Skype

Living abroad is a lot of fun, but there are always those at home whom you miss. It used to be, that when you were thousands of miles away, writing letters, postcards, or spending a small fortune on phone calls from crackling public phone boxes was the only way to keep in touch. Of course now we have the internet, email and the saviour of my bank account, Skype.

Skype is free to download. Free. You can make Skype to Skype calls for free. Free. Last week I had a ‘conference call’ with my friend who is living in Australia and my friend back home in the UK. We were in very different time zones, with me in an entirely different day, but not one of us had to pay for that thirty minute phone call. Free!

And even if you’re not calling a fellow Skype user, the cost is so low. My friends calling my American cell phone pay 1p a minute, and texting is 5 pence. Being in the US, I have to pay a little more, with a call to a cell phone being 14p a minute, but to a landline I’m still only paying 1p a minute. So I can talk to my parents for an hour for the same price as a mars bar. Amazing.

I can’t begin to explain how great it is to be in such easy contact with home when you’re away from everything you know and all the people that make your life at home. Skype truly is a life changing communication tool. My parents, at 63 and 58 years old, have just brought a webcam and downloaded Skype so they can video chat with me regularly. For a couple who still struggle to use more than one browser window, it proves how simple and easy Skype is to use.

Download it here.

The Sims3

I wouldn’t class myself as a computer geek as such. Sure, I have a blog and I like to play on photoshop, but I also have a social life and work and other pursuits... except, bye bye to those for a while because the Sims3 just entered my life.

I’ve been all about The Sims since the first game was released when I was about 14. I love the control, the creativity and the overall feeling of achievement that comes with creating a sim and seeing them through life successfully (or if you get bored, trapping them in a room so they die of hunger). Perhaps it says something about my personality that my Sims are always perfect, reaching the top of their career ladders, achieving their wants and lifetime goals, and raising perfect children.

With this new upgrade, the Sims are far more free willed and you can customise literally everything. The game runs smoothly on my eighteen month old laptop with no glitches or crashing, something which has never happened to me with a Sims game before. There is also no loading screens when you decide to leave the house and no more waiting around.

My only complaint is that you can’t speed the game up when your Sims are at work or school, but at least you can now chose what they do whilst there, which is a compromise I guess.

I just wish I could stop playing.

Posted By: Cat