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Wandering IQ. Raised by wolves. Friend to cheese. Building relationships of entangled mutualities.

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You are here: Home / Technology / Chat Dérive: I Ran in to Someone on the Web

Chat Dérive: I Ran in to Someone on the Web

9 Apr 2009 By Nate Angell Leave a Comment

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

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: aim, bonjour, Chat, Drupal, IM, kde, Life, OpenID, opensource, Sakai, serendipity, yahoo

About Nate Angell

Wandering IQ. Raised by wolves. Friend to cheese. Working to bend the arc of justice. Learn more about my professional and educational history on LinkedIn and on this blog, or if you really want to get to know me, follow me on Twitter.

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