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Feb
7
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I've been a Skype fan since they started the service in North America. I use it most days when I'm working from home and we have a separate account for calling friends and family back in Europe (for free, with video). I just stumbled across an interesting article with 5 Skype tips for web workers - good stuff - I like the house spy idea - I've alway wondered what the cats do when we're out.
As an aside - telephony is one of those technologies that has a cultural and personal impact like few others - I remember from my own childhood - the monster of a phone you rented from BT (you had little choice - BT had a monopoly in the UK), "party lines" (you shared a line with your neighbour) and the first broad wave of mobile-phones (late 80's) which we're only really mobile if you had a car to transport it in. Then in the 90's - the mobile phone as a status symbol for the young upwardly mobile.
My kid's memories of telephones will be different - watching their Mother sitting at the breakfast table talking into her laptop and seeing their Aunty Nicky or Grandpops 6000 miles away; Wondering who I'm talking to when my thing that used to be a cell-phone is giving me driving directions (It's John Cleese by the way). The real-time synchronous communication with anyone, anywhere, anytime has given my five year old a good understanding of time zones - not something a 5-year old from a previous generation would have been bothered with. I'm guessing the world will seem smaller to her generation a consequence of this rapidly converging technology.
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Jan
23
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Two things to be pissed-off about this morning. First Performancing (which produce the spiffy Firefox blog editor plugin I use) looks like they''ve gone belly-up. According to TechCrunch the demise may not be as swift and as clean as you might hope for. I hope the blog editor lives on - I rather like it (though support for the Roller's tags would be nice).
Second blogrant - I'll be on the road for some of this week and next so was just setting everything up for working on the road when I noticed my Treo wasn't able to collect mail from Sun's edge mail service. I tried a bunch of stuff (that mere mortals shouldn't have to know about) but couldn't make it work. The Treo just kept insisting it was out of memory shortly after connecting to the IMAP server. I'm not one to give up easily (especially when fighting electronic stuff) but don't really have time to debug right now. So instead, I installed ChatterMail and was up and running in no time. In hindsight - I probably should have switched from VersaMail a long time ago - ChatterMail is a fine piece of software and I'll probably buy it when my 30-days are up. This is a pretty common complaint I hear about Palm's products - the included apps are generally OK - but you probably want to replace them with much better commercial apps. of which there is an abundance. Kudos to Palm for creating the business ecosystem to allow that - I wonder if that's the path that Apple will take with the iPhone.
