General Thoughts
VoIP Incoming Call Routing
I use a company called Viatalk and since it’s a VoIP, it comes with a lot of free features that either aren’t available with landlines or you have to pay extra for. I especially love the Incoming Call Routing feature that Viatalk has. It gives you a lot of flexibility in handling incoming calls from specific numbers. It’s really helpful for blocking telemarketers or other unwanted callers. For example, you can make calls go straight to voicemail, give a busy signal, or play a handful of different messages. You can play a “disconnected” message that plays the recording you get from the phone company when you call an invalid number. You can even play a “blacklisted” message that literally tells the caller they’ve been blocked and to “go away”!
What Scares Me About This Election
Electronic voting machines. Stephen Spoonamore is a cyber security expert who’s a lifelong member of the GOP and he’s been saying since 1998 that electronic voting machines are completely insecure. It’s a relatively trivial thing for people who know what they’re doing to hack the vote and leave absolutely no trace behind. He explains this in an easy to understand way.
PayPal Phishing
I recently got a spoofed email attempting to phish my PayPal account details. I think of myself as pretty adept at identifying phishing emails but this one came at just the right time. This email came from PayPal’s abuse department, indicating that there was some recent suspicious activity on my account and provided a link where I could log in and presumably verify my information.
Casio EX-Z75 Faulty Battery
I purchased a Casio EX-Z75 digital camera about a year ago and for the most part it’s been working perfectly and it’s a very good camera. However, I didn’t use it for about 2 months or so and it seems the rechargeable lithium ion battery is dead (it’s a NP-20 battery). When I try to recharge it, the red light on the charger just keeps blinking. After 2 sessions of charging for several hours, I gave up. I searched online and found out a lot of people also had this problem with this camera’s battery.
Century Eggs
I remember seeing an episode of Fear Factor a long time ago where they ate century eggs and all the contestants were getting grossed out. I thought it was pretty ridiculous because I think century eggs are delicious. Either Fear Factor purposedly prepared the eggs to smell / taste really bad or the contestants were faking it. Or perhaps they just had a preconception of century eggs and their mind did the rest. Either way it’s a misrepresentation of this dish. I don’t eat it often but when I do I definitely enjoy the dish.
Happy New Year 2008
Well it’s my first post of the new year and I’d love to impart wisdom or some useful insight into life but I don’t really have much to share. So let me just say I hope this new year brings good things to everyone. Idleness is the holiday of fools! That’s my motto and it’s from a fortune cookie I got several years ago. I should’ve just taken credit for the quote 
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Valuable Host Sucks
I’ve been blogging for a while now but the reason there’s nothing before November 2003 is because my previous web host, Valuable Host, deleted all of my data before I could retrieve it. I probably mentioned them in the past several years ago, but I don’t think I have on this blog so I think it’s about time. The reason I even bring this up is because I was going through some old posts adding some tags, and it reminded me of Valuable Host. So here’s why Valuable Host sucks..
ViaTalk is Okay, Not That Good
So a couple months ago, I switched my phone service to ViaTalk from SunRocket. ViaTalk so far has worked okay but their customer support is exceedingly poor. It’s my understanding that they received a huge influx of customers fleeing SunRocket which overloaded their support staff. But even now, support response times take weeks and months. I’m not kidding. I’m a light support user generally, but they took forever answering my support tickets, which were not complicated issues at all.