Saturday, July 14, 2007

Mac IM woes

Back in my PC days, I had been using a combination of Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger to see and talk to my parents. This meant that come chat time every weekend there was a fair amount of fumbling with the microphone and webcam. This was one of my things I was looking forward to avoiding with my shiny new iMac. After all it has a built in camera and microphone.

However, I have been sorely disappointed -- for no fault of Apple.

Yahoo messenger (v3.0 beta 1) for the Mac supposedly supports video and chat. However, I have had no luck getting it to play nice with the messenger (on Windows) being used by my parents. While they can see my video I see nothing from their side.

After a bit of Googling, I found that a lot of dissatisfied users have switched to Fire or Adium. While Fire has been put out (hehe), Adium clearly states that it doesn't support voice or video and -- for the foreseeable future -- won't do so. In fact, they refer the reader to gaim-vv.

Now gaim-vv seems pretty dead since the last update was made in Oct 2005. The last note there said that they are going to merge back to the parent gaim project. So I tried their web site which and found that they are now calling themselves Pidgin. Reading about it brought me back a full circle as they redirect Mac users to...Adium :-(.

However there seems some hope albeit requiring a bit of manual work. I need to try it out.

Sunday, July 08, 2007

Supplies for school -- What a racket!

This is a subject that rankles me every time we have to deal with it. I am talking about bringing stationery supplies for "your child" (I'll explain the quotes in a bit).

Here is the verbatim list for 2nd graders at my daughter's school. This is representative of what it is for all other grades too:

3 100 ct black marble composition books
1 16 ct. Crayola crayons
2 Pocket folders with brads (red)
1 5" blunt scissors
4 2 each pocket only folders (blue and yellow)
1 100 ct wide rule notebook
36 #2 Dixon Ticonderoga pencils
24 Ziploc brand quartz bag (A-L)

OK, this is too much, I can't go further. Why do they need three composition books? That is in addition to 100 pages of wide rule notebook. In first grade we were asked to bring in two composition books and by the end of the year they had gone through less than half of one. What happened to to the other one?

This brings me my earlier statement : stationery supplies for "your child".

I believe that everyone is asked to bring in supplies to supplement for those you are unable to. I am sorry, why am subsidizing everyone else's kids' education? And the gall to demand that I bring Crayola crayons and Ziploc bags only to be pawned off to other kids. Why should I bring in black composition books. What's wrong with blue? Do you really think each kid is going to go through 36 pencils in 180 days?!!

If schools paid more attention to what they teach and how well the kids are learning and less on the supplies our kids would be much better off.