Author: rakesh

Let me join in the hopes and pleas of others. I switched over to using Gmail for work about a year ago, I’ve been above 90% capacity for a couple of months now and I would jump at the chance to pay for more space. Why isn’t Google offering this? There’s the additional infrastructure problem that this would create, but my gut tells me this isn’t the issue. I’m guessing that giving users the option to pay for extra space in Gmail is waiting on another Google product release, like maybe their net storage product.

I was on a flight yesterday and I saw something I had never seen before — someone watching a movie on an iPod Video. Maybe this guy bought one of the 1.3M Disney movies sold on iTunes:

I’ve wanted something like Callwave for a while now so when I read about it a couple of weeks ago on Lifehacker, I marked it as “keep new” in bloglines, planning to return to it… some time. Well, inspiration struck earlier this week.

Voicemail is a pain because

1. it’s not searchable
2. it’s not easy to access (Apple’s visual voicemail should help with this)
3. it’s not archivable (related to #1)
4. sometimes my cell phone won’t be getting good reception somewhere so it will fail to notify me about voicemails until long after they’ve been left
5. if I’m traveling overseas, I have to remember to make a long distance phone call to check my voicemail and once I’ve made that call, then I have to deal with #2.
6. I can’t forward a voicemail to someone in case I need to share a message

Over the past couple of years, I’ve moved all of my voicemail to email… My home voicemails get to my e-mail account courtesy of Vonage. My office voicemails get to me on e-mail via our office PBX. But my cell phone’s voicemails have continued to be locked up on my phone… until now.

Callwave’s setup was easy. I chose my provider, entered my cell phone number and Callwave gave me a command sequence to enter into my phone that changed where my phone would route unanswered calls. And, Callwave did a good job of anticipating my main questions before entering the command sequence: “What if I want to go back to my original settings? What if I need to check voicemails in my old voicemail system”. Answers to both questions were prominently visible at the right places during setup.

And that was it! Now, everytime I get a voicemail on my cell phone, I get an e-mail with the caller’s phone number, the caller ID (if it’s available), and the message as a WAV attachment. And if someone calls and doesn’t leave a message (even if my phone is off), I get an e-mail notifying me of the missed call with the caller’s phone number and their caller ID. Nice!

The fact that the service is completely free has me puzzled. A maximum number of messages per month? Nope. A maximum message length? The free version won’t send messages as WAV attachments? Nope. The pay version has some features that I can’t imagine myself being interested in (the ability to screen phone calls as they are being left and the subsequent ability to pick-up a call while someone is in the middle of leaving a message). I guess I shouldn’t complain about something being free, but it does make me concerned about whether the service will survive or not.

The only other complaint I have (did I really just complain that the service is free??) is that the audio quality is sub-par. I haven’t had any actual problems with it, ie all of my messages have been clear enough to understand, but I still wish the audio quality was better.

It would seal the deal on what is otherwise a perfect service.

I like Bob Garfield’s commentary on TV commercials from yesterday’s football game… what do they call it? Oh yeah, the Superbowl. His commentary on the Snickers ad: “Snickers… for macho young men insecure about their sexuality!” and his commentary on the GM ad: “We’re GM. Everybody gets laid off [even our robots].” I haven’t seen all the ads, but having seen those two spots, I have to agree with both comments.

I was doing some research yesterday and there was a specific article from the New York Times that I had read back in December (about a month and a half ago) that I wanted to re-read because it had some information in it that I wanted to follow-up on. For example, there were some people quoted in the article that I wanted to try and track down and talk to. So I did a search on what I remember from the article and the date range that I remembered the article falling within. With each search, I got one or two short sentences that matched the words in my query from each matching article and then I could click on each matching article and see a canned two sentence abstract.

Long story short, none of this was enough for me to figure out whether I had the right article. I was about to sign up for their $7 / month program that would give me access to 100 articles a month but then I thought, wait, do I really want to sign up for some recurring subscribes that’s going to run me nearly $100 / year. Why don’t I do a web search for the information I’m looking for?

