My irssi remains open all the time I'm in front of the computer - Shadowcat's primary internal co-ordination means is IRC, plus I'm on a dozen or so irc.perl.or

My irssi remains open all the time I'm in front of the computer - Shadowcat's primary internal co-ordination means is IRC, plus I'm on a dozen or so irc.perl.org channels, plus a handful on freenode. It does not, however, alert me in any way as to whether somebody's tried to contact me or not - so it only gets my attention when I want it to, usually because I'm thinking about something and can type responses on autopilot while I do.