Jul 30

Vacation day

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Today’s the day we’re going on the annual vacation to my Grampa’s old cottage. It’s on Anderson Lake in Wisconsin. If you’ve been to the gallery at Where’s Lou you’ve probably seen that the only pictures there really are from a 2003 vacation to the lake. Here are some of them.

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There’s also a railroad and logging museum named Camp 5 we’ve gone to more or less every year. You ride an old school locomotive down a mile or two of track to get there from the ticketing station. The kids love it.

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Jul 15

Dang entropy!

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Maybe it’s a normal psychological reaction to statistical clustering, but everything seems to go wrong at the same time. This has to be something common to everybody or where would you get the old adages about bad things happening in threes, or when it rains it pours.

A while ago coming out of Transformers the minivan wouldn’t start. Funny aside – I had sent off the last payment earlier that same day. The Mini got a nasty scratch-dent in it from some valet parking – the place said their insurance will cover it however.

At the moment I’m in the process of attempting to rescue a Windows machine that lost it’s boot loader file. So from an XP CD I chose what I believed to be the correct option and it jumped in and removed all of the system files and has begun replacing them, which is okay except there appears to be a problem with the disc or the cdrom drive because I’m having to “retry” frequently and it has failed-needing-reboot in the middle of the restore twice now. Sigh.

There’s some crisis or other my family-in-law is having too of course. Which is to be expected. There’s actually more but honestly I can’t recall at the moment.

But not to be defeated I pro-actively carry onward. I did mow the lawn successfully. And I’m going to try again today to get a haircut.

OMG this things idea of a restore looks like it is in fact installing a new copy of the OS where the old one used to be. Nice. I’m sure that’ll work out great.

Ah well. It’s a good thing I normally have such a positive disposition. This glass is *at least* 30 percent full right here, I’ll tell you what.

In fact I think I have enough internal fortitude to look up a recipe to go around this jar of mole sauce I picked up the other day. The chocolate based one, not the varmint.

D’oh! Product key? The thing had a fully installed O/S (minus boot loader) before the repair process began! Know what? I’m starting to think Ubuntu.

Jul 09

Funny geeky jewelry

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Earrings

All they need are a pair of matching bracelets engraved with <body> and </body>.

Jul 05

T-Mobile sets the stage

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I hope this is the last telephony post for a while – it can’t be that interesting.

That said here’s another telephony post!

T-Mobile announced a new dual mode phone; there’s a piece on the New York Times about it. With T-Mobile HotSpot @Home your calls can be placed on any 802.11b/g wireless and it will fall back to the T-Mobile cellular network when it needs to.

These phones hand off your calls from Wi-Fi network to cell network seamlessly and automatically, without a single crackle or pop to punctuate the switch. As you walk out of a hot spot, fewer and fewer Wi-Fi signal bars appear on the screen, until — blink! — the T-Mobile network bars replace them. (The handoff as you move in the opposite direction, from the cell network into a hot spot, is also seamless, but takes slightly longer, about a minute.)

It’s offered as $10 per month you can add to any individual plan of $39.99 per month or higher. It’s still tied to a contract, and your number is still tightly coupled to a cellular network, but it’s a step in the right direction at least. Hopefully it’s popular enough to force other providers to follow suit.

Jul 03

Google has acquired GrandCentral

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I’ve blogged a few times about Google’s telephony potential and it really looks like it’s going to happen. Google has just acquired a company named GrandCentral Communications which provides a considerable number of remarkable features.

Which makes a lot of sense. There’s a huge improvement Google can bring to both ends of the equation by merging all of your phones and voicemail inbox with your gmail inbox, and there’s the less well known Google Talk client that provides instant messaging chat but also provides voice call and voicemail as well. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see Gmail, Google Talk, and GrandCentral blend into a audio/textual communication/messaging mashup to unify personal telecommunication scenarios.

Voice mail, email, phone call, voice chat, sms, text, fax, pix, call forwarding, im presence… What’s the difference?

Read the rest of this entry »

Jul 01

Google telephony reprise

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Hey! Remember earlier when I blogged about Google steps further into telephony? I ended with the thought:

Now this is right on the heels of GOOG-411 directory assistance and free call connection. Add to that mix the Google Talk client which implements computer based voice calls in addition to the simple instant messaging.

Now I’m just speculating but this small handful of tricks could be the tip of the iceberg. Who knows if they’ll ever connect the dots, you know? That said you could be looking at a company here that could shake a few paradigms if they step into the personal telephony market in any significant way.

I just read another article I saw on Digg entitled Google: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet which explores that idea in much greater depth.

“It’s not an if, it’s a when,” says California-based technology analyst Rob Enderle. “Different parts of this are coming in at different speeds, but once they’re done what they plan to do is offer comprehensive services through their own backbone and effectively lock a lot of the traditional players out of the market. A lot of them don’t even see it coming.”

“These guys are increasingly swirling and swivelling around the telecom space,” says Lawrence Surtees, vice-president and principal analyst of Canadian communications research for global technology consultancy IDC. “If you put all of this together, is Google a search company or a telecom network service provider or all of the above?”

It’s a long piece and these two paragraphs alone don’t touch on the main gist of the article. So I’d suggest reading it from the source if you’re at all interested.

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