Skype
February 11, 2008
I seem to be taking more and more plunges technology speaking. Or is that web based speaking? With my new found, reliable, high speed internet service, I am finding more and more things I can do on the net.
You can now get a hold of me on Skype. I have long been a user of Teamspeak for voice chat, but I have to admit, this Skype works pretty darn well. And it has video. Guess I may have to get a web cam soon. You can even call real phones from Skype though that feature costs money and I haven’t felt the urge to try it.
Skype has proven useful for chatting with friends online and especially for coordinating some activities with the Simple:Press Forum development team that I am a member of.
Give Skype a try and look me up. My Skype username is the.mr.papa (some clown already took my moniker). BTW, this is not a paid post – I have just enjoyed this tool!
Qwest DSL
February 3, 2008
Qwest finally decided to turn on DSL out here in my neck of the woods. They had run fiber out for a central office several years ago but had resisted actually activating any kind of service. I guess they think Sonoita is backwoods and wouldn’t support turning on the service.
Anyways, I have used a wireless provider out here for the last year with mixed results. When it works, it works great. When it doesn’t, its very frustrating. The last couple of months haven’t been very good. I think the wireless is getting interference from somewhere. It just cuts out at different times and becomes very latent. The provider has been very good about talking with me about the problem and working to solve it, but unfortunately has not been able to fix it.
I decided to give the Qwest system a run. I got the service turned on Friday and did a self install. It went pretty smoothly until I noticed that the DSL cut out whenever the phone system was in use. I had done everything properly with filters and such, but just couldn’t figure it out. I called Qwest technical support yesterday and they took me through several steps, all of which I had already done, that didn’t work. They said they would send out a tech the next day, Super Bowl Sunday.
Sure enough, he arrived on schedule this morning and pretty quickly determined that the issue was my whole house wired system was degrading the DSL quality. Since I had several outside drops put in when the house was built and sent them to a central box for my home runs, he was able to split the signal outside the house and use a dedicated line for the DSL to my central box. He put a filter on the splitter for the rest of my phones so I won’t need the filters at each place I use a regular phone line.
Everything is working perfectly now. The system is pretty quick, but they have limited me to 1.5M because of my distance from the central office. The tech said my signal was good enough to get me 6M and that he would tell the office this and see if they would give me more bandwidth. I will have to see what happens there.
Thus far, the system is working great and a definite improvement over my wireless provider, who was a huge step up from my satellite provider. Things keep getting better in the country. I will continue with both providers for a bit to make sure things continue to be good. I won’t look forward to canceling my wireless provider because I really liked using a local guy and he really was trying to make the system work. However, I think I have been patient enough and I just simply use the internet for too much to be constantly frustrated with my connection to it.
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