Month: October 2004

My New VOIP (Home) Phone

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I finally broke down and purchased another VOIP phone for my house. If you are someone who actually reads this regularly you will know last summer I got Vonage for about 2 weeks. it was too expensive for me to justify keeping it so I got rid of it. I am not home enough to warrant a home phone. I have been fine with my mobile.

Fast forward 14 months and I found a company that offers relatively cheap VOIP and offers all the cool features I wanted. Jayson found Broad Voice. They offer a $9.99 plan that gives you unlimited in state calls. That is all I needed so I got it. They also offer a function that AT&T Callvantage offers that allows me to have my phone right simultaneously on several phones. Now I can have my home phone ring at work, on my cell, etc at the same time. I have wanted one number to route to multiple lines for years. I used to use AT&T’s 500 number service back in the early 90’s but that was expensive and you paid per inbound calls. This is better. Whatever phone I pick up first is the phone that the call gets routed to.

What is also cool is that this company unlike allot of other VOIP providers allow you the option of bringing your own VOIP device or ATA adapter. What that means for me is if want I can configure a Cisco 7940 phone I have at work and use that with this service. I actually have been trying to do that today, but I am running into issues since our Cisco phones are configured for Skinny (to work with a Cisco Call Manager) and for this service I need SIP. No matter what Cisco says it is not simple to change the configuration. For now I am just routing all my calls to my mobile. I get 30 days to try it out, and it is only like $15 a month after tax’s and extra features. Not bad for unlimited local calls. I can use my mobile for long distance!

More reviews as I get it. Jayson and Gus are both waiting to see how I like this company, but they are both interested in the service.

Puffs Plus Are My Friend

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Puffs Plus (with lotion) is my best friend this week. I would not know what I would do without those gloriously comfortable paper products this week. I have had a head cold all week. The last few days it has been in my sinus’s. I was dying at work with the crap tissues they buy, so I brought some Puffs Plus from work. I still can’t breath right, but at least my nose isn’t killing me. Who would have thought (the makers of Puffs I guess) lotion on tissues?

Yes I am crazy. When I am sick the little things matter that much more!

Ecto Back Online

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I figured out my problem with my offline blog editor ecto. I had to totally blow away any reference to ecto on my individual profile. I learned this by setting up a new profile and had ecto work just fine. Now I feel kind of dumb having put a question on their message boards, but why did this happen???

I am just happy I am online again. Now I hope my memory holds up and I remember what I wanted to write about all week. On the bright side I downloaded the newer version of the software and it has some cool and not so cool new features.

Locked Out

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I sat down tonight to catch up on some posting. Unfortunatly I am currently locked out of my offline blog editor. Not sure why. It seems to be taking forever to setup all my settings again. I am writting this entry right into the Typepad web editor. Not a fan of it. I want my ecto to work:( More posts after I fix the problem.

PodCasting???

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I am feeling like crap today. That means I don’t have strength to do much more than sit around on my laptop and browse the web. Several blog’s that I read have been mentioning PodCasting. This link describes it best. I just downloaded iPodderX Podcast Client.

Since I don’t listen to audio books (yet), and I haven’t listened to the radio regularly in years I am not sure if this is for me. I am going to check it out though. Most suggestions from the blogs I read are usually pretty good. I will let you know if I like it. Or you might not care either way, and that is cool also..

System Monitoring

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I spent most of the day yesterday trying to fix a problem we had with Whatsup Gold monitoring system. One developer group said they were not getting pages. We saw tons of pages for them, but we looked into it. Well turns out the system was working, but had trouble with reboots to the server we had it on. After a reboot the monitoring system didn’t start up properly, even after we initialized it. While I was looking at the system it completely stopped sending pages. I got fed up and moved it to a different box. now it is all happy and working. Not sure why it wasn’t working properly. Maybe it was Backup Exec running on the same box, or Windows 2003 (even though we have used it on 2k3 before). I don’t know. I just know Gus wanted it working, and now it is.

While I was investigating my problems I checked (for like the 10th time) to see if Microsoft posted Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM) to MSDN. It finally had, and I downloaded it. I really want to see if it will solve my other issues I am having with Whatsup Gold. We have the guys over at BMC also giving us a demo of their software, but I haven’t had time to run a test server of their BMC Patrol. I will look over MOM in a bit more detail next week.

The Waiting

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Friday for lunch Jayson and I went to the shake shack in Madison Square Park. it is a good burger place. Well I waited 35 minutes for a fast food burger and a shake. I like the food, but I don’t think I will ever go back there. I mean I am all about good greasy burgers and thick shakes (Mmmm shakes), but over 30 minutes waiting for food, come on!

Next time I crave a fast food burger, I will goto Wendy’s. it was across the street from where we waited. The sign just stared at us like it was saying “why didn’t you come eat by me, you know I am tasty”. I may have been hallucinating from lack of food while waiting in the sun!

DVR’s

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I am sitting at home (fighting a cold) today. What to do? Watch TV of course. I am cleaning out my Tivo of things I want to watch. After that I decided to play around with my Eye TV USB. it is a DVR for my Mac. It is a great little device, that I don’t use as often as I would like. It act’s just like a Tivo. It records the files right to my Powerbook’s hard drive, which is cool. It can export to MPEG-1 so I can burn a VCD. that is also cool. I would like to burn as a DVD using MPEG-2 files, but I don’t want to upgrade to the newer version (EyeTV-200) that will do that. EyeTV also does not require me to pay a monthly subscription fee. Why then don’t I use it all the time? It has one fatal flaw.

I have a digital cable box (2 actually). In order for me to get digital cable channels I need to plug the EyeTV into the Digital Cable box. When the EyeTV wants to record something it cannot change the Cable box’s channel. That means if I want to record something on the EyeTV I need to change the channel on the cable box for it. What good is that unless I am at the TV? Now if they made some sort of IR channel changer that Tivo has to resolve this problem then I would not need my Tivo. With the majority of the US population with cable or satellite, why not have this option? This is a great product, that I can’t use that much because of this limitation. I have no way around it for now. I am warming up to the DVR on a computer idea. I would rather do this on my Mac, then finding a PC solution. I don’t even know if the PC TV cards can change cable box channels? My old ATI All in Wonder Pro had the same issue.

For now I will stick with my Tivo. I love it, and have not found anything that works better. That said I keep going back to replayTV’s website to check out their warez every few months.

Update

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Got 1 wrong on my first EMT quiz. Not bad, but nothing to brag about since this is the 3rd time I have taken an EMT basic course in 10 years. CPR class is boring. I got most of the scenarios right on the first try. It was like riding a bike, you never really forget. I just needed to brush up on what is the current protocol for things.

I am getting a cold, or that is how I felt this afternoon. I took some cold meds to try and head off the impending shitty feeling. I will know tomorrow if I get any worse.

I want to write more about stuff that happened at work today, but I am tired. Hopefully I will post this weekend and talk about the good conversation we had with some high up exec’s at Cisco. I always find it weird (in a good way) when very high up people at billion dollar companies spend time to talk to people at relatively small companies about buying their product. I felt the same way when Gus spoke to John Chambers last spring. More about that later.