Our Hero

Early humans found hollowed out rocks to turn into homes, originating the term “Cave men”. ¹ This constraint made community difficult, so humans advanced to creating homes from natural materials, such as wood. Primitive homes were modeled on the cave, with nothing but some closed walls and an uncovered opening. Thousands of years of evolution lead us to create doors that open, close, and lock, and windows that allow us to see out and in, then glass to keep what’s out out and what’s in in, then curtains to cover what’s both out and in. In the end, we have the same caves we had before, with our darkness and privacy.

In the 1600′s the Dutch East India company was like the Wal-Mart of the high seas. If you worked on a ship for the DEI, actually called VOC, but let’s not have an acromania tournament over it, you lived day in and day out with the other people on the ship. Everyone knew everyone’s business, and that’s just how it was. There would be no need to do a status update when you went to the head, because everyone watched you go.

With the onset of industrialization and assembly-style production in the 1900′s, factories became central to small towns and people began working together, but their was a similar environment of everyone knew everyone’s family and friends and kids and lifestyle. There just weren’t a lot of secrets. Only in the last 50 years have we moved to the cubiclised, white-collar, technically-oriented jobs where turnover is an expectation and no one really bothers to get to know everyone else. Cliques form, but on the whole there isn’t a sense of community.

In a relatively short span of time, we created a generation and a culture that has a “right to privacy.” We have seen this concept denied by courts who say employers can regulate lifestyle as a condition of employment, and that what an employee does outside of work can still be used against her at work. Drinking, drugs, cigarettes, and even functions allowed to be attended can all be used as conditions of employment in our “right to work” world.  Though it has been upheld time and time again, the belief in this right grows ever stronger.

The political buzzword of the last decade has been “transparency.” We the people should have an open window on the workings of our government, of our corporations, of our financial institutions. We should see how the cogs turn and the deals are made, we should have open access to it all. At the same time, a subculture of companies has grown around controlling the online image of individuals. Ex-boyfriend posted some risque pictures of you? They can fix that. You got fired from your old job for coming to work drunk, and some people decided to blog about it? They can fix that. From the benign to the outright slanderous, companies that specialize in online identity rehab are doing bang up business curing the internet of individuals’ indiscretions.

Should it matter? Should you want to work for a company that would use your facebook status update about hating filing against you in an interview? Does that tweet about being drunk at the Alice In Chains concert make you a bad person or in any way impact your job performance? Are companies better off pretending that their employees don’t have a personal life? Maybe this is the wake up call that companies need to start treating their employees like people. Maybe it’s time to open up the door to the cave and not worry about what others will see, because their cave door is wide open too.

^{1. This is rather vague and unresearched proposition, because this is a tech blog and not an anthropology blog. Please do not blame us when you crib this and fail your class.}

If you want to be judgmental of our thoughts, feel free to follow Fred and Patrick on twitter!

Or cleverly disguised secret agent for the video phone revolution?

I R Eatz U R Dataz!

I love my netbook. I love my netbook so much, I have two of them (okay, one is the wife’s). Surprisingly, I managed to survive months on nothing but my netbook doing fairly intensive SQL / VoIP / Web work. The hard drive is a little slow, but the overall performance is outstanding.

When I travel, I can use Skype to video chat with the built in webcam and get great quality (both ways) for both picture and sound. It’s like a giant smart phone. It reminds me of the $1000+ “video phones” that were supposed to be the future of talking on the phone… then people realized they really didn’t want to “get pretty” to use the phone. Now, for around $250 a unit, you can have that and so much more.

Recently, my wife’s netbook gave an error on boot that had something to do with a missing windows file (system32\ntoskrnl.exe). Apparently, she’s not the only one with this issue… it seems to be quite common. Of course, as the techie/geek/nerd of the castle, it was my job to slay this dragon and I came across the only problem I have had with this magical mini machine. Not so much a problem… more like open questions to Acer.

1. To access the hard drive, you have to remove 17 screws (maybe more, I think I lost some extras), you have to remove the keyboard, you have to remove the top, you have to remove this little card on top of the mother board, this side circuit board, the motherboard. Then you slide the hard drive out, reverse. Why not put a panel on the bottom to access the hard drive directly?
2. Why can I find nothing in your documentation about Alt-F10? This is a handy mode that lets you recover the operating system to factory defaults, but I don’t see it in my Acer manual.
3. In line with question 2, Why is the only recovery option to completely reset to factory? Since this is basically a stripped version of the OS, why not offer an explorer window so I can copy files to an SD or USB drive before formatting, or just backup the user files to another partition?
4. What degree in sadism lead to the design of the three little clips that hold the keyboard in place?

All told, from error to recovered could have been done in < 30 minutes, and I HIGHLY recommend Acer products to everyone I know. From their higher-end Ferrari laptop to the humble netbook (go with XP home, Windows 7 netbook edition is crippleware garbage), I have never had a problem with their hardware or software that made me lose respect for the brand, which is saying a lot.

For More Information:

• Acer: Acer Aspire One Website
• Skype: Free PC to PC Video Calls

Every phone tree should follow Nestle’s lead.

1. Call 1-800-295-0051
2. Ignore the press 1 for English
3. Ignore the press 2 for Spanish (even if you, like Fred, feel an overwhelming urge to practice your Spanish.)
4. Keep on Keepin’ on
5. Wait for the next prompts

A cute reminder that phone systems can still be novel.

Or, listen to the call below:

Download audio file (24MAR2010VTCnestle.mp3)

(Thanks Leslie)

This year marks the second decennial census since widespread use of the internet began in the 1990′s. The bulk of census activity takes place during the time when people are traditionally preparing taxes and vying for an infusion of cash  from their tax return.  The evil peoples of the interwebs will be out in force to take advantage of  the under-informed.

