video chatting

Randy Clepper, who's in Columbus Ohio, and I spent a couple of hours tonight and last night trying to get video chatting working over the internet. Our goal is to get this working partly for fun but also to make it easier for us to work on new Hammeron material. We're trying to get the bugs worked out before we spring it on Mark Wade, who is, well, less geeky than we are. Yeah, that was a nice way to put it.

Randy's a PC guy, I'm a Mac guy and we've experimented with quite a few different chat clients and so far nothing and nothing has worked quite right. In the process last night Randy found one particular chat client that sounded promising for both formats. We both downloaded and registered the software while we chatted like normal people on the telephone. Neither one of us paid much attention to the name of the software which would have given us a hint that we were making a mistake.

I always use my real name rather than screen names when involved with the net. My theory is that I don't want to be anywhere or say anything where I would want to hide my identity. Anyway, in just a few minutes we found ourselves right in the middle of a place where we didn't want to be or be seen. There was my name posted for anyone else with this particular bizarre proclivity to invite for a chat.

My name being there was bad enough, Randy had chosen a screen name that had included the word hammeron. We had a pretty good laugh, got out of there pronto and deleted the software. ¶ 11:58 PM