Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Ok, well, maybe not exactly, but more or less. At least that’s my fervent hope. As readers here may have noticed, I have not posted an entry here in over a year! That is a long time to go without blogging, especially for someone who tended to post not every day, but at least a couple times a month in most months, and often more than that.

2007 was a busy year for me personally. My daughter turned two, and rapidly demanded more attention as she became totally super-mobile as well as agile enough to climb tables, leap tall buildings, or at least cushions with a single bound, etc.

I also started a new job in 2007 where I’ve been kept very busy. Previous jobs have almost all had some serious downtimes, especially the job previous to my current one. The business at work means I’m sometimes working late and/or on the weekends. Since many of my previous jobs were for government contracts where you really couldn’t work overtime, this is definitely different!

But the blogging bug has been gnawing at me for a while. I’ve actually been keeping my writing going by participating in a number of discussion forums, and a recent reply to a message asking me if I was a professional writer (incredibly flattering to someone who’s never had a piece of writing printed other than a couple of college paper editorials!) has given me that much more motivation to get this thing back on the tracks again. I really want to put some thoughts down here and there if only in a paragraph or two. Unfortunately - or perhaps fortunately for some of my readers - the long tomes you may encounter by viewing the archives here probably will not occur again, or only on very rare occasion. I’m going to attempt, however, to at least start scribbling down a disjointed thought or two on a more regular basis - well, hell, on ANY basis – and we’ll see what happens.

I did feel like I needed to write SOME kind of intermediate message, though, explaining my absence for over a year, so here it is.

Sorry about the dirth of entries recently. I’ve been a bit preoccupied as of late. Namely, we were expecting our first child early in August, but she just didn’t want to come out! She was finally born last week and since then I’ve been burping, changing diapers, and fetching things for my wife. On top of this work has become a bit more hectic recently, so all this means that time is even a more pretty precious commodity than it is normally. One day I will get back to posting here on some interesting tech or diet/nutrition-realated topics. But things need to calm down just a bit first!

While our birth adventure was underway we were somewhat dead to the outside world and so only learned a bit second hand about what was going on in New Orleans, but we still haven’t watched any TV for over a week. Just hearing about it on the radio occasionally or from friends is bad enough! We know some people who moved to New Orleans just two months ago. They got out with some essentials, but lost everything else, including a car. Another family friend’s family is from New Orleans. They got out safely, but their houses are gone. Another friend’s family is from New Orleans and he hadn’t heard from any of them as of a couple of days ago. I’m not going to bother to put up another link for donations, as these are everywhere on the web these days, but I will just say that my heart goes out to all those who were effected by this tragedy and I will be trying to help out in some way myself.

Vienna 4th best place to live in the U.S.!

Money Magazine has come out with its top 100 places to live in the U.S and my town is #4 on the list. I knew there was a reason we moved here! To be fair, though, I’m sure lots of deserving towns were not in this list and many in this list are probably questionable. The problem is that the criteria are all weighted the same, whereas for different people some criteria will by far outweigh others. So while my town might be a great place for me to live, it’s probably not the right place for a whole lot of people. At least money lets you program your own criteria on their site (from a limited list) so that you can produce one that might be more customized to your own needs.

The other odd thing about how they judge towns in this article is that they do it based on the post office address. So while Vienna’s city limits comprise a fairly compact area, it’s official address stretches much further, encompassing some areas that are very different from the main parts that most people associate as Vienna. The same is true of all of these towns, so I’m sure this had a big effect. There could very well be incredible places to live, but their city name also encompasses areas on their outskirts that may have crime problems, or bad schools, or perhaps where the houses are astronomical in price.

Still, I can’t help but to be glad that my town won something like this. The last time I recall there was a big news story that featured Vienna was when Robert Hannsen was caught passing secret documents to the KGB via drop-offs in Vienna parks. Hannsen also lived in Vienna.

For anyone who is already a Vienna resident or who is thinking of moving here, a few weeks ago I set up a Yahoo! Group devoted to things Vienna. It still hasn’t quite gotten off the ground, but maybe this #4 placement will be the start of something?

Back to blogging.

