Skype!

If you aren't using Skype yet, I strongly urge you to give it a try. It is soooo cool. I'm using it now to talk to two former colleagues at Georgia State while we work on an article, and the clarity is amazing. It's like they're in the cube next to me, not across the country. I can certainly see job candidates down the road asking if they can Skype their phone interviews.

A couple of things we discovered:

• Definitely take the time to test it out before you really need to use it. It may take several tries to get mic/headphone connections correct on your CPU. And if you're CPU is on the floor and under the desk like mine, the headphones are probably going to stay connected.
• The second time we tried it out, Doug and I couldn't hear each other (and were using IM as a backup to figure out what was going on). We each closed out Skype and reopened it and that seemed to fix it.