Where’s the peanut butter?!

I’ve said before and will say again that there are an incredible
number of great documentaries out this year. tonight I add the yes men
to that list which already includes control room and the
corporation. the yes men is along the same general lines as the
corporation - we have a lot of problems around the world (or rather
create them) and business is to blame. the yes men is less academic
than the corporation, though, which tends to focus on institutions and
poweer in an abstract sense. the yes men are moe traditional activists
who travel the world pretending to represent the mcdonalds when they
talk to students about selling reprocessed human waste as burgers in
the middle east or when they go to textile conferences in gold
leotards with giant phalluses condemning the high costs of traditional
slavery and extolling the cost efective nature of contempoprary
globalization. go see it!

My mom sent me some email from href="http://www.travelbritain.org/newhome/discounts/disctlond.htm">TravelBritain.org
advertising discounted tube passes. Since Tanya’s going for a
conference in June and I’m tagging along, I poked around a
little to see how the deal really works. The US$ is currently
trading at about $0.84 href="http://finance.yahoo.com/m5?a=1&s=USD&t=EUR">according
to Yahoo. The href="http://www.thetube.com/content/tickets/quickFares_2003.asp">normal
cost for the tube for a single zones 1&2 fare is $2 and
a day pass for zones 1&2 is $5.10 (zones 1&2 cover most of
href="http://www.thetube.com/content/tubemap/images/tm_quad_2h.gif">central
London). After the exchange, the US$33 TravelBritain pass
comes out to about $3.96/day, which is about 22% off, so it
looks like a pretty good deal.

I’m thrilled to have made progress on one of my href="http://purl.org/NET/pjn/cgi-bin/blog.cgi/computers/techtodo.html">tech
todo items. I bought a license for the href="http://www.mapopolis.com">Mapopolis GPS navigation software
last weekend and now can go anywhere in the US or Canada with
turn-by-turn navigation directions read to me by my PDA. I think this
quality of GPS system would have easily cost me $800 or so as a
standalone application. Now for less than that, I have the GPS system
that is also my phone and can play music and that I can use to href="http://www.pqdvd.com">watch href="http://betaplayer.corecodec.org">movies on flights. Woot!

But for under USD$5000, href="http://www.bulgarianproperties.com/Houses_in_Bulgaria/AD2682BG_House_for_sale_near_Elhovo.html">this
house in rural Bulgaria could be yours!

I always have a bunch of projects I.m overcommitted to. here.s an update as much for my own reference as anyone else.

• make my wifi work. I.ve had a problem for a while getting my media
  center pc on my wireless network, making music and video sharing a
  pain. the media center pc is finally online. for some reason the wifi
  connnection to my accesspoint was set to manual, not automatic and in
  spite of my best efforts to manually connect it would not. deleting my
  ap from the list of preferred connections and making it autodiscover
  got me back in business.
• wifi + xbox. when my xbox is turned on connected to my wmce pc it
  knocks the wmce pc off the wireless net and the xbox can.t get on the
  net either.
• build one of the diy projectors with an old overhead and lcd
  screen. need to fnd a cheap ohp and monitor to ruin.
• finish the fence in our yard. finally got my survey results back! I’d
  recommend true north surveying to anyone in a situation like mine in
  seattle and now were finally ready to build.
• finish xbox stuff. get xbmc set as default dash. get on lan (as
  above). figure out how to get on xbl without being banned.
• finish kavalier and clay. maybe a good start would be reading on the
  bus instead of writing infrequent blog entries?
• finish pda gps. need tomtom or the other navigation software that will
  talk to me, car mount and car charger. some good news is that my new
  h6315 takes the same charger as my old h1910 so theres at least some
  chance ths would be forward compatible with something else. my
  bluetooth sled for the gps that came with streets and trips includes a
  power cable that can piggyback on the ppc charge cable so I have juice
  for that when I get the ppc car cable, too.
• probably cancel vonage. the situations where I want to make or receive
  an international call and save on the per minute charges will add up
  to less than the 25 a month ill spend on vonage plus softphone. also
  when I first tried this it wouldn.t work at all. I called support and
  waitted 20 minutes before hanging up. I emailed support and haven.t
  otten a reply yet. when I finally got it to work, I found the audio
  out uses my pocketpc normal speaker, not the phone speaker (its like
  permanent speakerphone) and tanya said she had some serious echo. I.m
  doing the pda bleeding edge phone thing and would guess the usual
  vonae customer experience is a lot better, but its not at a usable
  level of maturity where I’d pay for it (and theres no excuse for the
  customer service - its been like a week and they haven.t responded to
  my issue which was basically “hi, I just signed up and can.t get your
  service to work at all”)
• phone ftp. ftp from my phone was always flaky over gprs and I.ve
  basically given up on it. plus the application I was using was
  shareware and has expired. make this work. I’d blog more if it did.

