Entries this day: Day_ Skype natalie_b-day_party

Day

6:07pm JST Friday 23 September 2005

I thought I had already written an entry today, and it very well could have been called Day, so I added an underscore to the end of this filename.

I've been transcribing all day. Heading toward the end of this P.B. Tape Transcription process!

Skype

A couple weeks ago, Jesse told me about a thing called Skype. He said it was super cheap and super easy to make phone calls anywhere in the world. He said he's been talking for hours and barely paid anything at all.

I figured it couldn't hurt, and I had heard of Skype before, so I downloaded it and installed, which took about 3 minutes total (I didn't actually time it, but the installation, username selection, and configuration was less than painless. Completely easy, including getting thunderrabbit as my username).

I called Jessie on his Skype account two feet away from me and we laughed about it, but I actually had to be impressed because iChat could not do the same thing: allow us to talk while we were actually connected to the same hub.

Recently, I had need to call home urgently, but had no credit on my phone card. I remembered that Skype allowed calls to landline phones, but I was on line far too slow to support VoIP. But I figured it couldn't hurt to buy some credit for next time, so I bought a 10 Euro chunk of credit which is good for 180 days, I believe.

((While I didn't like the idea of having a limit on the amount of time I could use the credit, I assume I will have forgotten about my concern in 6 months when it comes time to pay up again, assuming I haven't used all my credit. If I use all the credit, then it's no sweat, and in some backwards logic kinda way, if I *don't* use all the credit, then it will have been like paying 10 Euros for a 6 month pass to all the calls I want to make.))

Later, when I was on a fast connection, I used it to make that not-quite-so-urgent-anymore call. The conversation was great and we talked for 20 minutes on her cellphone in the US. The whole conversation cost 0.48 Euros, if I remember correctly.

Today, for fun, I called Fred for 25 minutes using Skype on my slow connection, and its performance impressed me! On this connection, images download around 5kb/s, but Fred came through loudly and clearly and I could ha rdly tell we were only paying fractions of pennies per minute.

If we both talked at the same time, there was a bit of silence on one end or the other, but I hardly noticed, and it certainly didn't detract from the conversation.

Skype-to-Skype calls are (and always will be) free. In this case, me calling from my computer to my brother's landline in Texas, the whole conversation cost around 0.50 Euros.

I hounded Fred until he said he would get Skype as well, so we can chatter free of charge for hours.

There is apparently a party-line option where I can have up to 50 people on the same call. I don't think I know 50 people who would be interested, but this could certainly be interesting for some updates-from-the-field type of situation where a reporter is in, say, Palestine, and reporting back to a bunch of people at once. Or for network marketing rep who has a weekly pep rally with their downline.

Get Skype.

natalie b day party

6:05pm JST Friday 23 September 2005

I'm headed out to Takabakabaka, probably for the night, but at least for all we can eat all we can drink extravaganza at Gyro's Heros in Takabakabaka. This is the preferred location for P.B. parties, it seems. At least, gatherings hosted by Natalie.

1:03pm JST Sunday 25 September 2005

Bigtime fun with many silly drunk people, not including myself, and not including ¤¢¤Ä¤·¤µ¤ó, who offered me space in his room for sleeping purposes around 2am.

Bahia, Alan, and Alan (sp) missed the last train and came back to the party and then got the first train out.

I chatted with ¤¢¤Ä¤· a bit; he has lived in middle east and learned Arabic in a month of immersion. Fuckin' hell I wanna do that.