After the longest hiatus in months, I’m finally trying to get back to posting a bit more. Not that I’ve suddenly got a lot of time on my hands, but after a pretty hellish week where I was doing some work for my old job and working at my new job for a total of somewhere around 70 hours, I at least FEEL like I have a lot more free time! I’ve actually gotten some things around the house and yard done I’ve been wanting to do for WEEKS! My new job also has had be a bit busy, but now that I’m finally starting to get used to the new environment and develop a rhythm, I’ll actually get to take a short break once in a while and maybe not write per se, but at least get some things done that I otherwise would have put off till after work.

I’m sorry about the quietness here over the last couple of weeks. It’s one of those times in my life when real-life events are superseding a lot of my time online. Damn you, real life, damn you to hell! To be more specific, I’d been searching for a new job as my current job’s contract is ending, and I found one, so I’ve been trying to wrap things up at my now old job – my last day was yesterday. In the mean time, me an my wife are expecting and we’re starting to approach the home stretch. With that comes lots of business with juggling decisions about birth attendants, pediatricians, and childcare providers, as well as taking childbirth classes, figuring out what we need to buy (or ask for) for the baby, etc., etc. I wish I could tell you there is a light at the end of the tunnel, but that light seems like it might be a ways off. My new job will require me to learn some new programming skills, and my old job wants me to come in on my “spare time” at least until the contract is officially over in a couple of weeks to finish a couple of projects. And then of course there’s the baby, which will probably preoccupy most of my free time once she arrives! But, I will at least try to steal 20 minutes here and there and post something interesting. Indeed, I may look into ways of posting quick links and very short comments, since that should be a lot faster. I fear my days of the epic-long treatises may be behind me – at least for a while!

A few days ago, I posted a list of states in textual form that I’d lived in, visited, etc., which was generated from a script I found. As I wrote, I have long wanted to keep a kind of visual record of where I’ve been. I love maps, and so I always had the thought of creating one that was color-coded based on where I’ve been – at least in the U.S. to start. I finally created such a map which you see below. It is at least a start. I figure this is something that I can work on building up, but it is at least the beginnings of something that represent my travels here. It’s color-coded based on three main divisions – where I’ve visited, where I’ve lived, and where I’ve driven through or had a layover in.

To describe the division a little better, I would say that “lived in” is if you stayed there for more than a couple of months. For example, many people go to camp for a couple months when they are young, but I don’t count this as “living” in a place, rather you are just “staying” there for a while. I know, it’s not the best choice of words, but I suppose that will be in the next draft. “Visited,” I think, requires an intentional visit to a place. I’m not sure whether sleeping there is necessary but I think in all my “visited” states, I’ve slept over. Anytime you were simply in an airport in a state as part of a layover, or if you had to drive through a state in order to get to your destination (even if you got off the road and had a bite to eat or visited some place of interest), these would count as the third category.

One thing I’m a bit unclear about is my stay in California. I was apparently very young – probably about 1 – so of course don’t remember it at all. Does this still count? Or is it yet another category?

Also notice that I am colorcoding with a neutral green – too many damn red and blue state maps have gone and ruined those colors for maps! You start thinking that the color-coding has something to do with politics, which in this case it doesn’t!

This is a static map which I edited in Photoshop. Other than doing this yourself, there’s another tool out there, but it only delineates whether you’ve been to a state or not. You can’t really customize it. And the map it produces in not all that great in quality. I’m still looking for something similar that is dynamic and lets you create graphical representations of this sort but haven’t found anything yet. I think it could be programmed in Flash, but not knowing Flash very well, I would have to spend large amounts of time learning Flash and playing with it, something I don’t have time to do at the moment. Perhaps a Flash wizard out there could punch something out in a couple of hours?

I finally posted on eBay an auction for my Treo 600, a 512MB SD Memory Card, a Vaja case, and a GPS bundle. If you read this blog regularly, you know that this phone served me well for the last 8 months or so. I’m hoping to get one Meeeelion dollars for it. But considering the phone itself was purchased for a low price from a friend, I’d be happy with a lot less. Anyway, aside from the auction, here are some nice shots me and my wife took of the Treo and the bundled stuff (with her Fuji S2):

Update: Well, wouldn’t you know it! My auction went well, but the guy who won wanted to pay using bidpay. I had never heard of them, but apparently they use Western Union to transmit money. It looked legit so I said ok. But after he won and tried to send money, bidpay for some reason rejected the transfer. Twice. He asked to post it again so that he could start fresh and he would buy it and then try the same thing. I took a chance and did this. He bought it, tried to transfer money and again got rejected. Apparently this was the only way he could send money. He was located in the Ukraine. He had a perfect 60+ feedback, but go figure, this was the time his usual payment option decided to balk on him!