Sure enough, one Google search later, I had far more information than what I was looking for in that one New York Times article. Assuming that the New York Times’ decision to maintain a paywall is a sound one (hard for me to analyze this since I’ve never been in the content business), there are things they could be doing better. Like on that 100 article / month limit — how does that work? Does it roll over from month to month? Can I see more of an abstract to figure out whether a particular article is the article I was looking for or am I limited to the same lame duck preview? Once I’ve “purchased” an article, up to how long afterwards can I view the article? Is there a place where I can go to view all the articles that I’ve purchased access to? Why not give me an all-you-can-eat option?

For me, it wasn’t even the actual cost of the service — my questions above would have been the same whether the service had been priced at $5 / month, $15 / month or $25 / month. It was more of the principle of it — when there’s so much information out there from other news outlets that’s “freely” available, is there really something that I’d pay to get just from the New York Times?

I’ve long been an early riser, so it should be no surprise that I agree with Lifehacker’s advice of starting the day earlier if you want to get more done.

I don’t know how effective it is as marketing for Vista, but I think the episodes over at Clearification are funny. Made me laugh anyways. Hole avoidance, Pinata Diplomacy. Heh, funny stuff. (I’m sure that this says something more about my personality than I should be revealing, but… oh well!)

I love taking photographs, but it doesn’t always make sense to carry around a bulky SLR. Sometimes, you just want to travel light. So at least for me, the “wedding camera” is an essential — a camera that’s shoots good enough photographs and conveniently slips in and out of your pocket.

My first wedding camera was an Canon Elph APS camera that I bought in downtown Philadelphia while I was there for a friend’s wedding. That was many years ago and since that purchase, I’ve been a big fan of Canon’s Elph line of cameras.

So this afternoon I received my latest “wedding camera”, a Canon SD600:

I could have opted for something more cutting edge in Canon’s Elph line-up (the SD900 is the very latest), but the more recent models didn’t seem to be worth the 1.5x to 2x price difference. The SD600 was only a little more than $200. So far, I like the thing. It’s compact, actually more compact than both the SD700 and the SD900. The LCD is nice and large. It has an acceleratmeter (sp?) that instantly rotates pictures on the camera’s LCD when you turn it from landscape to portrait (I don’t understand why Canon doesn’t market this feature more than they do. Before I bought the camera, I couldn’t find out from Canon’s website or amazon.com whether it had this sensor in it or not. Apple gets the simple appeal of this feature… it’s too bad that Canon doesn’t). It’s nice and shiny. Does decent quality video.

So is it the perfect wedding camera? As I use it to shoot, upload and print photographs over the next month or two we’ll see, but so far so good.

We recently installed a zBoost cell phone signal booster in the office after reading John Biggs’ review of it at the New York Times. I’ve been trying to get a cell phone repeater/amplifier in the office for at least a year, because our office is essentially a big Faraday cage but all the products I could find had very mixed reviews, widely varying prices, and were sold by a random mix of companies. The only seemingly non-snakeoil company we could find was SpotWave but their products seemed to be very, very expensive*. We took a gamble on the zBoost product, installed it right after the winter holidays and it’s done an amazing job of solving our cell phone reception problems. Jason reports that it’s practically doubled his Motorola Q’s battery life (Verizon service). I can comfortably take and make calls on my cell phone sitting at my desk (Cingular service) — no more needing to step outside and battle with the noise of traffic. For anyone considering getting one of these things, I highly recommend the zBoost product. We bought ours from here at Wi-Ex for $399.

(On a side note, I happened to pass by SpotWave’s booth at CES this year and chatted with them and they have recently released a single band cell phone amplifier product for the small businesses like zBoost’s. They confirmed that zBoost’s product was effective, but raised some concerns about whether it was fully compliant with cell phone company and FCC regulations… I’m not how concerned we should be about that, but at this point, we’d have to be doing something very wrong to make me give the thing up!)