Scoutseven

Finally Found a Decent IM Aggregator for Mac

While perusing TechCrunch yesterday (the must read breaking news/reviews on useful tools Blog), I came across a reference for Adium, which appears to be the best open source (or otherwise) IM aggregator for the Mac that I’ve come across.

It supports:

• AOL Instant Messenger (Including ICQ and .Mac)
• Jabber (Including Google Talk)
• MSN Messenger
• Yahoo! Messenger (Including Yahoo! Japan)
• Bonjour (Compatible with iChat)
• Gadu-Gadu
• Novell Groupwise
• Lotus Sametime

The downside is that they don’t support audio, video or very good file sharing. But you can always use your native clients for that (iChat, Skype, bla bla). What it does have is a very decent user interface that aggregates all your IM buddies from various services into one unified list. And from what I can tell, it’s chat features and preferences are almost identical to iChat.

Very handy.

Bill Moyers to the Class of 2006: “We’re Sorry”

The other night my 88-year-old grandmother told me, “I wanted to leave the world better than I found it, and I’ve failed.”

I was so struck and saddened by her words that I found myself fully arguing with her. “No, we’re fine!!!!” (yeah, right).

I mean, who wants their grandma going to the grave thinking their life’s work was for nothing?!

It quickly became clear that this wasn’t a matter of hope or despair, but simply how difficult it is to know that she will not see the end of this particular cycle. While I may see better times (and I believe I will), she may not even see George Bush get booted from office.

She had recently heard a speech by Bill Moyers, which quite beautifully reflects this particular dilemma.

Addressed to the class of 2006 at Hamilton College, this is the kind of honesty, heart and integrity rarely found these days. She appreciated that tremendously. And since she didn’t think anyone else in the world would appreciate it too, I’m sharing it here.

From her generation to mine…

I have been thinking seriously about what I might say to you in this Baccalaureate service. Frankly, I’m not sure anyone from my generation should be saying anything to your generation except, “We’re sorry. We’re really sorry for the mess you’re inheriting. We are sorry for the war in Iraq. For the huge debts you will have to pay for without getting a new social infrastructure in return. We’re sorry for the polarized country. The corporate scandals. The corrupt politics. Our imperiled democracy. We’re sorry for the sprawl and our addiction to oil and for all those toxins in the environment. Sorry about all this, class of 2006. Good luck cleaning it up.”

You’re going to have your hands full, frankly. I don’t need to tell you of the gloomy scenarios being written for your time. Three books on my desk right now question whether human beings will even survive the 21st century. Just listen to their titles: The Long Emergency: Surviving the Convergence Catastrophe; Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed; The Winds of Change: Weather and the Destruction of Civilizations.

These are just three of the recent books that make the apocalypse prophesied in the Bible…the Revelations of St. John…look like child’s play. I won’t summarize them for you except to say that they spell out Doomsday scenarios for global catastrophe. There’s another recent book called The Revenge of Gaia that could well have been subtitled, “The Earth Strikes Back,” because the author, James Lovelock, says human consumption, our obsession with technology, and our habit of “playing God” are stripping bare nature’s assets until the Earth’s only consolation will be to take us down with her. Before this century is over, he writes, “Billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be kept in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.” So there you have it: The future of the race, to be joined in a final and fatal march of the penguins.

Full Speech >

Stolen Passwords

Last Monday my laptop, phone and digital camera were stolen while I was taking a nice stroll with a colleague in Golden Gate Park.

I do know better, but it was such a beautiful day. And I somehow thought the locked trunk of a car was still a (somewhat) safe zone.

Nope.

It’s been an unfortunate lesson in loss, Zen, and gratitude (yes, I was mostly backed up).

After the initial shock of discovering both our computers stolen from a car that had no signs of tampering whatsoever, my colleague and I spent the evening bemoaning bookmarks and Firefox’s password tracking.

As two tech heads who conduct a lot of our personal and professional business online, our lives were there for the taking, perfectly memorized.

There are two passwords I never write down — my bank info and my primary email password. I am grateful for that.

The rest were kept in a little text file on my hard drive called “info.”

Nice and secure.

Luckily, whoever stole my computer appears to have little interest in purchasing plane tickets, deleting ScoutSeven’s entire email list, or hacking my website. Most likely, they wiped the hard drive pretty immediately and went from there. So I try not to get too creaped out by the goody basket of voyeuristic potential that my computer offers, including personal writing, photos, financial data, etc.

Yeah, I know. I should be using multiple encryptions and some kind of vaulted password manager. Or, I should somehow be able to memorize 50-100 unique and unhackable passwords. My friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation would tell me not to use the same password twice and to never, ever keep them electronically available, but what’s a girl to do? Even after the hard lesson, I’m not entirely sure how to balance security with the fact that my brain is too full of details already.

I am still letting Firefox track my passwords. Tho there are certain sites I never bookmark (financial, etc.).

And I’m considering forcing a secure login to my computer after sleep (as I rarely shut the thing down).

What do you do?

Thoughts and best practices appreciated (Mac friendly please…).