British Inside : Phones

Running with CallingID

James — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 19:28:00 GMT

This experiment is fascinating. I now have CA's version of CallingID toolbar in FF/IE and it is really interesting to watch. The big names are obviously all green, but some very well known sites are yellow. Most small sites are yellow, but some are red.

Red causes all sorts of traffic to leave immediately I'd imagine. Or not even go there in the first place, this toolbar is very effective at warning you in advance.

But it led me to thinking; most of the yellows are because CallingID thinks that the company is not registered at that address or because you are using Domains By Proxy or similar service. I recently started switching over to private registration but I'm regretting that decision now.

The thing is, I've always wanted to open about who I am - and who my businesses are. Always put a cell phone on there and an email address. I instantly DISTRUST companies that don't have a very visible list of executives and ways to contact them.

So why go with private registration? Full disclosure on a website with private registration is a bit of an oxymoron isn't it?

I always rent a MailBox Etc/UPS Store mailbox and use that as my mailing address anyway - best $100 a year you can spend. So, why make a Mailbox private. Dumb, Dumb, Dumb Shaw.

Ok, so it's on my to-do now, get into GoDaddy and get back to regular whois data. Big deal, I'll start getting mail about renewing my domain from spammers; that's ok. Full Disclosure Baby, it's the only way to go.

Of course, that probably won't satisfy CallingID until I move the registered address to the mailbox..assuming that is what they are checking. Still no reply from them...

Moto Q returned!

James — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 08:47:00 GMT

Well, that didn't last long. After four days I returned the Moto Q and got a replacement. Another Moto Q; I'm a sucker for punishment.

From day one, the sucker kept hanging up. I'd pick it up to do something and it wouldn't turn on. Or I'd dial someone and it would just sit at "Dialing" with no sounds coming out and keyboard unresponsive. Each time I had to remove the battery to recover.

So, an hour waiting in the most disorganized store I've ever been in - Verizon's stores are awful - and I have a brand new phone to see if that helps. Fingers crossed. I know I'm not the only one with Moto Q issues, so we'll see. The form factor is great though, and I love being able to get into that home page XML and change my skin. Just like CS skinning!

My new Motorola Q

James — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 22:51:00 GMT

I was getting fed up with my Samsung i700 - my pretty old fashioned Pocket PC brick. Every day I have to re-align the screen, and once a week the stylus falls out. It's on the bottom of the phone for goodness sake!

And then last night I opened the mail and got a flyer about the Motorola Q.

Holy crap, this thing is 0.45" thick and weighs 4oz. It's barely bigger than a Razr.

It has a keyboard. It has bluetooth. These are all things my old brick doesn't have!

Most surprisingly, it has a thumbwheel just like a Crackberry. Didn't they patent that?

So, now I have one and what looks like a fat locust on my ear. So far, I love it. The thing is so small!

Oops, No Phone!

James — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 11:17:00 GMT

Uh-oh. I dropped my phone and it doesn't work any more.

I feel strangely liberated.

I went drag racing yesterday without it and couldn't be reached by phone or email.

I didn't check my email for 24 hours, can you imagine??

Luckily, prices for this now-outdated phone have dropped significantly. Listed at $900 when I bought it, I bought it from a Verizon dealer online for $600.

Now, two years later you can buy slightly used ones on ebay for $100. Since mine was more than slightly used and had a lot of battle scarring, it'll be a step up for me.

Just 49 minutes to go until the auction's over, at 12pm EST.

Just 2 hours 49 minutes to go until the puppies get here. We're looking at two 8 week old Golden's at 2pm.

Frankly, this is too much excitement for me on a Sunday.

Skype 2.0 and other toys

James — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 11:38:00 GMT

As Wally tipped me off, Skype 2.0 is available and now includes video amongst other things. I don't yet have a webcam, but I'm intrigued enough to look for one.

One feature stood out for me - the ability to list your contacts in groups. Since I use Skype as my main business phone I use it a lot and have many SkypeOut numbers in my list. Being able to split them into ASP.NET, Business/Client, Family/Friends and Telligenti clears up a lot of clutter in the UI.

However, even better than 2.0 itself (to me anyway) are the new add-ons, specifically Skype Email Toolbar.

The email toolbar is an Outlook add-in, and it's very cool. Whenever you click on a contact the toolbar will allow you to quickly call them with SkypeOut. It detects phone numbers in emails that you read and allows you to call them (although I have to say I couldn't get this to work, I suspect because I use Word for my email).

It even looks at your calendar and sets the Skype status to Do Not Disturb during appointments if you want!

