Since Livejournal's ability to keep their various services actually running has gotten so much worse this year, I've started divesting myself of reliance on them. Last month, LJ went a full five days without updating RSS feeds, so now I no longer use LJ as my feed aggregator (I'm using NetNewsWire now; it's ok). And last week, LJ was totally down for 4+ hours, meaning that I couldn't use my LJ OpenID token to log in to other sites, so now I'm running my own OpenID provider too (phpMyID, it's really easy).

My question is, what do I use to replace LJ's Jabber server? (Other than Google Chat, obviously.) I'd like my Jabber ID to be "jwz@jwz.org" instead of "jwz@livejournal.com", and I suspect the only way to accomplish that is to run my own Jabber server. Said server would only ever have one person connected to it and would peer with the rest of the network. I tried installing Djabberd, but there is basically nothing in the way of documentation or examples, so I couldn't get it to do anything.

(I imagine the lack of reliability that seems to be Livejournal's new way of doing things -- plus the fact that the site feels like a ghost town now -- will eventually cause me to move this blog to somewhere else. I'm not sure where, though. All the options are bad. Run it on your own site: get no comments but lots of spam. Just use Facebook: effectively limited to friends-only posts. Bleh.)

Dear Lazyweb, what should I use to read RSS feeds?

Given that almost all of my friends have given up on using Livejournal for actual blogging, the only thing I really use it for these days (besides hosting my own posts) is as an RSS aggregator for the 200+ feeds I subscribe to.

Lately Livejournal seems utterly incapable of keeping their feed poller running. Last week, no feeds updated for more than 5 days, and now it's happening again: it's been more than 12 hours since any feed has updated.

I wish I could just use Mail.app as my feed reader, but it doesn't work for shit. It re-posts un-changed entries all the time.

I gather a lot of people use Google Reader, but for previously discussed reasons, I refuse to log in to any Google account. So forget that.

Are there any free OSX desktop apps for this that don't suck? Or other free web sites that don't suck?

Update: Almost everybody is recommending NetNewsWire. It seems ok so far. This may end up being the final nail in the coffin of LiveJournal for me.

I thought you might be interested in what happens to computing machinery around me. It's part of a field that I emit. Or perhaps a secretion. But I think it's a field. A failfield. I have been using this particular keyboard for just under eight years:

Yes, those keys used to say "N" and "M" on them. Wearing the paint off your keycaps? That's for amateurs. Not only do I wear the paint off, I inadvertently carve scars into the plastic. But it's the left "Alt" key that deserves special notice:

It is nearly worn through. That's just how meta I am, man.

Wait, did this song just include the line, "every quotation that dribbled from your mouth like a final, fatal livejournal entry"?

Yes. Yes it did.

I think that all of you (you with the jerking knees) who piped up to say "but that's not a BLIIIIIMP!!" should take a moment to realize that you just did the equivalent of complaining that I got Data's Starfleet rank wrong.

I hope you all think about what you've done.

PS, yes I know the difference, but BLIMP is a much better word.

The tubes are dumb.

1. People I actually know in person: you should go sign up on SonicLiving and friend me there. It's a concert-recommending web site that seems to actually work pretty well. (Let it read your iTunes. I recommend the "5 or more tracks" checkbox.)

   If I don't know you, I'll probably ignore you. So make it obvious who you actually are, please. Left to its own devices, all SonicLiving tells me about you is first-name-last-initial, and that's really not enough to go on.

2. People who work on social network sites: You know what we, your users, are really sick of doing? Re-finding and re-friending all of our friends every time the intertubes spit out another whack-a-mole social network site. Why has your company not yet implemented brad's Social Graph API? Won't you get on that already please? Pretty fucking please?

3. People who work on social network sites, part 2: It's great that all of you are OpenID providers now. it's completely useless that none of you are OpenID consumers. What the hell, people.

4. I dug through Keychain Access and my cookies to try and track down all the sites I have a login on that have a notion of "friends", and "claimed ownership" of them on jwz.org. You do that like this:
   <link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml">
   <link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/jwz/">
   
