The latest Trillian Astra update has just added in email checking. So I thought I'd try it out for gmail. The trouble with gmail is that I have a few accounts for it. The Gmail notifier that you can download only checks one account every 2 minutes that that's it. So I have the You've Got Gmail plugin in the old version of Trillian checking my RP account. Which is a bit of a pain because it means I have to have two versions of Trillian open and the old one has an annoying habit of crashing. You've Got Gmail doesn't yet work in Astra.

You have to be logged into google in Astra for it to work. Which is fine, since google IM actually works in Astra, unlike in 3.1 (and it's not a Jabber plugin either, it comes as standard). It tells you if you have mail instantly. And by instantly I mean if I have my inbox open in a Firefox tab, Astra will tell me I have email before the tab does. It can cope with telling you if you have a new email in a conversation where you already have one unread email too. And it does my email sound, so I can tell I have new email. So all that's great. Well, I don't need it to check that often, but I don't get that many emails on my RP account, so I'm hardly going to complain about that.

What's less good is that it doesn't tell you the time stamp on the email. Sometimes I leave mine unread and just go to the page, and I can't tell, in that case if it's telling me the email I know about is there, or I've had a new one. But more of a problem than that is that the subject says 'Reply to your comment/post' and that it's from ljnotify@livejournal or whatever the address is. Which is unhelpful. At least YGG tells you what LJ name it's from. Which doesn't necessarily tell you which conversation it's for, but it narrows it down a bit.

I don't know, I still can't decide whether it's liveable with despite the faults. Although the main problem I have a the moment with Astra (apart from still no support for AIM chatrooms) is that the skin you get has coloured circles for different IMs. Which Trillian seem to like for some strange reason. I can never work out which is which, so I usually have a skin where they're the relevant symbols - which is much easier to understand. But being an alpha release, there are no skins yet. I am looking forward to the day when there are.

I've been meaning to write a post about this for ages. With the stuff I watch or read, I keep finding parent & child relationships where they're not actually related (or at least, don't have that direct relationship) fascinating. I've got a perfectly normal family going on, so there's no psychological reason like that, I just like it.

melliyna asked:
1. In your fandom(s), what are your favourite parent/child relationships? (biological or non biological parents and children) Why?
so I thought I'd answer here, rather than in a comment.
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