weird string of characters in my name in outgoing messages

[Mark Doliner]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 6:10 PM, daviddoria<daviddoria at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> When I send an IM, it looks like this:
>
> (9:00:21 PM) daviddoria at gmail.com/4A0F9634: and the old gui used to group
> stuff
>
> what is this: 4A0F9634
>
> ??
>
> I'm using Pidgin 2.5.6.

Hi Dave.  This is your "resource."  It's meant to tell other people
where your location.  For example, "home" or "work" or "laptop."  In
this case you have not specified a resource in the account editor, and
the Google Talk servers automatically append a unique string.  So
you're seeing the unique string.  This isn't really a problem, and I
don't believe it's possible for you to turn it off.  You could specify
a resource if you want, but the unique string still gets tacked onto
the end.

-Mark