Might Snatch Ya Necklace

Before I begin, I'd like to say that this stuff... is the best freakin' ramen on the planet. Go get a few boxes from your local Oriental marketplace, today! I'm not kidding.

OK, so I used the headset two nights ago and the clarity on it was awesome. I really did like it. My friend and I tried it out on his SoF2 server that was running TeamSpeak. The problem with that was his server is in Oregon, and I'm in Michigan. His voice came across OK, but mine was apparently very choppy. I guess my upstream can't handle that distance.

I suggested that we try out Skype, since it was supposed to have excellent clarity even over great distances (because of the nature of it's P2P model). Immediately, we could tell the difference between the two. Skype required no tweaking or set-up and was immediately functional. The sound quality was incredible and didn't bog down either of our connections. It's like a TeamSpeaker's dream come true. Now, we don't have to clog the server's bandwidth and we can still speak to each other. Plus, it will work with any game, because it's a completely independent program. It's meant to be used for general VoIP chat.

Sorry if I'm coming across as a Skype evangelist, but we really do love it. I hope it never gets bogged down with spyware/adware/malware like KaZaa did (Skype is made by the makers of KaZaa [but not the same people who bought KaZaa out, changed the EULA, and inserted all of the spyware]). If not, I could see myself using it forever. Even though, when my wife woke up and saw me on the computer, she said I looked like a dork and a telemarketer. I tend to disagree. Either way, we talked over Skype for about 3:50.

So, that makes my two, new best electronic friends Skype and Gmail. I love both, equally. Screw Hotmail. Before Google announced their free gig, Hotmail's "extra storage" accounts (of which, I am a member) only carried 10MB, it still had several large, annoying ads on each page, and we were paying $15 a year for that!

I started moving all of my old e-mails over to Gmail from Hotmail so I can cancel my account. They sent me a notice about the upgrades they plan on doing. According to that e-mail, my current account will be upgraded to 2GB of storage, plus the ability to send 20MB attachments.

Oh yeah? Where was all this hospitality before April 1st? IIRC, Hotmail, you were increasing my costs and keeping my storage the same at the beginning of this year. If the last two years of "extra storage" has taught me anything, it's that Microsoft refuses to innovate unless they are financially threatened. Even still, with all of MS's funding, they still are only handing out 250MB for free accounts. For a company who loves to claim that in a few years, hardware will be free, they sure hate to part with their own. I for one welcome our new gigabyte overlords.