It reminds me of my first ever experience with eBay which soured me to it so much that I didn’t use it for at least a year. It was back in 1997 and I sold an old VCR to a guy in Texas. I checked my bank account for days after I deposited his check and when I saw it listed, I thought it was a done deal. So I sent off the VCR. A week or so later I get a notice from the bank that the check had bounced and they were charging me $5. I wrote the guy who said that he was moving and so had to transfer money out of that bank, but put money back in so told me to ask them to try it again. I did, and the same thing happened. I tried reaching him again about it, but was not getting a response. I wanted a money order in order to guarentee payment. Finally he wrote back (this was probably about two months after he had won) to say that he was being harrassed and that I was somehow being a jerk for asking for my money. He said it was my fault for sending him the VCR before his check had really cleared! He said he still intended to send the money, but of course I never got either that nor any further correspondence. I even had a friend who was a lawyer send him a letter mentioning legal action if he didn’t send the money, but still never got a penny. Thus I receive one of only two negative feedbacks on my account. The other one was from someone who bought something but never responded to several of my emails. I eventually had to give them negative feedback and of course they returned the favor. For this reason, I’m leary about leaving negative feedback unless someone does something really aggregious because it’s almost a given that they will do the same to you, which will hurt your chances of selling things in the future.

Anyway, I had to go ahead and relist the Treo. This time I put a much lower Buy It Now price of $399.99, which is actually less than what the auction was won for last time

I always knew I’d be famous! Ok, well, it’s a start! Mozilla, as part of their promotional effort, asked for donations so that they could post a full-page ad in the New York Times. They got much more than they expected and so were able to post a two-page ad. I haven’t seen it person yet, but they have a png file as well as a much larger pdf file that you can zoom in on. The deal was make a donation, get your name listed, and in fact my name is in there! Yes it means nothing, but it’s still fun to see your name in print – for someone who hasn’t had the pleasure (or agony) of that happening.

Back in April when we were about to move into our new home, I started researching Voice Over IP (VOIP) services. There’s never a better time to do this when you are moving to a new location and will have to order a bunch of services like phone, internet, cable/satellite anew. At the time, after a lot of review reading at BroadbandReports.com, I came to the conclusion that a company called Broadvoice offered a service that offered what I wanted at the lowest cost.

For those who are unfamiliar with VOIP, it’s just a way to hook up a normal phone line and use it as you would a normal phone, but using a high-speed internet connection. Initially only smaller third-party companies were offering the service, but major telecom companies have gotten into the act since the service can save a serious amount of money for a lot of people, and I suppose they couldn’t bully the FCC into outlawing the technology.

Since then, I’ve been mostly perfectly happy with the service, although there have been glitches here and there. First off, until last month, our DSL service was a bit slow with a 128K upload speed, which doesn’t leave much after Broadvoice takes its 90Kbps. So it was hard to do much in the way of uploading during calls. Not a huge deal, but a bit annoying. Sometimes the voice quality cracks out a bit, but it’s kind of rare. In general the quality is pretty close to what a regular landline phone sounds like.

When I first subscribed, part of the reason I went with Broadvoice over some more expensive services was their promises that various features were coming in a week or two or a month or two. That and they had a very good rating for customer support. I figured it had most of what I needed, and it would soon have things that were available elsewhere that might be useful. I kept checking back with their site but never saw any changes. It wasn’t a huge deal as I wasn’t used to those features, but of course it would be cool to have some added functionality.

Today for some reason I decided to go to their site after a good couple of months since the last time and found lots of surprises. First of all, I can now, for the same $20 per month, call 21 countries and stay on for an unlimited amount of time without getting charged. I don’t know of any other VOIP provider that offers something like this, although most are pricier than Broadvoice! For an additional $5 per month you can call unlimited to an additional 14 countries. Now if only I had lots of international friends! I feel so provincial!

