|Absolute Value|

Finally after all the wait, phone calls to shops, lists signed up for, auctions on Ebay lost, I have in my possesion an XBox 360.  Game finally had stock and I went and purchased the premium setup.  Of course tonight I have a birthday dinner so I won’t be able to play until Thursday!

With Google Talk flipping the switch and opening up to any network which supports XMPP (with dialback ), I’m starting to use it more.  I don’t have many contacts using IM clients other than MSN messenger but open federation is a requirement for IM.  I can send emails to any other domain without a problem but why should I be held back by not being able to send IMs to people on other “domains”.  It doesn’t make sense and IM clients that don’t support XMPP then we shouldn’t be using them.  With the shift of user focus away from email because of spam, phishing and all those problems to IM, this is a huge hinderance for people moving across. 

Currently I have 3 IM clients open (MSN Messenger, Skype and GTalk), and I have people on all 3 networks.  I should be able to talk to all of them with one client.  Not 3.  I would guess AOL will open their messenger after their deal with Google.  Yahoo and Microsoft are talking to enabling their clients to talk together which hopefully doesn’t mean a Yahoo/Microsoft IM gorilla holding back user choice.  Use the standards available, open your clients up allow for federation and let the world choose their client.  Its not about the IM service provided but the value added services your client can provide.  Is MSN Messenger scared that their client isn’t good enough?  Will we see XMPP support in the final MSN 8 release?  Lets hope.

With all the planning starting to heat up for the wedding and a lot of the guests spread over the world, I thought it would be right (and geeky) to set up some sort of an internet source of information for our wedding. So as of two days ago, our wedding blog is up and running. Nice domain name too!

After a largish search for domain names, I have setup my family with blogs. My sister (who is moving to the UK at the end of January) now has an active blog. My parents are now blogging too which is pretty interesting. How come they get all into blogging and all this once I leave their house? When I lived at home, there was no talk about blogging. No one cared. Oh well, what can I do?

I’ve been looking for a Skype solution for my house that doesn’t mean carting my laptop around.  Bluetooth is an option but I still need to be around my laptop.  I had a XDA IIs but this crashed too frequently and the WIFI card in it sucked.  So I was a little stuck for options.

Until today, when I found out about the Netgear Skype phone.  No need for a computer, Skype is builtin.  No need for wires because it has a wifi card.  Charge it, login and phone away.  This is the first device in hopefully many that will start to come out supporting Skype natively instead of communicating with the client on your PC.  The phone is pretty impressive; its not available yet, but I will be one of the first to purchase it when it does become available.  Look for a steep price tag though, this is a lot of gadget.

I’m looking for an old computer. A working machine, hard drives unneccesary. I’m willing to pick it up from anywhere in the London area. It can pretty much be the slowest machine in existance as its only going to be running as a file server but I will accept Pentium 4s.

Where on earth in London can I get an XBox 360?  Not a core system, but the full premium console.  This has to be the most frustrating search I have ever seen.  Game has started getting them in but only the core versions.  Any help out there?