Damn I Love Skype!

Skype is the thing that seems to work best for my Australian phone calls (at least once/week if not more) and I love SkypeOut for when I’m just too damn lazy to walk across the room for the phone. If I could use a SkypeIn phone number for getting/sending faxes as well as placing and receiving calls and taking voicemail, I’d have one of those, too (only $4/month!).

That said, MSN7 seems to have fixed the a/v sharing problems through firewalls, so now I use it for that and MS Communicator is damn cool, too.

These communication devices are pretty important for a remote guy. Just today, I had an hour long video counseling session with my boss (it takes me about a year to feel like I’m actually capable of any new job I take) and another hour-long IM with one of the architects on my team arguing about what the hell we’re building anyway. The counseling session would’ve happened no matter where I lived, but even if I lived next door to him in Redmond, I wasn’t going to be sitting in the architect’s living room from 12:30am - 1:30am chatting with him; new comm was the enabler.