IM

My wife and I have been using Yahoo! Messenger to communicate to one another during the work day. If you are on-line and feel like sending me an instant message, download Yahoo! Messenger, and look for Yahoo! ID rick_umali.

When I was in college, I used to chat on-line all the time using Connect, an ancient dumb-terminal chat program. Later, I was a fervent user of mIRC, which is Internet Relay Chat. My login then was bitflip. Recently, I thought about grabbing the bitflip domain name, but it was already scooped up.

I briefly flirted with ICQ (my number is 58388303), but it always felt like a heavier application than Yahoo! Messenger. At my last job, an older version of the ICQ client wouldn't work behind the corporate firewall, but that's since been fixed.

As if e-mail wasn't enough!