I keep a land line for various reasons, and have really hated all the charges and fees from Qwest just to maintain this. To start with, if you want long distance service, you have to pay up to $10 a month in just taxes and fees to have it, even if you never use it. We ended up dropping the long distance service on our land line, since we had cell phones. This turned out to be a big pain since we couldn’t use our fax machine on long distance calls, and couldn’t use it on the rare occasions when the cell phone wasn’t good enough.

Enter ooma to the rescue.

Ooma is a Voice Over IP system that lets you stick it to the phone companies. For a one time fee of around $250, you get a device that let’s you have a phone line using your broadband internet connection. The sound quality is great, and you never have to pay any monthly fees (unlike MagicJack), and domestic long distance is free. You can even port over your existing phone number for a $39.99 fee.

I started the port away from Qwest about 3 weeks ago, and it is currently switching over right now.

Since I also have Internet service with Qwest, I was concerned that when the port occurred, my internet connection would also go down. However, Qwest has gotten much smarter about this, and will automatically convert your DSL service to a “standalone DSL”, and give your DSL service a new phone number that is only used for data.

Our old bill was $90 per month, and will be ~$50 now for the standalone DSL. Add in the $39.99 porting fee and cost of the unit ($215 from Amazon with their credit card), and it will take us around 7 months to break even (also counting the extra 3-4 weeks of keeping the land line during the porting process).

The only quirk I’ve found so far is a setting for an “ooma Connection Tone”. When a call is connected, a little jingle is played which informs both parties that the connection is on ooma, and not a standard land line. It’s mainly an advertising thing for ooma, but it has the odd side effect of screwing up voice mail. When someone’s voicemail message picks up on the other end, the jingle acts like hitting the “*” key, and sends you to their password prompt to get into their mailbox. I just turn that off, as it is unnecessary anyway.

Rating:

Tags: DSL, ooma, Qwest, voip

We just had a gas fireplace insert installed, and used Bassett Home Heating to install it. John, the owner, is a no-nonsense, very helpful and reasonable guy, and runs a nice family business (his son comes along and helps him out). We used them when we installed our gas hot water heater, and he did an OK job.

I was missing a part before the installation, and he was nice enough to stop by the stove place in Lynwood and get the part.

Both times I had to ask and make sure that they caulked where the gas pipe enters the house. But they were much more reasonable than the installers that Rich’s Stove and Spa recommended.

I’d certainly recommend if you need that kind of service in the Seattle area.

Rating:

Shanna and I just saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. There was plenty of that Indiana Jones charm, and Harrison Ford seemed to pick up right where he left off with the last film.

Originally, I was worried that it would be all computer graphics driven, and that it would lose the feel of reality, but barring a scene of swinging on vines in the jungle, it wasn’t too heavy on the CG.

What I always liked about the other movies was that even though some of the actions scenes were hairy and crazy, they were still plausible. Could someone hang on to a rope bridge after it had been cut? Maybe. Could someone avoid a rolling boulder and then escape from natives with poison darts? Maybe. Could someone survive a tank going off a cliff? Maybe.

This fourth movie however was full of too many ridiculous, over the top stunts that were not believable at all. This left very little suspense, as you knew that no matter what, the entire team of heroes was going to come out unscathed (the refrigerator scene in particular).

The story was interesting, but rushed. I felt that there was just too much action to pack in, that there was not enough time left to develop the characters and the story. My biggest beef with the film was that there was very little down-time. The moments of dialog with Sean Connery, the gross dinner scene at the Temple of Doom, the bar in Nepal. There was plenty of slow time to develop things in the other movies, but not in this one.

Overall, it was entertaining and met my expectations, but predictably not better than any of the other films.

We’ve implemented Ontolica search (for MOSS 2007) for several of our customers. The product fits our service offerings very well, and provides a great value add for minimal cost and effort (compared with other search replacement products).

The sales team has been very helpful and responsive. They’ve provided trial licenses quickly and without hassle, have provided training and demos/overviews of the product, and have even been excellent interfaces to help escalate support incidents. I can’t really say enough about the sales team.

I can’t say that about their support however. So far, they have had just about the worst level of support I have experienced with a third party SharePoint product. If you file a support incident through their web site or via email, you are guaranteed to not get a response.

I filed one particular support incident, never heard back from anyone, until 2 months later, when I received an automated email asking me if my incident had been resolved. Another incident received no response until I involved the sales persons, who managed to look into the issue themselves. A co-worker filed another incident, and never heard a response. I’m not even convinced they have a support team.

Outside of the support, if you are interested in their product, keep in mind that they have very little extensibility. This can be important if you ever need to write any customized search code, and would like to take advantage of the Ontolica features in your custom search solution.

