First thing, I sat down at my desk this morning to find my ICQ account 102% inaccessible. Password wouldn't work. Password recovery didn't recognize my email. Either my account was stolen or it's been banned or it's just disappeared from the system. Why someone would want to steal a throwaway account with four friends on it, I have no idea, but ICQ has definitely been a spam-trap lately.

On a related note, I'm hoping Digsby comes up with some kind of challenge-response plugin. Trillian had one, and it worked brilliantly. If an unsolicited user messaged me, they'd get an auto-response along the line of "Prove that you're a human by sending me the number 123". If they did it, then their messages would go through and I could whitelist 'em so they wouldn't get challenged again. It was absurdly simple and it filtered out 100% of bots.

Anyway, my new ICQ number is now 454167184 if you wanna add me.



Second, I must add a couple of follow-ups to my Google Chrome points below. . .

1. Chrome loves cores. I ran it on my single core Athlon-64 machine downstairs and it wasn't nearly as snappy. Running it on the four-core machine upstairs, it was handily faster than Firefox. On a single core, it was about the same or even marginally slower than Firefox. Its little "one process per page" scheme I mentioned below definitely gives it a multi-core boost.

2. Chrome loves Vista. It's definitely designed to merge seamlessly with the Vista look.

3. Chrome does have its own task manager. Right-click on any empty space on the titlebar and you'll get a menu item for the task manager where you can kill tabs more easily and cleanly than with the Windows task manager. In addition, the Chrome task manager shows off the traffic on each tab, which is pretty cool.