The other nice thing is that they finally revamped the “Account Portal” which is basically an web administrative interface to control all the features of the phone, like call forwarding, voicemail, etc. Speaking of voicemail, one of the most useful features that we have enabled is the feature that notifies us by email when someone has called our number. It doesn’t matter if they’ve left a voicemail or not, but if they do, we get another email that has an actual wav file of the voicemail attached, and can then listen to it on our office computers without having to call our voicemail system. Of course when you for some reason these waves are not playable on my Treo 600 via PocketTunes, but I am going to contact them to see if we can figure out why they are incompatible. Anyway, the new portal actually has something that Vonage and AT&T had when I was first researching this stuff and wanted badly – a full online system to view the current voicemails on your account, listen to them, and/or delete them. This allows for much easier management of this stuff than having to go through a convoluted phone menu. My only problem is that I can listen to the voicemail “inline” with Firefox. Instead I have to download them manually to my desktop and then click on them. Whereas in IE I can just just hit the little play icon. Firefox tells me that I don’t have a QuickTime plug-in installed, but when I try to install it, it tells me it’s been installed, but going back to the page produces the same “Click here to download plug-in.” This is on my work computer, so I’ll have to try it out at home. I also thought I might be able to access it on my phone’s browser but I guess that was too much to ask, as when I try it tells me my browser isn’t compatible…

So it seems like Broadvoice has been pretty hard at work, it just took them a while to get some of the big improvements out. There are also a few items in the portal marked as “coming soon” and I’m sure there will be additional ones in the future. I think VOIP is definitely the way things are heading in Telecom. The “calling adapters,” as they are called, that allow you to use normal telephones seem to be a necessary at the present since most people still use these and they are readily available and relatively cheap. But already we are seeing “soft phones” that only work with VOIP services, but are optimized for that kind of functionality. While I can’t bring my calling adapter with me anywhere like a cell phone, I can at least bring it to a place that has a fast internet connection - like a hotel or a friend’s house - and get the same unlimited calling that I can at home. I haven’t actually DONE this, but if we end up taking any extended trips in the future where we’ll have access to a high-speed connection, it would be useful. I’ve also heard that you can’t use them in Starbucks/Borders Hotspots (Wireless public internet access). This may have to do with the fact that Hotspots is set up by T-Mobile which is a cell-phone company, and enabling the use of VOIP could potentially hurt their business.

The way it could hurt is that when cellular data rates get fast enough (and they already have for some of the 3G networks that are starting to be laid out), VOIP will be available on cell phones. But count on the mobile telecom industry to do everything it can to prevent this step, including blocking the ports necessary. After all, if you can bypass the phone company’s voice network and just buy an “all-you-can-eat” data plan for $40/month, you never have to worry about peak times or minute rates again, since you will just be using the data plan to your VOIP service. What mobile Telecom companies should really do in order to compete with this is to just set up their VOIP services and integrate them, offering a “data/VOIP” service for a $75 flat fee for unlimited VOIP calls and unlimited data. This would also enable you to be talking on your phone and simultaneously accessing the data network (say to view a web page), something that currently is not possible, at least with GSM/GPRS phones. It should be interesting to see how things fall in the next year or two when this should go down. For now, though, I am very happy with Broadvoice’s service.

Hey, if you found this useful and end up subscribing to Broadvoice and don’t mind giving me credit as your referal, email me before you sign up so I can give you my referral fee.

Engadget has a piece about inferior Christmas lights causing interference that may be effect DSL connections. While I haven’t been having problems with my DSL connection, my Treo 600 cell phone seems to be having issues when I’m at home this week. Everyone I talk to hears a loud buzz. So loud that they have to hang up after a pretty short period of time. Then again, maybe my family is just sick of talking to me and that’s a nice excuse. We don’t have any lights up outselves and neither do our neighbors on each side of us, but two doors down there’s a house with a decent number of lights. I just wonder if all these lights are causing problems for others. We don’t even live on a block that has that many big light displays, just the one that I can tell. Although other blocks not too far from us are pretty much dripping with lights and other garish stuff. It’s fun to look at all these monstrosities, but if they are going to make my cell phone reception suck, that’s another matter!