Skype phone calls on laptop (over Wi-Fi)

So I’m in Toronto. I want to talk to my family. Since I can’t afford roaming charges this time I bought some Skype minutes to use while I was away from home. To call home (California/US) from Toronto Canada was about 2.5 cents a minute. I’ve used Skype for video calls – computer to computer – but finding my family isn’t always easy so I bought minutes this time.

I wasn’t expecting much. The call was going from my comptuer over hotel Wi-Fi, from Canada to the US, and then accross the country to my home phone in California. The call quality was great. There were one or two momentary sound quality issues, but my neither my wife or kids noticed.

The only thing i wish I had done was try the call from Skype on my iPhone. Tried that at home before I left, it worked, but the true test is when I’m away from home. Maybe next year when I head to Toronto again.

 

Big City Vs. Bigger City – Part 1

So on June 1st, I’m flying to Toronto to spend a week in our branch office. Every time I go up there, I don’t get much time to spend outside the office, but this time we’re staying in downtown Toronto and don’t have a overbooked schedule. We should have time to go out at night and see a few restaurants…obviously the CN Tower, who knows what else. 

I live in Orange County California. As a commnity, I would like to think we’re very a diverse and mostly friendly bunch of people. Yet I’ve heard Toronto descrived as one of the most cosmopolitan cities in world. 

Should be interesting.

 

Business, the Economy, Projects, and Your Boss

Whether you have seen the forest for the trees yet or not, you have felt the impact of the economy at the office. Some managers start focusing on cost cutting, others go right to “results, I need results right now”, some head right for trimming staff. At my office I’ve seen all of these things. I’m fighting to keep the people looking to trim from looking at me and my staff, and still make some kind of miracle difference. 

Being an IT director, I report to our president at our small/medium company. Very few people in my office get what IT does. There’s even one or two who seem to think we’re supposed to bring them cool toys. So from the top to the bottom, IT is alone. When the pressure started getting high, it took me a couple months to see the forest. After that, I had a light bulb go off and so far things are going well. Here’s what I did:

• Shut up and listen to what people were saying. Respond to them, don’t react. Helps keep the tension down.
• Thought back to my (a copy I bought) audio book  ”The One Minute Manager”, get yourself a copy.
• Find one trusted person who can “see” you…then shut up and listen.
• Set and keep one week goals, even if you are in until Sunday night.

When we started doing one week goals at my office, reaction was mixed. Now that we’re setting one week goals that are tangible for people outside of IT, the reaction is getting warmer. Yeah, you can’t work many miracles in a single week. Wait though..who says you need a miracle? My department spent a year working on some major items. They were all large scale and desperately needed. However, in this economy business leaders need results now and the impression of “completed projects” no matter how small is a positive force on attitudes. (To put this into context, a one week project might be a difficult to code right click menu that does something time saving.) It’s almost like some folks have blinders on and can’t see the value in long term projects, even if it’s right in front of them, they only see what can happen this week. So give it to them, this week!

 

Skype, AT&T, And Verizon

As I’m searching the app store on my iPhone tonight looking for Skype to show up, I keep thinking about Verizon. (Oh wait, I found Skype..installing now). Back when I was still with Verizon (I moved to AT&T shortly after iPhone 3G was released), I had a Windows Mobile device and ran Skype on it. In the same fashion as Apple, Verizon didn’t like it when I ran Skype over the 3G connection. Now that AT&T was at least kind enough to say “no you can’t do that” at least I know what to expect and don’t have to reboot my phone when I’m done using Skype. 

The only reason the whole Skype situation bugs me still is the carriers greed. If you make a call on your handset, your handset must turn that into a data stream and wirelessly transmit that. It’s all data, so why not just say “if you want quality, you are going to pay a premium on the cellular network, otherwise enjoy our higher latency 3G network”. If I have an iPhone data plan, do they really think I’m going to be one of those “lite” users who doesn’t suck up much bandwidth? I use 2 to 5 times the data I used to on Windows Mobile. I doubt that Skype uses as much bandwidth as a Google maps session or me downloading my video podcast on the phone. 

OK, done complaining about greed and happy to have Skype back on my mobile.

 

VMware…will you love it or hate it

OK, some of my previous posts mentioned we were installing VMware for DR purposes, as well as the usual benefits of virtualization. After working with VirtualCenter and ESX servers for a few months, I have reached a conclusion. 

If you like Microsoft because it just works and you don’t have to get into every single detail, you will NOT like VMware. If you like to dig into every setting and maybe sometimes reinvent the wheel, and are a little familiar with Linux, you will like VMware. 

 

Disclaimer: my exchange server is currently down because it apparently, sometime, on another ESX server had snapshots turned on. They are not currently on, but the link and old files are still there and are required to boot the server (but it won’t boot because there is no disk space left). So VMware has apparently kept this setting, and I have a mess of files I can try and go through to look for settings and try to pull an answer out of……. At this point I wish this was an MS virtual server. Every setting is stored in one file (in plain text!), all of the data is stored in a single VHD. Nothing complicated!