el rinconcito

Finally, it is Thanksgiving Day. Lots of family, friends, wine, iced tea, riding around in the car, it's a good time.

Every Spanish book I've used over the past quarter century to learn Spanish always says that Thanksgiving is something like "día de acción de dar gracias." What a tortured phrase that is: "day of action of giving thanks." Try to say that quickly ten times. I guess official books have to put things that way.

I have lots of Mexican friends here. Without fail, they all call "Thanksgiving"........Thanksgiving! They might hit the vowels a little harder than I would, but they all say, "Thanksgiving." Plain and simple.

There are some cool perks for being hooked up with the Mex network here. I'm talking about the Christmas tamales. It's the best possible thing you could ever put in your mouth. I'm nice to some of my friends all year just to get a plate of them once a year. Is that evil?

I don't run my opera unite services that often, but I had them on today and actually got a note on my "fridge." Yay! Thanks Carol.

Opera explains the Unite services in detail here. I'm primarily into messaging and communicating with others, so some of the unite services suit me. Unite is included in the latest release of the Opera browser by default, though you do have to turn each app on, which is good, so you aren't running anything you didn't intend to.

When I am home, I leave my computer running 24/7 with all my messengers on. I like chatting in real time, but I also like getting messages when I get up in the morning that friends have left me overnight. The Opera Unite "fridge" is kind of cool for this.

I also used the "photo sharing" application twice today to serve a few pics to friends in places where my usual method is blocked, i.e. flickr. You know some countries block flickr and youtube, right? This gets right around that, as does e-mail, usually.

So, there is some fun and usefulness for me in Opera Unite, but there are a few hindrances.

Very few people, myself included, run Unite for more then a few minutes or hours at a time. Those who do almost invariably leave the password setting turned on, so you cannot casually view a picture or leave a message. A password is great for many situations, but I usually just want to show or view a few casual pics right then and there! Asking for a password makes me move on.

Also, just a couple of beta versions ago, leaving Opera Unite running all the time would eventually make the browser freeze up on me. That seems to be fixed now, but I am still not accustomed to leaving a web browser running all the time.

Well, there ya have it. I like it. It's cool, but I haven't popped the cork out of the bottle yet. It's new stuff, though. Maybe the richest potential is still to come.

Opera Software still has a sense of humor all the time. See the image below. It says, "Opera Unite is running fine." That's cute!