softwerkz.net

Cyber-chatting has been around a more than a decade! I remember back in those days when I used to chat at WebChat Broadcasting System almost every evening. Shortly, under the influence of my classmate, I proceeded to Alamak.com. Chatting for hours at Alamak was a norm back then. After school, I would head home immediately and power up my PC (it was a 486 system with 56.6kpbs modem) to carry out my usual routine — cyber-chatting. It was an amazing feeling to meet with people around world in a chatroom within an internet browser.

However, after a year of parking in Alamak, I moved on to Internet Relay Chat (IRC)! It was totally another new experience for me. The thought of being able to be in multiple chat channels at the same time was simply fascinating. I would park myself in the MP3 channel to download songs. During those days, we were not educated about illegal downloading (or piracy). So, please do not hold anything against me! While downloading songs, I would chat in channels such as teens, teenagers, under21 and the list goes on. With features like creating and operating channel(s), kicking and banning user from a channel and file transfer, I was completely hooked on to IRC. I remember writing various IRC scripts to auto kick and ban spammer, auto download of songs upon reading mp3 which was not in my list of collection, and many more. I was having a great time with IRC until I Seek You (ICQ) came about.

ICQ, a standalone application, has many cool features. You can leave a message for your friends even when they are offline. Sending files is much easier as compared to IRC. It even comes with SMS and VOIP capabilities. With all these great features, I had to bid farewell to IRC. ICQ was a must-have application for IT geeks. Hey, even 90% of the college girls had them back then. Their signature sound of the incoming message, “Oh Oh…”, never failed to arouse my interest and get me coming back again and again to ICQ. I remember being young and mischievous, my friends and I would transfer file with a transfer rate of near zero to make each other frustrated. It was fun and we would still laugh about it at times. I stopped using ICQ after a catastrophe. My HDD crashed and I lost my password. I was furious that I could not log into ICQ. I tried creating a new account and all my friends in my list were gone. In addition with the upcoming MSN Messenger from Microsoft, I was even more determine to give up on ICQ. So finally, I waved “sayonara” to ICQ.

Welcome my new buddy, MSN Messenger! The interface looked cool and it had many features (as much as ICQ’s). One thing I love about MSN Messenger is that its password is tied to my Hotmail account. With this new toy, I was able to play MSN games with my girlfriend (now, my wife). We used to play Solitaire! Yes! A lot! I still remember that the loser was made to give a treat in a 5 out of 9 game-wins. We really enjoyed it very much. Also, my mum picked up MSN Messenger to chat with me when I was in overseas — Japan. It was not long ago, Microsoft renamed it to Windows Live Messenger (WLM).

WLM has become a part of our lives. We log on to the messenger at home and even at work. It enables me to get quick answers from friends or ex-colleagues. It feels great to be logged on to WLM. Lately, I joined a new company and we are not allowed to use WLM at work. The Windows policy will block the installed WLM application, rendering it unusable. I have tried several web WLM like eBuddy, MSN Web Messenger, Meebo, and many more. They are all blocked by the IT department. I find this very annoying. As a result, I decided to host WLM at my site to enable myself, also those of the same fate, to use the WLM chat even in the office. So, there we go, it is on today!!! Remember do not let the IT administrators know about this site

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