Who's idea was IM anyway?

This past week at church, I had the privelege of speaking ot the church about my experience on a silent retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani this past April. In the course of the message I believe I mentioned that I am a major gadget nerd. I've been meaning to post a blog about my current favorite gadgets, and have had one in my drafts folder for a while, but inner-procrastinator has kept me from ever getting it done.

Anyhoo... I was talking with Tersie on IM today and it occurred to me that I am also an IM geek, and my IM client is just one of the many "gadgets" in my arsenal of geek weaponry!

When I was in high school, I picked up the nick name "Roogles". If you know me at all, you know that "roogles" has followed me through high school, college, into real life, the web, and just about every other aspect of my life. I do own "roogles.com", the whole fam has email addresses @roogles.com ( eli, jenn, ellie, and silas ). And in HS I picked up the name "Roogles" for AOL's Instant messenger...

Ah, my first IM account, and the one that has followed me through out the years. Roogles on AIM is still my most used IM account, and the one that I sign into solely if I don't have a multi IM client handy.

When I got into college I started discovering that all of my new found friends had their own IM accounts on a variety of services ( many already on AIM ) but also on Yahoo, MSN, and rarely on ICQ. Being the easy-going, compliant guy that I am I simply signed up for all the services!

Those were the days too... Having four or five different IM clients, all open at the same time, each with anywhere from a few to a ton of "buddies" on my list. Eventually I discovered Trillian ( yes, I was a PC user at the time ), which allowed me to congregate all of my IM services into one handy app, with a long list of buddies all in one place.

When I started working for Horizon ( in 2000 ), ICQ was the IM of choice for inter-office communication so I became a big ICQ user then ( still have my 8 digit ICQ number ).

Since making the move to a Mac in 2002, I have tried a few different multi-IM clients including Fire, Proteus, and finally settling down with Adium.

I am still an IM service junkie... Right now my Adium is setup for AIM, ICQ, .Mac ( Apple's AIM variant ), two yahoo messenger accounts, msn messenger, Gtalk ( Google's Jabber implementation ), and our corporate ( in office ) jabber system.

A grand total of eight IM accounts on seven different services. I have about 325 total "buddies" on my list, which span across all of those services. I tend to have my IM up anytime that I'm online which is almost all day everyday at work and many evenings at home in my recliner.

If I don't already have you on one of those lists and you want to give me a virtual "what's up", let me know and I'll happily add you.

I'm not really sure if there as a point to any of this... Just thought it might be fun to dust off the old blog editor.

drop me an IM some time to say "Hi".

-Roogles