Something odd happened to me today. I ran into a complete stranger on the Internet.
I signed into chat, and almost immediately had the conversation below with someone I didn’t know, going by the handle “toweringcoho”. I was at a largish gathering and had bonjour turned on as usual, so assumed it was someone in the room—even though I didn’t bother to look to see what chat connection toweringcoho was using.
A quick Google search suggested that “toweringcoho” is the name of one of a series of IM bots that randomly connect to otherwise unconnected chat users.
And that’s how I met Sunil Khiatani from Hong Kong. It took a while for both of us to figure out that we were NOT talking to robots, and a bit longer to introduce ourselves. In the end, we had a worthy conversation, got to know each other a bit, and went on our ways.
I’m not sure if these IM bots are supposed to be malicious, but I liked what happened. It was like going on a kind of unintentional dérive in text only.
6:45:55 PM toweringcoho: Hi, Billy Mays here with another fantastic coho.
6:46:40 PM Nate Angell: wish I knew what that meant…
6:46:52 PM toweringcoho: hmmm
6:46:59 PM toweringcoho: take a wild guess
6:47:04 PM Nate Angell: salmon?
6:47:23 PM toweringcoho: you definitely aren’t turing complete
6:47:39 PM Nate Angell: human error
6:48:06 PM toweringcoho: are you related to skynet?
6:48:51 PM Nate Angell: maybe on the distaff side
6:49:14 PM toweringcoho: ahh
6:50:01 PM toweringcoho: here’s the thing though, will skynet be porgrammed with the 3 robot laws and if so would it still be able to nuke us?
6:50:28 PM Nate Angell: did the 3 robot laws really work out? have to refer to the text
6:50:54 PM toweringcoho: dunno about the text, but in the movies they didn’t
6:51:55 PM Nate Angell: isn’t the book always better than the movie?
6:52:21 PM toweringcoho: naw
6:52:28 PM toweringcoho: fight club is better movie wise :D
6:53:22 PM Nate Angell: didn’t read fight club
6:55:24 PM toweringcoho: so who are you? :P
6:55:41 PM Nate Angell: @xolotl
6:55:56 PM toweringcoho: huh?
6:56:11 PM Nate Angell: you definitely aren’t turing complete
6:56:30 PM toweringcoho: yeah yeah
6:56:57 PM Nate Angell: that should be enough to go on
6:57:20 PM toweringcoho: naw it isn’t
6:57:45 PM Nate Angell: there’s this thing called google…
6:58:15 PM toweringcoho: nad what should I be searching for
7:01:19 PM Nate Angell: @xolotl
7:01:34 PM Nate Angell: it’s a pretty unique character string
7:02:31 PM toweringcoho: you’re nate angel?
7:03:23 PM Nate Angell: no, I’m Nate Angell
7:04:05 PM toweringcoho: ah close enough
7:04:08 PM Nate Angell: or, perhaps A dog-like deity, Double of Quetzalcoatl
7:04:10 PM toweringcoho: how come you’re contacting me :P
7:04:25 PM Nate Angell: you contacted me
7:04:48 PM toweringcoho: I did???
7:05:10 PM Nate Angell: I think there’s an AIM chat robot that connects random users
7:05:14 PM Nate Angell: and we are victims
7:05:30 PM toweringcoho: ahhh
7:05:36 PM toweringcoho: strange
7:05:58 PM toweringcoho: thi is my yahoo account though
7:07:41 PM Nate Angell: i think they are all connected
7:07:52 PM Nate Angell: so you know me, want to iintroduce your self?
7:08:16 PM toweringcoho: alright
7:08:27 PM toweringcoho: I’m Sunil Khiatani, I’m a coder in Hong Kong :D
7:08:37 PM Nate Angell: very cool
7:08:40 PM Nate Angell: what do you code?
7:08:56 PM Nate Angell: Sunil Khiatani doesn’t sound very HK ;)
7:09:21 PM toweringcoho: at the moment, stuff for work. Web Services in ASP.NET and C# :\
7:09:30 PM Nate Angell: sorry
7:09:33 PM toweringcoho: been trying to do OSS coding but I’ve been lazy
7:09:41 PM Nate Angell: that would be better!
7:09:53 PM Nate Angell: as you may have learned, I’m a bit of an OSS zealot
7:10:22 PM toweringcoho: haha yeah a lot of people freak out when I tell them that I’m an indian born in Hong Kong that has a fairly american accent
7:10:31 PM toweringcoho: yeah I think I did, what do you code ?
7:10:34 PM Nate Angell: i guess HK has all types
7:10:36 PM toweringcoho: bbs.. loo
7:10:50 PM Nate Angell: I’m not much of a coder
7:11:13 PM Nate Angell: but I usually evangelize around http://sakaiproject.org http://drupal.org and http://openid.net
7:11:35 PM Nate Angell: there are many worthy projects, depending on your interests
7:11:50 PM Nate Angell: I encourage you to broaden your skills/interests with OSS
7:16:25 PM toweringcoho: I have a few interests
7:16:46 PM toweringcoho: but i think I should focus on the KDE desktop, it’s waht i like and use the most
7:19:26 PM Nate Angell: that’s a worthy project