RSS on Pocket PC

James — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 11:04:00 GMT

In an effort to make better use of my time, and because my Samsung i700 is now full-time internet connected, I'm wondering about reading some of my new blog subscriptions on my Pocket PC.

I found a neat list of Pocket PC RSS readers on about.com but have you used one? Please let me know.

I'll be choosy about which blogs I'll use in this way, but my blogroll has grown recently to include some great ones. And most of these are long articles, not simple posts. Great for reading while waiting for the tires to be rotated.

Top of my list of article-length blogs is still Rick Segal's (good to see he's getting lots of link love from Hugh, Scoble, etc now. I read him before he was A-List :D)
Many-to-Many
The Community Engine
del.icio.us blog (shouldn't it be blog.alicio.us?)

Skype Update

James — Sun, 28 Aug 2005 07:03:00 GMT

Following my earlier upgrade of Skype to us SkypeIn and SkypeOut I've had to abandon my attempt to use the PCPhoneline VTA1000 adaptor with my wireless phone.

Despire them telling me "There are also thousands of other users successfully using this same exact configuration at the moment so something very subtle must be wrong" I just couldn't get it to work reliably. Sometimes the phone would ring, but mostly it wouldn't. Sometimes I could pick up the phone and get a dial tone, but not every time.

As I told them when I requested an RMA and refund, it may be my computer at fault but that really doesn't matter to me. I shall forego the wandering around the room and buy myself a USB headset today which I know will work flawlessly.

BTW, this is in no way reflective of the Skype service which throughout this has worked great. Having my own local number for Skype use is awesome - and to charge me just $30 a year for it is frankly ridiculous.

Skype and Positively Outrageous Service

James — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 07:16:00 GMT

Having a second telephone line brought into the house (I work remotely) is crucial if you want to stay sane. I used to have a business line come to the house, but the big problem with business lines is that there are no call blocking features like you get on residential.

So the phone rings constantly with telemarketers. The residential line gets *none*, due to the cool anonymous call blocking features.

So finally I decided to cancel the line and go with Skype. I've used Skype for a while to talk to my family in Australia (they immigrated there from England) because of course it's free!

Now Skype has the ability to work as a real phone line too, with their SkypeOut and SkypeIn (beta) services. So far, I'm impressed. I just topped up my SkypeOut with $10 and it removes 1.7c for every minute that you are on the phone to a 'real' non-Skype phone.

SkypeIn (beta) is a flat fee of 30 Euros a year, and includes voicemail too. You get to choose a local number; mine is 678-608-3321 (very easy to remember with lots of repeated numbers) - but don't bother calling yet because I completely emptied my office and started over at the weekend. Of the dozens of peripherals attached to my PC, Skype is one of the last to be plugged in.

Why? I'm waiting for a new VOIP device to make Skype work with my cordless phone. I used to have one of the cheap-n-nasty PC2TEL devices from Rota which was ok up to a point, but wouldnt make my phone ring, and I couldn't just pick up the phone to start a Skype call. Better than nothing... just.

Now I have ordered a VTA1000 VOIP Gateway from www.pcphoneline.com, which promises to solve those problems. It should allow me to use Skype literally just like a regular phone. I'll keep you posted..

P.S. An update on 1-877-DOZ-DOGS; my phone started ringing. Most people hang up when they call though, so I guess they're just seeing how the www.gotvmail.com service works. Realize that I'm using none of their fancy features - it's just a toll-free number redirect to me. At OurLittleNet I used a lot more features such as setting up different extensions and departments.

I did get one person brave enough to talk to me; Serge called just to say Hi and was surprised that I picked it up "after hours". All part of the Positively Outrageous Service Serge..

..but don't buy a copy. I have 3 spare copies here and will send one to anyone who asks, together with one of my awesome mugs. Just tell me what is your favorite business-related book and why - and your street address.

I'll go first; these books changed my business life:

Mobblogging Failure..

James — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 07:47:00 GMT

I'm disappointed. I've had a Samsung i700 for a while and love it, but I haven't tried browsing online before. So last night while watching Molly at Karate I tried to blog.

Surpringly, I browsed to the site just fine, nothing to set up, download or pay for, and typed in a new blog.

However, when I hit save the browser reported a viewstate problem. Sure enough when I get home the error report is sitting in my Inbox:

Exception "Invalid length for a Base-64 char array.
Source: mscorlib
Stack: at System.Convert.FromBase64String(String s)
at System.Web.UI.LosFormatter.Deserialize(String input)
at System.Web.UI.Page.LoadPageStateFromPersistenceMedium()URL:

Now I need to see if this is a) a problem with my code or b) a problem with Pocket PC's in general. Can they not cope with a lot of viewstate? It is quite long on the posting page -nearly 3k.

Any ideas?