MacMerc.com: iChat Tips, Tricks and Hacks looks at the generally disappointing bag of addons that have appeared for iChat, a topic I’ve bemoaned in the past.

I recently started dabbling in IRC a bit again, and started with mIRC, a geeks’ client if ever I saw one, and have settled, for now, on the considerably more Macish Fire, a multi-protocol chat client that supports AIM and IRC as well as MSN Chat and whatever else.

It’s particularly clever in its’ implementation of IRC chat channels. Create a buddy, name it after the channel, enter the channel’s settings, and that’s it.

Given that iChat is a product that’s been encumbered (and enabled) by AIM-related contracts, I can understand the lack of multiprotocol support from Apple. But given that, as MacMerc covers, others have written plugins to enfixen the wee bairn, might we not expect multiprotocol plugins to raisie their wee sparklin’ eyes?

(I have no idea what the heck is going on with the pseudo-Scots grammar and vocab. None whatsoever, and I further disclaim all responsibility.)

At work, I’ve been trying out Trillian, in between swearing fits concerning documentation and arbitrary dialog-entry relationships on the part of the Win XP team. It seems to work just fine, and the swooshy-yet-somehow-not-terribly-obtrusive eyecandy it comes with is neat too.

Edith Frost – Discography. A fellow MeFite and Chicago-based firefly watcher.

dealmac and Mac Prices are much on my bookmark list of late.

dealmac’s subsidary dealram is also on the hitlist.

I have to say, the bundles are leaving me kinda cold, on the whole. Ah well. The rule is wait until you can’t wait, right?

danelope survives the fires of the night of July 30th – August 1st.

[cue Dragnetty/Parry Masonish trombone sting]

Can he take another night?

(Please note among his links is a live stream of SPD radio chatter. Cool! Among the linked streams at the site is the Jersey City PD, also having a busy day today.)

One man’s treasure-from-trash is a Centralia tourist attraction – The Seattle Times profiles Richard Tracy, “Richart”, and his wonderful folk-art assemblage, on his property in Centralia.

(I noticed this as we were having lunch at the Pig-n-Whistle in Greenwood. We were there whilst I scheduled my driver’s test.)

Several years ago, my old band played an Oktoberfest in Centralia-Chehalis for three nights and during the days we poked arounf the town. One of the sights we saw was Richart’s magnificent pile.

Richart talked to all of us at length.

Here’s the man himself.

When you’ve got to feel it in your bones…: MoFi links to A Murder of Scarecrows, a lovely little flash game much indebted to Tim Burton and Edward Gorey. Lovely.

EmoteMail, an MIT emotive-context experiment.

[via Memepool.]

I’ll give this a whirl, but I think I am fundamentally disinterested in the concept. When I write an email, I might very well be interested to know the information captured and presented in the client here – but do I wish to share that info with others? Hell no!

I want the words in the email to carry the emotional context, and especially if the message has its’ genesis in a moment of anger I almost always want to wring that anger out and replace it with humor, self-deprecation, wit, sarcasm, and politeness.

Now, if I could hack the client to replace the realtime data with emotional expressions and evidence of typing intensities that I specify interactively in order to shape the message, now that’s something I’d probably be interested in, at least until the app was widespread and people understood it to be a medium.

And, in a completely unrelated topic, I wish there was a universal and customizable control-menu app for OS X, so, among other things, I could highlight a word and paste a well-formed href anchor tag around the selection.

Also: where the hell is my freakin’ hovercar, people? Huh? I mean, come on!

heliocentric is the way to be. Congrats to Eric and Rose.