I’ve written before about the general dodginess of “away notification emails” automatically set up to respond to incoming emails. Such messages usually go along the lines of: I will be out of the office from 12/08/2006 to 13/08/2006 hunting gazelle in the Liposuction Basin. For urgent matters, pl contact Ms Elbowgrinder/ Mr Headstrong at Tel… Read More »
Be careful what you wish for. For nearly a decade I, and a lot of people like me, have been dreaming of the day when we could send an instant message to someone who wasn’t on the network as us. An instant messaging program is one that sits on your computer and allows you to… Read More »
Every time I start to feel warm and fuzzy about Microsoft something jumps up and slaps me back to reality. Here’s my latest slap: For some reason my Trillian messenger wasn’t connecting to MSN because of some weirdness with my ISP so I had to download and install the 9 MB behemoth that is MSN… Read More »
Steve Smith of Lavalife makes a good point about the surge of new products which extend the use of Skype beyond the desktop. Great for mobility and wider access, bad for one of the key benefits that IM-related programs like Skype bring us: presence. (Presence merely means being able to signal whether you’re online, whether… Read More »
From the pages of the International Herald Tribune comes a glimpse of a world where clandestine communication retains the old and tested methods of hand to hand. When a godfather becomes expendable is a piece by Andrea Camilleri, the author of “The Smell of the Night” and other novels in the Inspector Montalbano series. In… Read More »