   <link rel="me" href="http://jwz.livejournal.com/">
   <link rel="me" href="http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=789364605">
   <link rel="me" href="http://www.myspace.com/yes_that_jwz">
   <link rel="me" href="http://slashdot.org/~Jamie+Zawinski/">
   <link rel="me" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jwz">
   <link rel="me" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jwz/">
   <link rel="me" href="http://tourb.us/fan/jwz">
   <link rel="me" href="http://profiles.aim.com/yesthatjwz">
   <link rel="me" href="http://twitter.com/jwz">
   <link rel="me" href="http://www.last.fm/user/yesthatjwz">
   <link rel="me" href="http://www.ilike.com/user/jwz">
   <link rel="me" href="http://delicious.com/jwz">
   <link rel="me" href="http://sanfrancisco.going.com/jwz">
   <link rel="me" href="http://sonicliving.com/user/13961">
   <link rel="me" href="http://upcoming.yahoo.com/user/235495/">
   <link rel="me" href="http://pownce.com/jwz/">
   <link rel="me" href="http://www.advogato.org/person/jwz/">
   <link rel="me" href="http://www.plaxo.com/directory/profile/201864677621/5182860c/">
   <link rel="me" href="http://friendfeed.com/jwz">
   

   But that doesn't really do anything, since no sites pay attention to any of this. If you add that kind of stuff and then run your site through the Google social graph API demo, it doesn't actually find most of them. If you run it through the Plaxo graph searcher, it spiders them all, but you then discover that almost none of them are even providing rel="me" links back to your claimed home page.

5. If you use any of those sites, feel free to friend me (though as you can tell, I barely use any of them.) Again, if I actually know you in real life, make it clear to me who you are or I'll probably ignore you.

   Possibly the reason that I barely use any of them is that they're kind of useless. But possibly the reason is that it's just too much hassle to re-create the friend tree on each of them. It's hard to tell.

Ow.

Way back when, it was typing that did me in. I never had trouble with mice. But now my mouse is messing me up. My fancypants chair-arm-mounted split keyboard has dual trackpads on it, but I hate trackpads. I've been trying to use them all day and they just drive me crazy.

I have a table-like mouse-pad clipped to the edge of my desk so that the mouse is lower than the desk surface, down near the keyboard, but I think I've been leaning on my elbow when using it. Which is, you know, bad.

I had one of those horizontally-gripped mice for a while (in the picture at that link), which sounded like a good idea, but after a couple of months, I found it even less comfortable than a flat mouse.

I wish this keyboard had a trackpoint. But even then, I'd really miss having a tilting scroll wheel.

Bah. And ow.

Am I being singled out, or is there a new plague of AIM bots going around? I used to get prodded by these stupid things every couple of weeks, but I've blocked a dozen of them in the last week. This time it's usually a bot with "salmon" in its name.

Remember the good old days, when if you configured your web browser to remember cookies for a site forever, you wouldn't have to log in again all the fucking time? Gosh, those were the days. Before sites kept a useless shit-ton of server-side session state that they felt the need to constantly expire on you. Or before they decided to log you out every N days for "security" reasons.

Also remember when if you told your web browser to remember your user name and password for web sites, that worked? When people actually used HTTP authentication instead of crazy-assed bullshit involving JavaScript and Flash and turning off autocomplete, because they know better than you? Yeah. Those were the days.

Dear Interweb: fucking knock that shit off.

Dear people who leave yourselves logged in on instant messenger, but don't have your preferences set to mark you idle/away after 5 or 10 minutes of inactivity, so that it always looks like you're there when you're not:

Fucking knock that shit off.

Update: What she said.

That was a loooong one.
It was long but very gentle.
Very mild, but lasted a while.
Long, and gentle, but that's still the most violent one I've felt.
It seemed kinda long.
Hooray, I actually FELT that one!
First one I've felt in several years as well.
I've still yet to feel one.
How is that possible? Just in the past year we've had several that made me go WHOA -- at least two of them woke me from a dead sleep.
I give it a five.

My mail server was being wonky over the last few weeks, and was bouncing mail every now and then (depending on which server it happened to route through.) So if you wrote me recently and I didn't write back, please resend.

Yes, I know jwz.org expired. No, I am not receiving email.

Update: It's renewed, but I guess it'll take a while for DNS to sort itself out.
Update: Fixed (20-ish hours later...)

If you've been getting a whole bunch of spam in the last few days relayed from Livejournal's servers, it's because they decided to turn off all their damned spam filters. And call it a "feature". The fix for this is to completely disable your useless @livejournal.com email address. But this doesn't have a preferences checkbox, so it requires some Admin Console hoop-jumping. This won't affect comment emails.

Update: Ok, lisa says they didn't actually change anything about the filtering they do. But, I started getting relayed spam a few days ago that I never got before, and turning off the @livejournal.com address will presumably fix that, since I never used that address anyway.

File under "jwz@aol.com":   http://www.myspace.com/jwz.

As of earlier this month, there are more than 2048 LJ users who have me on their friends lists. That's two kilolosers. It is once again time for you to explain yourselves. Yeah, I'm talking to you:

1. Who are you and why?
2. Recommend some music that you think I would enjoy.

Post a comment with a fictional memory of you and me.