One client of ours had a need to run searches using impersonation, so we wrote code to leverage the MOSS search web service, passing in the credentials of the impersonating account. We would have liked to have been able to pass our returned results into the Ontolica web parts (or simply have been able to use Ontolica with impersonation), but the web parts all use internal hidden search objects that are obfuscated and cannot be interacted with (unless you like deciphering obfuscated code). This made it so that we had rich search tabs with all the Ontolica features, and then our customized search tab with stripped down functionality. To be fair, my beef also lies with Microsoft for closing up their own search with the SearchResultHiddenObject, which cannot be used easily without reflection and a big level of effort. I would have thought that a product that provides such a good experience with installation and configuration would have put more thought into extensibility (and support).

Overall I would give Ontolica 3 out of 5 stars.

Tags: Ontolica, SharePoint

If you are shopping for granite countertops in the Seattle area, Import Stone has a great selection. While Pental probably has the best selection, they are too big and pricey. Import Stone is just the right size to not be overwhelming, but is big enough for you to find that unique special piece.

The folks there were very friendly and helpful, and we got an amazing and very unique slab from them.

When we had our granite countertops installed, we used a great installer, Western Tile and Marble. They were very professional, and did a flawless job. They didn’t make a fuss when we requested keeping the leftover bits (they had to make a second trip out to deliver the scrap pieces).

Additionally, we had ordered a marble-topped vanity from overstock.com that came with a chip in the corner. We asked for a price to have them take the square edge of the marble top (with the chip in it) and router the edge to make it rounded to get rid of the chip. They just decided to throw that in for free for us, and made a separate trip out to fix that edge. They routered the three sides of the marble top flawlessly right at our house.

I’d recommend them if you have any granite fabrication to do in the Seattle area.

I recently switched jobs, and cell phone providers as well. At my previous job, they provided me with a Q phone, which I really liked a lot.

When I switched jobs, I had to get a new phone and my own plan, and since my family is all on AT&T’s network, I decided to go with them and with a smartphone similar to the Q, the Samsung Blackjack.

I read lots of reviews comparing the two online, but they mainly focused on the performance of Verizon’s network vs AT&T’s, and also on the mutlimedia features such as VCast vs the Cingular video and audio services (which I’ve never used).

From a practical user perspective, I thought I would write down some pros and cons on the Blackjack vs Q after using it for a few weeks.

Blackjack Pros:

• Locking the phone – When you lock the phone on the Q, you have to press the Home + Space keys (had to look that up in the manual), and for some reason, it never ever works the first time you do it. You always have to press it twice. On the Blackjack, you press and hold the red end-call button (there is a nice icon for it on the button) – much simpler.After locking the Q, pressing any button on the phone will cause the lights to go on and display the Unlock softkey prompt. This sucks if you leave your phone in your pocket like I do, because those keys are constantly being pressed and causing the lights to go on, draining the battery quickly. With the Blackjack, when you lock the phone, a few seconds later the screen goes blank and the keys are unresponsive, and in order to unlock it again, you have to hit the power key on top to make the keys work again. This is a lot better.
• Specialty keys – The blackjack has some nice specialty keys, such as a Mail key to go to your inbox, and a Vibrate key to toggle between vibrate and ring profiles.
• MicroSD – I don’t know if this is a pro or con really. The Q uses a miniSD card, but more and more devices seem to be jumping to microSD cards now. You can by microSD cards with adaptor packs that fit into mini and regular size SD slots.

Blackjack Cons:

• Proprietary plug ins – There is only one plugin port, and it is a proprietary jack. This means you can’t use a mini usb-type cable to charge your phone (I have lots of those around, from my digital camera, usb hard drive, etc). There is also no headphone hack, which means you can’t charge your phone and plug in a headset at the same time.
• Screen seems smaller – On the Q, I didn’t have to scroll down as far to see the items towards the bottom of my home screen. I used to be able to see two/three appts, but now I only have room for one appt before I have to scroll.
• Main toggle key is difficult – The main up-down-left-right toggle key is hard to use. I keep hitting the soft key or OK button next to it.
• Number pad spacing – The Q has all the numbers on the left-most keys, making it real easy to dial without looking. The blackjack has the number keys in the middle of the keypad, and also not right next to each other, but spaces one key column apart. I’m getting used to it, but it still is not as good a design as the Q.
• Opening the battery cover – What a friggin pain. You have to squeeze these two narrow areas on each side of the device to be able to pull off the battery cover. It is hard to do. The Q has a nice little spring latch you press to release the cover.

All-in-all I like the BlackJack. But it does have a few usability issues that are unfortunate. Now if it actually gets a Windows Mobile 6.0 upgrade like the company executives mentioned would happen, I’d be even happier.

Tags: BlackJack, Cell phones, Motorolla Q