VoIP

This morning while text chatting with Morgaine via Trillian, she ran across a program that lets users talk over the internet, long-distance, for free… and she sent me the link to this program called Firefly made by Virbiage Pty Ltd. in Australia. Well, having experienced the sometimes painful excuse for voice communications over the computer (notably microsnot software), I was, to say the least, a bit hesitant about downloading and installing yet another piece of software to try to communicate via voice. I read all the pages I could find about it. Morgaine downloaded it and registered it, in the meantime. I looked at the hardware they were selling to go with the software. Morgaine picked out her firefly phone number. I hemmed and hawed, trying to think of some way of gracefully getting out of downloading this… “I’m shy”… “I’ve downloaded software like this before and it sucked”… “What if it has spyware in it?”… anything and everything I could think of. Meanwhile, Morgaine is running it through adaware and spybot remover.

Can you say “doomed”? Yes, I was doomed to download from the minute that link crossed my desktop… me, the person who almost never uninstalls anything because it’s usually impossible to remove all the bits and pieces of software that somehow find their way into my machine. Doomed, I tell you.

So, there I am, downloading and installing Firefly, somewhat dragging my feet, as you can imagine… when she tells me that adaware and spybot came up empty on it. Ah, the smile that crossed my face at that moment… priceless… oh, and did I mention, it’s FREE?

So, I went and registered and got a Firefly number and loaded it up… and we had a very, very interesting voice conversation for several hours this morning. The sound was very clear, no audible breaking up of the signal, no lag times (even though she is in Antwerp and I’m here in the U.P. of Michigan.) As the conversation got over that beginning awkwardness… and I know you know what I mean… I began to enjoy this experience of speaking aloud over the computer lines. My shyness, still there, but less so than normal. She sounded pretty much like I expected… pleasant-sounding voice, a nice laugh too. And I think I laughed more this morning than I have in a very long time.

And no, I won’t tell you what we talked about, maybe she will in her blog, you’ll have to go see… but I can tell you this, I enjoyed this morning’s conversation… and VoIP has come a long way, and I liked that, too.

A lot.