Bryan Strawser

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Vonage

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In other news, after watching my monthly phone bill climb and climb, I am dropping Verizon and switching to Vonage.

Picked up a new 5.8ghz phone yesterday with two handsets and a digital answering machine at Circuit City along with the LinkSys Vonage Router. Got it home, spent 5 minutes plugging them in, and 5 more minutes setting up on the web.

10 minutes later I had a Minnesota phone number in my home in Taunton, Massachusetts and unlimited long distance for $24.99/month.

As I said via IM to a friend yesterday, “why the hell didn’t I do this before?”

Handwriting

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Tim Bray wrote recently about the decline in his handwriting:

I think the fine art of handwriting is about done for

My handwriting is so bad I have trouble reading it any more. It’s not rocket science, I’ve been sitting in front of a computer for two and a half decades, what do you expect? It’s gotten to the point that I no longer apologize for popping open the laptop to take notes in meetings, even with people in suits. And I frequently find that I’m not carrying a pen when I have to fill out the customs forms.

It’s even worse for me. I’ve had horrible handwriting since I learned to write in cursive – for which I received “Cs” in school, mind you. Oh, that was in 1st grade. And it never got better.

With the advent of technology, my handwriting has simply gotten worse. I type most notes nowadays, I use email for many things, but I still take notes on my Tablet PC and sometime on paper – but I guarantee you that no one else can read them.

Two Years Since The Switch

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Mike Wendlund, over at Tech:Knowledge writes of his experiences after two years as a user of Apple products… he “switched”!

I just celebrated my two year anniversary of being – near as I can – an all-Mac operation in my personal computing.

Ten overwhelmingly positive experiences have kept me strongly in the fold:

No spam – There is no better spam filter than Spam Sieve. It’s a Mac-only product and it catches 98 percent of my junk mail.

No worms or viruses – None. Zip. Zero. Not a single one in two-plus years now.

No adware/spyware – Same thing. These are non-issues on my Macs.

No crashes – It just doesn’t happen with OS X. I had one crash in December 2002, but I was running OS 9 at the time and it was a very old program (from 1994-ish) and I was curious to see if it worked. It didn’t.

I switched in December 2002 when I purchased the Apple Dual G4 Desktop and expanded that system in April 2003 with a Powerbook G4 Laptop. Now it’s nearly two years later and I’m still using both machines without any upgrades (other than new software).

My employer is a WinTel / Microsoft shop so I picked up a Motion Computing 1400D tablet earlier this year – and used in conjunction, these two machines make my life alot easier. But I prefer an Apple solution — why? Just look at the three items I highlighted from Wendlund’s blow… No spam, no worms, no viruses, no adware, no spyware, and no crashes.

You can’t beat that.

Besides, Macs are SEXY!

FBI Holds Onto Passenger Records

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The Boston Globe reports today that the FBI has been keeping millions of records on air travelers who flew in the months before September 11th:

If you’re among the millions of Americans who took airline flights in the months before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the FBI probably knows about it and possibly where you stayed, whom you traveled with, what credit card you used and even whether you ordered a kosher meal.

The bureau is keeping 257.5 million records on people who flew on commercial airlines from June through September 2001 in its permanent investigative database, according to information obtained by a privacy group and made available to The Associated Press.

Privacy advocates say they’re troubled by the possibility that the FBI could be analyzing personal information about people without their knowledge or permission.

”The FBI collected a vast amount of information about millions of people with no indication that they had done anything unlawful,” said Marcia Hofmann, attorney with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which learned about the data through a Freedom of Information Act request.

And I say. BIG DEAL.

I believe in privacy. I’ve been a member of the ACLU since I was 16 years old – I’m a long time member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other organizations – and I’ve written a ton of letters and done some individual lobbying about issues like the Clipper chip, digital telephony, and other issues.

But you also have to draw a line about what’s reasonable from the standpoint of investigations – and I’m trying to see the issue here.

If you think the FBI really has the time to go digging through these records to see if you and your mistress were flying somewhere together because they’re trying to co-opt your vote – then I recommend that you pull the tin foil hat down a little closer around your ears to block the alien rays.

2005 Mobile Technology Wishlist

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At jkOnTheRun, James writes of his wishlist for Mobile Technology in 2005. My favorite wishlist item of his:

Apple iTablet.

I would love to see Apple come out with a Tablet PC based on OS X. My reasoning is somewhat devious- in addition to being curious what sort of Tablet Apple would release (and it would be innovative no doubt), it would also be the perfect vehicle to bring the Tablet PC concept to the masses. Apple knows how to market and I am confident they would show a lot of consumers how a Tablet can benefit them, something MS and the Tablet PC OEMs don’t seem to know how to do. It would create huge excitement in a genre that needs it desperately.

I can only hope this comes true!

JK, by the way, is hands down the best mobile technology weblog on the web today.

Creating the Home Office for Writing

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Blogger David Hewson has a post up over at his blog about creating an office for writing at home.

With three computers on my desk now – and a new Tablet PC that I need to find a way to integrate – I’m running into the same problem that he was — how to create the right atmosphere in my home office for creative and professional work.

David writes:

What I wanted of my office redesign was more space and less hassle. I think it gave me both and finally I have room for some books on my desk, not on the shelves behind. That should have been a priority from the start, but somehow the computers got hold of me, demanding I fit in with them, not the other way round.

It was, on the face of it, though quite expensive. There are a couple of ways of looking at this. I now have one computer which works all the time, on the road and at home. Before, either the desktop or the notebook was out of action. Had I replaced both they would have cost more than the notebook alone, and got less utilisation.

My home office is in the basement of a split level ranch and features two desktop computes (a Mac G4 w/ 23″ LCD, a Dell P3-933 w/ 19″ LCD, an Apple Powerbook G4 15″, and a Motion M1400 Tablet PC). I got the tablet specifically for work though I see potential home uses for it as well. It’s truly a portable notebook – I’m looking forward to really putting it through its paces in the coming weeks.