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I bought a Packet8 VOIP adapter a couple months ago. Just yesterday, Qing tried it in Hangzhou and it worked very well.
There are several independent Voip providers, they are usually much cheaper than the big telco or cable companies (Time Warner, for example, keeps asking me to sign up for the $40/month phone service). I chose Packet8 based on cost ($20/month) and friend’s recommendation. By making certain assumption of your typical home DHCP network, it makes the connection really pain-free.
The quality so far is pretty good, it is hard to tell whether the call is from a conventional circuit or not.
Qing left for Hangzhou yesterday. Qing had the foresight of asking me to set up this blog so that I have things to do. In fact I have a number of projects that I’m going to get to in the next a few weeks. Here is a few:
Putting things in order around the house: I plan to attack one room at a time. Throw out stuffs as much as I can. And for things I’m not sure of, I’ll box them up.
Games: Since last time I checked, there are already two Myst sequels out. Myst is my favorite francise. I’m going to catch up before the upcoming Myst 5 becomes old news.
BBQ: I have to get ready for hosting a BBQ at 7/16.
Hanbing’s post about storage is a typical thoughts we have when we think about the progress of personal computing. But what exactly is the progress of personal computing for most people anyway. You have to think about what we do with the PC. Yes, it is true that processor speed, storage capacity, in fact, every marketable metrics have improved dramatically in the last ten years. However, we still use PC for editing a document, working on a spreadsheet, writing software programs exactly the same way as before. Using human metrics, there’s hardly any improvements in those most important tasks.
Well, you say there’re the wonders of internet and multimedia. So what, you can talk to a machine to buy stuff instead of a human being. And you can watch TV on your computer? Well, I would say the only thing we have today that the author of 2001: A Space Odessey hasn’t dreamed about, is MP3 and iPod. We have never thought about our whole music collection can be compressed so much and stored on a deck of cards. But that, has a lot more to do with signal processing (a derivative of engineering math) than personal computing.
I finally got my Mac Mini, After weeks of agony!
G4 1.42 GHz CPU
1GB DDR SDRAM (I got it from a 3rd-party vendor and upgraded with a putty knife – saved $90!);
Combo drive (DVD writer is useless, just got a 250GB firewire drives);
Bluetooth + wireless keyboard and mouse;
80GB internal disk;
Total paid: under $800
Getting iPod connected to Mac Mini: priceless!
Thanks Hanbing for the encouragement and advice! I wouldn’t dare to pry open the spanking new Mac the first day I got it with the putty knife otherwise.
We visited Sedona over the Memorial Day weekend. It is a great place surrounded by the very unusual scenary red rocks formations under the blue sky. Sedona is a small city with 18,000 people. But it has a great artists community and has one of the highest per capita number of galleries.
We stayed in Phoenix at the Scottsdale resort and conference center, which is two hours drive from Sedona.