half a cat

So, most people know that I work from home, well I am at ORNL in TN now…but anyways. I generally enjoy working from home a ton, but I’ve started to realize the deficiencies of the methods of communication we use on the internet. This really only became obvious quite recently and amusingly enough had nothing to do with work — I was chatting with someone who I really have great conversations with, the nice deep, insightful and mind expanding kinds that are so much fun and was feeling a bit frustrated in being limited to a chat window. In retrospect, I may have started along this train of thought after working in an office for 3 weeks with people again — it is amazing how fun that really can be. I’ve heard the reasoning that the time savings from not getting ready and commuting into work are real benefits in the work-from-home category. I’ve always been quite lucky and lived within a short bus ride or walk from work and haven’t added that into the list of pros. I even keep catching myself thinking ‘boy, wouldn’t it be nice…’ while working from home. It is probably general laziness…but that is sooooo another post.

So, yeah, the real point is that I realized how chatting via email or IRC/AIM/Yahoo/MSN is so limited. I think they work ‘OK’ for technical work, but the more I get involved with project management where the needs are more on a personal and not a technical level, that the comms used really lack the ability to fully communicate The Messsage. I’d like to think that I am pretty good about communicating on a personal level with people when I am face to face, but when it comes to email or chat, that level of connection, mutual understanding, or whatever you’d like to call it, seems to really go missing and I feel like either I’ve not gotten the point across or that the other person(s) have not acknowledged that I have. Who knows, this might just be my brain craving more personal interaction and showing it by disliking the non-personal interactions.

I have found that voice conversations are pretty good for most things, especially as far as communicating raw data or discussing something is concerned, but the rhythm can be difficult to find and the conversations can get quite skewed towards one person talking more than the other, as there is no out of band (body language) way to change that.

On a slightly related note, I believe someone made the comment “Honestly, what year is it again?” in reference to some sort of technical project that did not go as expected. This whole chat thing has me thinking too — why hasn’t the technology for this really exploded ? Or has it, and has been seen in the last 5 years, the USA is just lagging behind the tech acceptance curve ? For instance, you hear all about these crazy Japanese or Finish people who use these nifty G3 cell phone features every day. Perhaps if the US had a better (read cheaper, faster and generally less sucky) broadband solution, perhaps we would have a higher incident rate of video conferencing or similar conversation applications ? Speaking of which — has anyone ever used an iSight ? I’m really quite expecting that for most anything I want to do it will be either Windows or Apple based, as Linux solutions tend to interoperate pretty poorly. I’m so willing to be proven wrong though. I’m also curious as to how well using a webcam type thingy will do for Yahoo or MSN type chatting. Hrm, food for thought, that is.