Omar Shahine's WebLog : Technology

Phone Calls in Meetings

omars — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 03:36:00 GMT

When did it become OK to answer a phone call in a meeting? I personally find it incredibly distracting. I *never* answer my phone during a meeting. I try (and some times forget) to place my phone on vibrate, and if I need to answer the call (because my house is on fire), then I walk outside. While that is a bit distracting, it's not as bad as answering. If something is an emergency, my family knows to call me twice if I don't answer (or send an SMS).

I am guilty of doing email in meetings. Working on that one. The solution there relies on getting less email though so I don't feel like I constantly need to be on mail.

Geek Tax

omars — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 13:14:00 GMT

I have this term, Geek Tax, and I have to pay it every few months. Geek Tax is the amazing waste of time that you must endure when crap stops working. Today my internet stopped working. I've been troubleshooting various things for the past few hours, and I'm not sure I've accomplished anything. I think the problem is upstream from me, but I didn't get to this conclusion before unplugging, uninstalling, restarting, cursing, for a few hours. I almost redesigned my network topology in the process.

Of course the next tax will surely be in the form of re-installing windows or something like that.

Aghhhhh.

Make

omars — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 09:48:00 GMT

Looks like a great new magazine from one of my favorite tech publishers, O'Reilly. Subscribed.

SBC, ATT and Vonage

omars — Fri, 13 Feb 2004 05:12:00 GMT

I just received my last SBC phone bill today. That's right, no more DSL, no more local and no more long distance. For some weird reason I felt compelled to switch once I ditched DSL for the cable modem (3.1 down/ ~ 700 up) just because I could. Well, actually, I switched because ATT gave me 5,000 American Airlines miles and 5 miles for every dollar I spend.

I do find it ridiculous that with a land line you pay for each additional service like caller id etc. Things that are free with cell phones. In fact, I would just go ahead and cancel my land line all together, but there are some people my wife and I do not want to give out our cell phone numbers to, so the land line works well for that.

I thought about switching to Vonage, a Voice over IP company. However, when I went to their website to see if I could keep my landline number the site said no and offered no explanation. When I called them to inquire, the person I spoke to sounded like she was in Siberia. The connection cut out ever few seconds. That didn't make a good impression since I assumed they were using their own technology I guess. Oh, and I still got no explanation as to why I could not keep my number.

Until there is Qos for things like VoIP I don't see how it will take off. I already have to put up with reliability issues with my cell phone, I don't need that to expand to other areas of my life.