Skype is wonderful

Here I am (last week) catching up with life, with Rose, via Skype.

Sometimes the long distances seem so small when the conversations just go on from where we last left off. This was our delightful venue in the dining room at Paul & Carol's home in Watertown, CT. Freezing and snowing outside, but plenty warm inside - it was a very comfortable meeting place.

I installed the new Skype version 4 on my work laptop today, and really like it. Different, but intuitive and easy to get to know quickly. You can get the download here, but remember it is only a beta version - probably not for those of you on slow or dialup connections.

Guided tour via Skype

Cool - just now we had a guided tour of my brother Rogan's house in Colorado - his webcam and wifi and laptop and Skype. Great technology!

Recording Skype Interviews gets professional

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So Skype Was Down

Skype, the amazing service that has done such a lot to improve the way we can stay in touch with each other, had some problems last week, and it took a few days to sort out. Stuff happens, and I am glad they found the problems and resolved them. What really made me angry though (as reported by the BBC) was this:

Many bloggers inconvenienced by the outage wondered if Skype was planning to refund them for all the calls they had to re-direct to other, usually more expensive, phone numbers during the period of disruption. SOURCE

What a bunch of wallys. Such Skype users should be asked to submit their Skype names and then forever banned from VOiP networks for being terminally self-centred. Instead of being thankful that people far more resourceful than them have established something to take on even the giant telcos, they immediately think of themselves, and how terribly inconvenient it all is. If they whine some more, they could get four weeks of clean-up duty in Baghdad, or a month of helping out the refugees in Darfur - then they might understand inconvenience.

Disclaimer: I have no disclaimer - no shares in Skype, don't know anyone who works there. Just know Skype is fabulous.

What time is it?

Real Palm Trees inside Dubai International

A reasonably comfortable flight from Gatwick to Dubai overnight, and I am catching up on my caffeine at a Starbucks in Dubai International Airport. The shops are always amazing here, but I did not think so many bargains as I recalled from before. Of course, you can get just about anything associated with lifestyles of the rich and famous, probably reason enough for me to simply park myself quietly, sip a Grande Cappucino, and watch others buy their real gold bars, Cuban cigars, and Russian caviar. WiFi is free around the Starbucks area, which is close to Gates 1,2 and 3 at the end of the terminal building. I see that Skype Zones also has a good and strong signal here in the building for both their pay-as-you go service ($2.95 for 2 hours) and their other account service.

Skype etiquette

I am sure that a mainstream Skype etiquette will emerge soon, but one of my most disliked Skype things is seeing someone online, dropping them a quick hello, and there is no response and suddenly they change their status to AWAY or NOT AVAILABLE or they just go offline. My view is that ONLINE means your connection is available for contact, and if you don't want to be disturbed, you should change your status.

If I say 'hello" to someone who is online, and they come back and say 'in a meeting' or 'busy, later' I am not offended because that is the nature of instant messaging. But no response and changing the status ... well for me that's the IM equivalent of being ignored in a face to face meeting when you say 'hello' and they walk right by without a word.

The Loose Wire Blog of journalist Jeremy Wagstaff seems to have had a similar problem and the Ken Thompson on his Bumble Bee blog refers to something his team call polITE - polite intrusive technologies etiquette, which is interesting. (As an aside, Ken's blog is a great one to just browse through if you are interested in bioteams ... team dynamics, virtual collaboration, emerging technology and bioteaming. RSS FEED.) Wonder what other people think?

UPDATE: This post helped the folk at the SHARP END TRAINING blog write a post about Skype Etiquette.

Recording SKYPE conversations

Trying to find an easy way to record Skype conversations for podcast interviews is proving to be more difficult than I imagined, but Jeff Sanquist seems to be using Adobe Audition and XP, same as me. I still have problems with the two sides of a Skype interview being at completely different sound levels, and not sure if there is an easy fix to this?