I mentioned awhile back that I was playing around with Skype, but hadn’t actually called anyone with it yet as the only other person I know that’s using it is fellow blogger Neil Turner. I happened to notice he was on Google Talk this evening so I loaded up Skype and asked him if he had time to help me try it out and he said he had a few moments to spare so he’d be happy to. I thought that meant he was getting ready to go out for the evening, perhaps to dinner, and it wasn’t until we were both voice chatting for a bit that it occurred to me that he’s in the United Kingdom and that means he’s several hours into the future relative to Michigan where it was around 6:56PM at the time. He was quite gracious about the whole thing despite the fact that he has to get up in the morning for work.

We didn’t talk for long, but I was amazed at the clarity of the call as the lag time was minimal and he sounded as though he was sitting right next to me. I was also momentarily fascinated by the fact that this is probably the first true international call I’ve ever made in my life and by the fact that we’d taken the time to set up this impressive bit of technology only to have no idea what the hell we should talk about. So we fell back on the geek standards: What our first computers were, how amazing the voice quality was, what speed his broadband connection happened to be, that sort of stuff. About the time midnight rolled around on his clock I figured I should let him go so he could get some sleep. In total it was a 3 or 4 minute conversation about nothing in particular that didn’t cost a dime with someone I’ll probably never get a chance to meet in person. It was pretty cool.