It was inevitable.  Becky has left for college.  So begins the two long years of phone calls, e-mail’s, weekends at GVSU, and long boring weekdays.  "It won't be so bad," I had assured her many times.  "This is the 21^st century!  We both have microphones and webcams.  The technology exists for use to spend time together each day talking online.  We will still get to share our day with each other.  It won’t be so bad!” 

So the big day arrives.  We turn on our webcams, which work fine, and then try the audio chat.  After a full minute of “Connecting with Dorothy Gale,” I receive the error message “The network or computer you are trying to reach is experiencing a problem. Please try again later.”  Right… Try again later!  Like that ever works!

As it turns out, Microsoft in their great wisdom, decided to have MSN Messenger 6.2 require ports 5,004 – 65,535 unblocked to use the audio feature.  Now that’s a friggin lot of ports!  I can’t blame a college Network Administrator for blocking all those!  Post after post on the Internet roasted Microsoft for this blunder.  Many people recommended ditching MSN and going to Yahoo.  That was reported as working trouble free.

I don’t want to run two chat programs!  I have enough crap in my system tray!  This is the 21^st century!  We have the technology to chat using MSN Messenger, and come hell or high water I was going to make this work.  Now resolved, I got Mike on the case.  We determined that we could not audio chat either due to his firewall at work.  Mike browsed around for a few minutes and produced a HTTP Tunnel Client which worked perfectly.  The ports were magically changed or something and we were able to use the MSN Messenger audio chat feature.

Encouraged now, I sent the file to Becky and walked her through setting it up.  But for some stupid reason we still could not get the audio chat to work.  Mike tried too.  No luck.  This is the point that we both installed Yahoo Messenger.  Works great.  I feel so defeated.  I’m sure Microsoft will fix this glaring error in the next version.  Retards…

As a side note, the following chronicles my attempts to find out from the GVSU HelpDesk if the ports required for MSN Messenger 6.2 were indeed blocked.  Remember the old Helpdesk axiom:  “If we ignore the customer, maybe they will go away!”

To GVSU HelpDesk – 08/22/2004
My girlfriend is living in Laker Village.  We are both running Windows
XP with SP2 and MSN Messenger 6.2.  We are unable to use the audio
feature.  I was wondering if you could confirm if the necessary ports
are blocked on your end for this service.

From CTS Helpdesk – 08/23/2004
Are you both in Laker village?

To GVSU HelpDesk - 08/24/2004
No, I am off site.  I have no problems using the audio feature with other MSN 6.2 clients on 56K, DSL, and Cable Modem connections.  It does not appear that the XP SP2 firewall is the issue, due to the fact that I can use the audio feature with the Windows XP firewall in place with other clients.  In addition, there is a special exception set by default in the SP2 firewall allowing MSN 6.2.  I am assuming based on our tests, that port are blocked on the GVSU end that are required for the audio feature of MSN 6.2.  Can you confirm?

From CTS Helpdesk – 08/29/2004
I am sorry but those ports are block by our firewall

Hmmm.  Thanks for nothing I guess.