Its not a personal site, per se, but its my YouTube page for my family's little cabin videos and trail cams. Love making them and its the one consistent thing I do, other than walk my dog, that makes me happy.
US tax attorney here. I write a lot on the subject of EU VAT fraud (mostly in Tax Notes and Tax Notes International). I'm currently looking at a number of cases. Would love to be involved, if you don't mind a remote American. In any event, would love to chat. Andrew[at]Leahey.org
I don't think so - I believe the original GAIM client used the open TOC protocol, e.g. from TiK which was the official Tk-based AIM client, some years before Gamera.
You are correct. At the time, AOL had released TiK and documented the TOC protocol but TiK was a bit slow and clunky, so Mark Spencer, the original author of GAIM, implemented faster client in C using GTK for the UI. OSCAR support came later because OSCAR supported some additional presence features (I think?? It's been a while...) and because ICQ also used OSCAR.
Pidgin and libpurple also have roots in another project called Everybuddy which was one of the first multi-protocol integrated free software chat clients. As I recall, Torrey Searle started Everybuddy because he was having a hard time getting traction on adding multiple protocols to GAIM at the time for a variety of reasons my hazy memory doesn't really remember.
For a couple of years after GAIM started to get plugin and multiple protocol support, much code was shared between GAIM and Everybuddy, and then eventually effort centered around just one of the code bases which eventually became Pidgin and libpurple.
Source: I was involved in GAIM early on and Torrey is a friend from those days.
I remember when they shut down TOC. I think that was close to the time it was renamed gaim to pidgin. My whole college career surrounded aol away messages.
One time I put an away message of “Dave Matthew’s coming to play at our school. Click here for tickets” and directed them to goatse. Yeah I was super cool.
Lawyer here. Your best bet is a friend's recommendation, backed up with at least there not being anything negative about them in terms of reviews online. Not every one of us pushes for positive reviews from clients, though, and for the most part you have to to get one, so don't make not having any reviews a dealbreaker. Also make sure they haven't been sanctioned, you can search your state's disciplinary records -- its all public.
If its for an issue that is niche, you should see if they have published in the area in question. Gives you a decent indication of their standing in that field.
This kind of revolving door stuff has been going on for as long as there has been government and private industry. It's just as scary as ever, but no more.
The good news/bad news reality is Alexander is looking for a big payday after years in government service -- not assist the government is using Amazon for its own surveillance purposes, or assist Amazon in becoming better at surveillance.
I'm lucky that my daughter just wrapped up Pre-K and is now starting Kindergarten, two "years" that are pretty low stakes in terms of what gets done. With that caveat, remote learning went fine and home schooling is going smoothly (1 week in).
The insurance bonus is actually intended to incentivize coverage, rather than care, and act as a stimulus to the insurance industry. I'm not endorsing that policy, just stating it as plainly as I can.
Its not a personal site, per se, but its my YouTube page for my family's little cabin videos and trail cams. Love making them and its the one consistent thing I do, other than walk my dog, that makes me happy.