ICQ, the forgotten.

When was the last time you use ICQ? I guess alot of people are like me, haven't use it for over a year. (or more?) last version I used was 4.0? Hated the lite version. Those Xtra stuff were so annoying. Now it's 5.1 (just updated it) and the Xtra thing is IN and don't seems to be allow you to remove it. Oh well, may be I will try find out how to remove it or at least get it out of my sight.

Well, I have total number of 368 contacts. Wow, that's alot (to me, I know someone who has over 1000 and had to open a new account just to sort out the people on the list.) It's true that I don't talk to all of them often enough. But at least when I was active in various stages of my life, I did talk to most of people on the list...most of them daily, and some less often was only because we are in different time zone(s).

Talk about time zone(s). I remember that I used to live by the GMT+8 to GMT+12, always chatting with people in that time zone, while I'm living in the GMT-5 time zone. Yes, from 13-17 hours difference than a normal person would live by here in GMT-5. Pretty crazy huh? That's how I wasted my life...hahaha...

Back to ICQ. I was once very proud of my user number, since it's so easy to remember. (ok ok, it's only easy for ME to remember, don't think anyone else really cares~) I even tried to contact the phone company to see if I can get my user number to be my phone number. Too bad they don't allow you to choose your own number (well...not all 7 digit). And I don't want to pay $30 a month to get a 1-800 number (or 1-899 nowadays?). So that's just a dream until they starts to use the same first 3 digit code in phone list...when will that be? (rumors about you can transfer your cell phone numbers between companies sometime this winter, well, rumors...)

Ok, really back to ICQ. Why does it crash so often? It actually crash more than windows itself. Well, I don't know, they usually dies together, so I can't really tell which one is the murder here in this murder/suicide case. (or it's a gang war? But I'm not the cop, I don't want them dead!)
Did ICQ ever have any major improvement to it's core? I mean, their search for user still sucks.
And for some reason, it doesn't stay connected very well. While everything else works fine, ICQ will drops out of connection and die. (Well, hangs there forever means dead to me, don't you think?)

Support for Chinese. Most of the time during chat is alright. But on everything else it doesn't work all the time. And usually when you really wanted it to work, it fails. (ain't everything else in life are like that too?) I guess I better stop picking on it's fault, after all, ICQ is a chat program(??) and if does that well, that's enough.

Oh, if you are one of those people who still use (or only use) ICQ as your main communication program with your friends and family, you can ignore this.