MSN Messenger 1, YM 0

Yup, MSN Messenger is winning this time. At least in one aspect... or at least in my personal case.

I had never thought of using MSN Messenger for chatting purposes, except in my office which happens to use it for internal communication. All my friends and relatives use Yahoo! Messenger; none of them I know ever uses MSN, AIM, or others. YM also never disappointed me or made my system crash, for example. So why bother?

That was until last week when I came across a problem using my new webcams with YM. First I assumed it was because of my internet connection setting. YM requires a 'no-proxy' connection. Ok, I followed the suggestion and changed it to 'no proxy.' The same problem remained stubborn.

Then I thought it was something to do with my wireless connection at home. I googled for some solutions and followed all reasonable suggestions, including installing some scripts as necessary. Still the same old problem -- 'Network error occurred while connecting to the server' came up.

As time was getting closer to my departure to Houston for a 3-month business trip, leaving my lovely wife and my two small, cute boys on the other side of the earth in KL or Jakarta, I gave up on YM and rushed to find an alternative for video calls. As Skype, which my wife and I already had an account, was prohibited in my company machine, I decided to use either MSN Messenger or AIM.

I tried MSN first and as it has worked fine and smoothly for video chatting without any problem at all, I didn't proceed to test AIM.

And here's now I am a happy MSN user, along with my family. The fact that now we can see each other while conversing is so priceless.

A drawback was however found. Once I had started using the new MSN Messenger, all personal contacts in my office MSN Messenger completely disappeared when I logged in it afterward. I had to add them back one by one.


But that was a small hassle compared to the happiness my family and I have found of being able to see each other in real-time... enjoying our smiles and laughters while sharing stories, checking each other's health, or just saying hello.

Forgetting for a while that we are now half the earth away, but also assuring ourselves that our love will only grow bigger and bigger, surpassing any existing physical and virtual walls.

Thanks, MSN!