Nope, but I've finally made a life that works for me with a job I love that lets me travel the world like I want and still accomplish something meaningful. :)
To me, his message was to always be thinking of what you desire. What you desire isn't the same as what others desire. Everyone's definition of happiness varies. I'm trying to say if everyone lived the message that Alan Watts so eloquently articulated, then there would be no "sacrifice". What one person thinks of as a sacrifice wasn't really a sacrifice in the eyes of the person who made it because they did what made them happy so that enables you to do what makes you happy.
Because people don't live according to his message right now, we make ourselves miserable by trying to repay the debts of other people's sacrifices for us. Rather, I would have it so we pay those debts forward to the next generation by enabling them to do what makes them happy, not holding them to some standard of what we think makes people happy just because we raised them or provided them with the means or money to do something they enjoyed.
Just to clarify: If you think you need a client because you are currently using an XMPP client with your gmail account, then you do NOT need to switch. See bullet point 1 — XMPP _clients_ are still supported.
Google enthusiastically kills legacy and niche products. I'm making wild guesses, but I don't think we'll have support for XMPP clients in the long run.
They're saying XMPP clients still works with the App Engine XMPP service (which is "An App Engine application can send and receive chat messages to and from any XMPP-compatible chat messaging service, such as Google Talk"). The email says that Google's new service no longer support XMPP.
That extension is essentially broken (running iceWM), as the text input box dips below the taskbar. Furthermore, it requires chrome to be open. I don't necessarily want to keep my browser open at all times, nor do I care to use my browser as a chat client. (Also, what happens if switch to some non-standard browser? There is no way that my choice of browser should impact my ability to chat.)
I'm trying to stay open-minded, but so far I really dislike this product. I hope gtalk stays open.
I think the Chrome app is an excellent cross platform solution (written once, easily maintainable). As for the protocol I don't think it is practical or even possible to built this sort of all encompassing communications platform on top of XMPP (see the competition).
I think the chrome app is one aspect of a cross-platform solution. But what if I'd like to chat without opening chrome?
I'll cross my fingers for a Hangouts API that allows me to write a standalone client. However, if chatting through a semi-broken browser extension (or memory intensive gmail tab) are my only options, then I guess the service isn't for me. I think the reason I'm annoyed is that I have a lot of important contacts on gtalk, so migrating away will be a challenge.
I know change is inevitable, that the service is free, and that they want to offer a better product. Perhaps my use cases are just too expensive to support in the long run.
Worse: I couldn't get into the WLAN (students only), so I could only use my phone's Internet connection w/384Kbit/s -- but that was good, you get so effective with such a low bandwidth (using Google's mobile client, doing only must searches etc.)
You're right, outlasting everyone is a way to suck less. But it's not a real way to be the best. Being the best and sucking less have similar starting steps but very different ending steps. Where you stop on your list and write "repeat" is where the journey to being the best just begins.
I don't know about you, but I never want to just be mediocre. I want to be really damn good at whatever it is I try. Even knowing that one of the greats could "come out of retirement" and still out-do me is not good enough for me. That's just patience resulting in complacency and mediocrity.
I think we agree, but are just missing on semantics. What I mean is that once you get to a level of mediocrity, there's a whole new level of things for you to try out and suck at. Most of these you're not able to try at from the start or you're not ready to try at the start, but as you grow and become mediocre, you can start to reach a little higher.
If you repeat this enough times, you'll outlast enough people to the point where you're pretty damn good at something.
