Electronic Communication

When I was an exchange student in Canada more than a decade ago, I used to communicate with my friends and family through letters and - once in a while - through expensive phone calls (that irritating pulse sound chirping every few seconds still makes me shiver).

Today, I'm again far away from home, but it doesn't feel like it from a communication perspective: through email, chat, and internet telephony I stay in touch with friends and family (some of them more than sixty years old!) on a regular base. It's odd, but when I open my chat client and see my friends in Europe being online, I somehow feel quite close to them - even though I only see their name flashing in bold letters.

Recently, I started my own personal blog which allows me to keep my friends and family back home uptodate about what's happening on the other side of the planet.

Thunderbird is my favourite POP email client (yeah, never again Outlook Express). Its spam filter works quite well for me, the search engine is fast, and I love the management of multiple email accounts.

Trillian is definitely my favourite chat client since it allows to transparently merge several chat protocols into one client application. It has a very slick user interface, it's easy to configure and use, and it's even more reliable than some of the standard chat clients.

Skype is a great tool for internet telephony and it works perfectly well right out of the box. Even though I only have a very shabby microphone built-in to my laptop, the quality is highly sufficient. Besides, it's very funny when people look at you with a very puzzled face because they think you are going insane talking to your laptop screen loud and clear.

Blogger.com is an awesome site to have your own free blog and it's very simple to sign up and set up. I think this blogging provider is so successful because they make the process from writing to publishing so straight-forward, they provide text editing that makes you forget that you work with an HTML application, and they still keep many things very configurable for advanced users. By the way, it's now Google-owned.