I remember about six years ago thinking I’d never get a cell phone
because I didn.t need the complications in my life. now I.m trying to
make my phone be my car navigation system and make it make phone calls
ove wifi with no gsm connection at all. so I guess the moral is that
you should trust your instinct.

I tried out vonage a couple weeks ago because I wanted to be able
to use my pocketpc phone as a . . . voip/wifi phone. I’m perfectly
happy with the my device as a phone - this was partially a “I wonder
how this technology works?” experiment and partially “I’d like to make
(relatively) free calls when I’m travelling internationally”). Here’s
how the experience went. To cut to the chase: I wouldn’t recommend
you try this at home…

1. Day 0: Signed up for Vonage. The 14 day refund policy was a
   little worrisome - with shipping etc. it looked like I’d need to
   evaluate the service and get it sent back right away. There are
   tons of early termination fees, number changing fees, and almost
   if-you-return-our-hardware-and-it’s-dusty fees. $15/month for 500
   minute plan with a number tied to the hardware they would send me
   + softphone @ $10/month for a number that I can use on any
   computer on the internet (against my same 500 minute plan).
2. Day 0: I downloaded the softphone for my pocketpc from
   sjlabs. This should let me use my pocketpc as a vonage client
   which should turn my pocketpc into a phone with coverage area
   being anywhere I can get on wifi.
3. Day 0: I tried placing a couple calls and the callee could
   hear me but I could not hear that person.
4. Day 1: I called Vonage’s support and waited 20 minutes
   before giving up (bad support experience #1)
5. Day 1: I sent a question to their technical support
   basically saying “I’m a new customer and your service isn’t
   working for me - help!” that they didn’t respond to for a about a
   week.
6. Days 2-3: Over the course of the next week, I solved my
   problem myself (NAT issues).
7. Day 3: I make a successful call to my wife. She hears an
   echo even when I have my handsfree kit plugged in (this is
   surprising since my pocketpc IS a phone). There’s a noticeable
   lag. On my pocketpc, the phone software uses the PDA speaker (not
   the phone speaker that is next to my head when I use it as a
   phone) and I don’t have any way to make the sound come out of the
   speaker it should.
8. Days 2-6: Not surprisingly, there are NAT scenarios (like
   my work WLAN) where you can’t get your softphone account out to
   the internet (or not without tons of hacking I wasn’t prepared to
   do)
9. Day ~7: The hardware arrived - some OEM Linksys VOIP device
   - I never tried this since I don’t have a traditional phone to
   plug in to it. Around this time they also respond to my support
   question from when I signed up.
10. Day 8 (Thanksgiving): I want to cancel - their regular
    support # is open but not cancellations.
11. Day 9: I arrange to cancel and send everything back. The
    support is very helpful and I express my hope that this matures in
    the future.

I didn’t even get to try voicemail, call forwarding, etc. and I
suspect the regular (non-softphone, non-PDA) phone experience is a lot
better but have no idea if it’s remotely close to being a candidate
for landline replacement. Vonage don’t make the PPC client but they
do officially reference it for their platform so I’m disappointed by
that experience but suppose I might be able to kind of forgive them
for it. I was unimpressed with my support experience, but I’m under
the impression they’re going through massive growth and it’s possible
they don’t even try to start supporting customers until they believe
we’ve got our hardware (which seems kind of lame for someone in my
situation but maybe they get a lot of “what will my hardware be?” or
“do I need to go buy phone cables?” questions that are easy to
self-diagnose when the hardware comes).

I listened to the radio - waitin for my favorite song. when they played I.d ing along - it made me smile.

could there be any better way to close off the week than with a retrospective collection of karen and richard carpenters work turned up to 35? I don.t think so.

sha-la-la-la