marlyse.comme, myself and my life
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Very exciting
Today Gaby - good friend from Switzerland - messaged me and we had a neat thirty minute chat mid afternoon. It is always so nice to have contact with her, I feel still very close to her and cherish our chats, as wide spread in time they often are.
Then, not even an hour later I suddenly had a request to be added to my contacts lists on Skype from a very unexpected source: Isabelle (my oldest niece in Switzerland) and her husband Claudio. What a hyper cool surprise! Only minutes later we were chatting online and I was able to grab a screenshot of her baby belly she was showing to me on her camera - she is due in only 3 weeks and now they are ready to go into labor any day soon.
I’ve installed Skype only a few days ago on my machine - the only reason being that my mom was pushing for it “because all her PC friends are on it”. I had resented strongly installing it for her, it is an additional application to confuse her and she is using computers only since 3 months and as good as she is doing, there are areas she is definitely still struggling and thus I wanted to keep the amount of applications down. But due to her repeated reference to it, I went ahead, downloaded it myself and created an account and then did the same for her yesterday via VNC on her machine in Cape Town.
The sound was surprisingly loud and sometimes nice and clear - still a time delay like with iChat but louder otherwise. At first I thought it would beat the quality of iChat but then the voice also began breaking up plus between us we’d have the oddest noises intermingled, as if some audio feedback was interfering. We have not been able to fix this - one reason of the voice breaking up is definitely her bandwidth she is on because it becomes almost non-audible when I am controlling her computer via VNC and in the end it seems to be just as good and weak as iChat. Though I’ve noticed that when she had Skype launched I no longer could log in via VNC… so maybe in this sense it is even more trouble prone.
Talking with Isabelle and Claudio, I had no bad noise feedback. They hooked me up with even more family members on Skype and I am really excited to have the option to now chat from time to time with my family - who, by-the-way, with exception of my dad and mom, I haven’t seen in 7 years!
I’m so glad for Spaces - now I have 1 Space setup for all my communication channels : PowerMail which is my email application of choise, Adium which allows me to have my 7 different chat accounts all in one place (ICQ, MSN, AIM, Bonjour, Yahoo, Google and Mac) and now, all new in the mix, I have Skype, the online ‘phone’ chat in that Space too.
As usual, this brings me to the point to ensure I am only available for chat when I really don’t need to do something else… main reason I stopped being so often online in the first place.
created mid-afternoon - it was 4:15 pm to be exact | trackback |
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