Fractal Dreams

I’m not really an IM (instant messaging) guy.

I mean, not that I have a bunch of friends to IM with, and the only things I see when I log in are all “OFFLINE”.  Add that to the fact that Yahoo Messenger was so infamous as an access route for malware, and that until just recently, I was operating by the minute on a prepaid dial-up line, so there wasn’t much reason to, you know, connect. (Bleh.)

But there were times that I needed to chat with someone online. You know, for schoolwork. So I turned to the web-based alternative, meebo. That worked fine, I guess, and I eventually forgot about it. Then I switched to Linux, and about the same time, I felt the urge to chat with some of the guys for old time’s sake. That’s what unemployment and a DSL line does to you.

So I tried meebo again, but looks like web traffic is heavy there, since it takes forever to load. (In fact, I had never seen it load. Most of the time, I just got pissed off and closed the browser.) My old college buddy was using the Yahoo Web Messenger one time, so I tried using it.

It loaded, thankfully, and I was chatting again. But I found the ever-changing ads on the side to be irritating, since they load on and on and on,  and it’s really distracting.  And not only that.  Linux is famous for being stable. But when I use this site, sometimes the whole box freezes. No movement from the mouse, keyboard, screen, nothing. The whole thing just hangs, and no error messages. I really don’t know if the Yahoo WM is causing the problem, but I haven’t been able to induce the lockup in any other way. Tsk. Don’t tell me even the web messenger version is jinxed?

So any other Linux users encountered the same problem? Or has this been already addressed? Cause, I really don’t read online that much. Poor uninformed me.