktop. On my installation, Skype still pops up then automatically hides when Adium logs into the Skype account, but I don't mind that because will probably need to open it again anyway for phone call and video chats. No more Jabber for me! Good bye iChat, Adium here I come!!

A couple of weeks ago, Apple finally delivered my custom, order-to-made MacBook Pro 17", LED backlight, 2.6 Ghz, and 4 GB RAM. Gotta serious machine here. A screamer that does not skip a beat even for Parallels on Coherence to boot a Visio drawing.