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Part of Bill's incredibly stupid web diary. Read some more today, yerhear!
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A fun weekend it has been. I've finally got MSN Messenger installed. For those who don't know it, it's a fairly reasonable chat program. It took a quick reconfiguartion to restrain it from starting up all the time but it's now working when I want it to. I've found IRC perfectly adequate in the past, but it's a case of going where your friends are.
Some friends of mine who I knew way back from my Fidonet days use MSN, and so I went with MSN. If they used Yahoo Chat, I would have gone there instead. The quality of the technology had nothing to do with it. IRC, AIM, Yahoo or ICQ could be the bestest chat systems ever, but MSN has the distinction of being what Thia and Kendra use. No contest.
Of particular note was the voice chat feature. Before today, I was under the impression I was microphone-less. Any voice chats would have to be with this antiquated telephone technology.
In the middle of a conversation over MSN, I noticed the voice chat feature and I wondered if it would work one way only. I knew she a microphone and was already equipeed to use it. I clicked on the icon to enter voice mode, expecting a rendition of 4'33" from my end. Being the first time I had tried it, it went through a configuration gizmo, just to check the sound levels and such were okay. During the microphone test, which I was quite ready to just skip through, I coughed, and the sound bar blipped up for a moment.
Wow, my laptop has a built in microphone and I never knew. Once it had finished, we were talking, but my speech was barely understandable. On a process of rubbing my finger against various holes in the casing, the microphone was located at the back behind the screen. To be clearly heard without waking anyone up, I would have to turn the laptop around slightly between sentences. But still, it's a good thing, a microphone in a dodgy location is better than none.
The "Browse the web together" feature was an anti-climax. First of all, it refused to let us run it, stating that it was not available in my area. As an experiment, I reconfigured by "Passport" settings and told it I was in Georgia. One borrowing of a ZIP code and a reboot later, and I'm now in Georgia!
After all that, it still wouldn't let me. "Browse the web together" is a feature of MSN 8, which costs a bit and really is only available to Americans. Couldn't it have told me that earlier?