Hide and Seek

Holes in the Google chat invisibility cloak..
Or
..maybe you have an alternate explanation!?

Spice up you Gtalk

Here are some little known/ unknown tricks for all you Gtalk users out there. You'd know many of them, but there are lots more that you don't too..

Text Formatting:
1) Bold: Enclosing text within asterisks (*) makes it appear in bold face.
So the next time, try *GTH !!* instead!
2) Italics: Enclosing text with underscores(_) italicizes the text.
Ergo '_Abbey sale_' would be easier to comprehend than just 'Abbey sale'!

Shortcuts:
Here is a list of really handy shortcuts.

• Windows + ESC: Open Google Talk (if it's minimized, or in the tray)
• ALT + ESC: Minimize the current window
• ESC: Close the current window
• TAB: Switch between multiple chat windows
• CTRL + I: Same as TAB
• SHIFT + TAB: Same as TAB but in reverse order
• CTRL + TAB: Same as SHIFT + TAB
• CTRL + Mousewheel up/down: Change the font-size in the typing window
• F9: Open Gmail to send an email to your friend
• F11: Start a call with your friend
• F12: Stop the current call

Mozilla firefox addon:
In case you'd prefer to chat from your browser (read Firefox) itself (because you are either too lazy to login into gmail just to chat or you cant install Gtalk on your office computer) then grag the gTalk Sidebar addon. This nifty little fellow launches as a sidebar (by pressing Alt+g) in the browser window itself and lets you chat conveniently (and clandestinely). Shortcuts for the chat window tabs are the same as those of Firefox. Having Google Toolbar makes signing in that much more hassle free.

Themes:
There are a number of themes and addons available out there. Mytheme is the one that I use and really love using! It lets you change the chat window background and has got tons of really cute and adorable smileys.[Don't forget to check out all possible smileys listed in the help file]
Extended Talk is another addon worth trying. It offers a wide gamut of features as compared to Mytheme. Worth a specific mention is the (independent) control of chat and main window transparency(of course, at the cost of higher CPU usage) which dilly dalliers in office will find really handy.

Winamp 5.5 'Now Playing' hack:
In case you do use Winamp 5.5x and find that Google Talk hangs every time you set your status to 'Show current music track', then there is an easy fix. It has been reported as a bug and an easy fix has also been suggested. Just go to your winamp installation folder (C:\Program Files\Winamp\ by default) and create a file named "winamp.m3u" (For nubes: Create a new text document and rename it). Restart Gtalk and lo and behold.. You're ready to sport your current track!

If there is more you want to know from me, just drop me a comment. And in case you are hungry for more, I suggest you look up the Google Talk Fan Site.

Inspiration Gtalk...

There is one thing in life that i respect more than anything else..The Human Mind. The Beautiful Mind. Its not really surprising that many of us actually fail to see the point. It takes effort, time and above all, tenacious curiosity to do it. But to those of us who have discovered it, the experience I'm sure would have been unsurpassed. This post is first of the (hopefully)series, wherein i shall pen down some insight that I have personally gained into this amazing thing called the human mind. Not some ground breaking revelations but interesting all the same.

Having spents hours at an end chatting on Gtalk, some things have become become glaringly evident. So, much so that I' m longing to devote an entire post to it. Here goes...

Hidden behind the 'screen', an online Mr.X ( sex no bar, and I'm seious!), is way different from an offline Mr.X. Its not a conscious effort to project oneself as someone he/she is not, but rather an outcome of a beautiful mind game. Online, its an alltogether different arena, a different game. When you communicate with a person, in person, the mind is at work processing a countless different things of which the owner is not even remotely aware of. But he/she reacts to it all the same. When you think that you are just talking the person, your mind is busy doing things much more than just listening to the verbal communication. There is a lot of non-verbal communication that goes on in tandem with the more evident verbal part. The mind picks up subtle information, or rather tries to infer information from the other persons body language, facial expressions, hand gestures, tone, etc. The processing and the resulting information greatly varies from individual to individual. Like for example, different people form different opinions about the same lecturer even though they all hear the same thing. The mind rewires and reorganizes itself constanly to adapt to its environs, hoping to help it better cope with circumstances that are to come. This, to me, seems to be a natural outcome of Darwins Theory of Evolution. The better I am at reading you (not just listening to you) the more I understand not just what you say, but also what you actually think. So naturally, the more we communicate. the better I get at it. Hence, during an actual face to face communication, the mind is not only busy reading signals, but is also busy sending the right signals across. In a nutshell, this seemingly innocuous talk is much more than a simple exchange of words. Mind you, the brain goes into an overdrive if you are communicating with someone of the opposite gender. There is an entire new spectrum of data processing that needs to be, whether you like it or not ...Probably one of the reasons why heroes get tongue-tied when trying to propose the heroine !?

But that is not the case when you are online. All that the brain is doing is processing a plain, flat, string of text. It means what it means. Period. It does not have to give a damn about anything else and so is at ease and does what is does best...think. The net outcome of all this that when online, I feel much more at ease expressing myself. I freely put across whatever I have to, without any fear of misjudgement or any urgency of having to be spontaneous . I am actually being more of myself.

So, the next time you are online chatting your time away, just keep this in the back of your mind. You may be a very appeasing and loved character online(or god forbid, a despicable and blunt person)....but then, life is a game played offline. Its an all together different arena, and a different mind game...