VoIP enabled!

:sun Wow! My Sipura SPA2000 arrived yesterday, and after some fiddling with telephone to RJ11 adaptors, I am now able to make cheap VoIP calls using a standard digital wireless phone over my broadband connection. This is cool… now who can I call?

Thoughts on mobile tariffs

:unhappy I find it very irritating that after every 12-18 months I invariably end up going through the hassle of changing my mobile network provider to get a more competitive tariff. I can’t be the only person who faces this issue, and imagine this must result in a high churn of customers for network operators.

My suggestion is for an operator to offer a 36 month contract, based on them billing me the best call/data rate available per month against my usage for that month. Ideally I’d also be offered two handset deals over this period. This should ultimately amount to the same as I’m getting currently but, in return for my 3 year commitment to a network, they are dynamically giving me best tariff they have.

Hush finally give me a refund

:angry Hush Technologies have finally agreed to give me a refund after 9 months of trying to resolve problems with their ITX pc. I have been thoroughly messed about by this company and wouldn’t recommend them to anyone.

I bought an ITX Hush back in May 2003, after seeing it as the only real HTPC that you could put into your AV stack in the living room. It looked promising, but the information on their site was a little lacking, so I decided to contact them and try and get some specific answers. Their sales people were helpful, so I bit the bullet and ordered one. To go with it, I bought an ATI AIW card and wireless keyboard and mouse (after confirming compatibility from Hush). When it all arrived I plugged it all together only to find that it was behaving erratically… intermittent power problems, audio problems, hard disk problems, network problems.. the list goes on. So thinking that this was something to do with the configuration, I went to their online forums and started posting requests for help. I also found other people were facing similar issues. Anyway after a few weeks of no responses from their support, I tried to call them. They said that their support people (person!) had been off sick and should be in contact soon.

Ecademy – Business networking community

:happy I recently registered at ecademy.com and so far the experience has been excellent. Within minutes of registering I had a couple of messages from people welcoming me to the community. These aren’t standard template messages, but rather individuals taking their time to send a specific welcome message to me. I hope to learn and meet some interesting people through this community, and who knows maybe help a few out myself.