Patrick's Rants

I don’t know about you, but I have my chat program open all day. I don’t get to chat all day since I’m usually at work, but there it sits in my system tray.

All the people I don’t chat with anymore:
A friend of mine used to work from home – he lived in Chicago and “work” was in Cottonwood. We used to chat all the time. He would send me decent funny/political links and I would answer “stupid” Linux questions. It was a great symbiotic relationship. I hardly get to chat with him anymore since he has moved to California to work for the “Big G” as a support… something. Google keeps him really busy. Anytime I do manage to catch him he tells me it’s been a busy week. Well I hope he’s happy! (Hi Steve)

Another friend of mine works as a consultant for Dell, implimenting Linux installations and conversions and such. I don’t chat with him much anymore either since he’s usually flying off somewhere. Still another returned to work for RedHat and although I didn’t usually chat with him online we used to email occasionally and I would see him at our monthly geek meetings. He too flies out to customer sites at the behest of his employer.

That leaves the rest of my Buddy List. There are a couple of people who I chat with because they use my FreeRealty package, but then that leaves me with a really short and quiet Buddy List. It didn’t used to be this way. I used to have a fairly long list of people that I used to chat with – I spent late nights searching for people to chat with. The thing about these lists is that they take work to build and maintain. I have close to 100 people on my list and haven’t seen more than like six online at any given point in time. I don’t add people to my list very much anymore except for geeky type people. What does that say about me?