Keep these simple rules in mind:

• No one from the IRS or the Census bureau will ever email you about your taxes or the Census. Ever.
• No one from the IRS or the Census bureau will call you and ask for your address, social security number, and bank account information. Ever.
• No one from the IRS or the Census bureau will ask for money, a donation, passwords, or pin numbers over the phone or via email. Ever.

If you get a phone call from the IRS and do not feel comfortable with the questions they ask to identify you, the real IRS is always willing to accept a callback. Their phone number is 1-800-829-1040 (800-TAX-1040). Doing this callback will (almost) always ensure you are talking to the IRS.

This is a good rule of thumb for any unsolicited phone call. If the questioning or “verification process” makes you feel uncomfortable or involves revealing sensitive information such as a mother’s maiden name, social security number, driver’s license number, bank information, or credit information, get a callback name and number. Anyone can spoof an outgoing phone number, so caller id is no protection here. In the case of official agencies, it’s fairly easy to verify the listed phone number before making the callback, and legitimate businesses will never try to goad you into giving information.

If you are struggling with confrontation, all legitimate businesses will also be willing to conduct business via mail. Specifically in cases of debt collection or IRS matters, request the correspondence be provided via US mail instead of the telephone. Legitimate agencies will comply with this request, anyone who doesn’t you can safely hang up on.

Further Reading:
Census on Scams
IRS on Scams

Sometimes, VoIP tech chat is more about tech, and less about VoIP.

As a follow up to our podcast last week, Fred left the teaser of a discussion of airport security this week. In (unexpected) preparation for this discussion, I took a “short” trip from my home in Chattanooga, TN to Salt Lake city, UT. The flight out was uneventful, Chattanooga is a small, 5-gate airport with a fairly simple metal detector security checkpoint.

On the trip back, things got interesting. At the Salt Lake City airport, one of their security lines has been converted to the full body scan. Had I been a terrorist, I likely would have paid more attention and just not gone through this line. Since I am not, I got my first full body scan. Research scientists have suggested that even one of these scans can cause long-term mutations in DNA and lead to the development of cancer, but I am using the George Carlin theory of more carcinogens generate more cancer, and the cancers will just eat each other.

As a matter of habit, flying five – ten times per year, when I go through security I place my driver’s license and boarding pass(es) in my back pocket. With a metal detector this is never an issue, and surprisingly my new belt that is a fabric weave with two small square hoops for the buckle does not trigger the metal detector. NOW we have full body scan technology, where it was necessary for the fairly well-humored TSA agent to grope my right butt cheek in order to ensure that I did not have explosives or weapons.

For perspective, a walk-through metal detector and wand cost well under $10,000 per unit and requires one TSA agent to oversee use. A full-body scanner costs over $100,000 per unit and requires at least three TSA agents to oversee use. One or two agents work in an unseen location viewing the passenger’s genitals and giggling, then a male and female security officer are present to do the intimate pat down of the genitals. On the upside, the female TSA agent was cute, on the down side they do not accept requests for a pat down. Lest you believe I am being sarcastic about the genital pat-down, the gentleman ahead of me in line was told, “there is an area of concern on the scan. I am going to feel across your waist, down the zipper of your pants, and across.”

So for ten times the cost, you need at least three times as many workers, and this advanced security technology can’t tell the difference between a thin plastic ID card with a magnetic strip and explosives. Additionally, no screening was done of the ID. Terrorists, take note: Driver’s License bomb.

On a side note, I must express appreciation to the Salt Lake City airport for compromising federal regulations and allowing me to take my four ounces of contraband caramel through security, and the Memphis airport (where the hiring process clearly involves rudeness training) for being oblivious to the four ounces of mystery goo in an unmarked container and wrapped in a shopping bag but stopping the belt to dispose of my twenty ounce Coke Zero (purchased at the airport twelve hours earlier.)

The more I look at the post-nine-eleven world, the more I see money and technology being dumped into solutions that are all about smoke and mirrors.  They don’t increase the detection of explosives, they don’t deter terrorism, they just route more government money into a private industry and increase the power of government agencies to disregard the constitution and bill of rights. We see it in airports, we see it in the “war on drugs”, we see it in the telecom industry with increased latitude on wiretapping and records subpoenas.

Free has a price, and it’s usually subjecting ourselves to marketing based on the magic numbers games.

Here at VoipTechChat(.com!) we don’t (as of this writing, but things change…) have any paid advertising on the site, and have abandoned AdWords, since it’s giving away real estate and not getting a lot of value. While we are open to targeted advertising (if you have a phone to sell, we are available to pitch it!), we appreciate that generic revolving text ads aren’t super valuable to anyone.

Today I started noticing the heavy addition of leading ads in my YouTube videos and I realized a critical feature all ads should share, and very few do:You should want to watch an ad. You should want to share it with your friends. You should be ABLE to share it with your friends.

When I see a clever ad on TV, regardless of if I like the product or want to buy it, I will send it to my friends. I tell two people, they tell two, etc. Maybe I have a blog with three regular readers and I want to show them. Which leads me to two questions:

1. Why pay to produce an ad and air an ad on television, but not upload it to video sites like youtube where people can view it and share it for free?

2. Why would Youtube, of all places, have clever ads in front of videos, but not a link to the ad itself?

When creating an ad-supported service, whether it’s a “free” calling card, “free” conference server, “free” social networking site, “free” blog,  the key test should always be:  is this advertising content either useful, entertaining, or both for my users? Can my users easily share this advertising content with their friends on an entirely opt-in basis? If people are interested in the ad and sharing the ad, the chances become much higher they will buy the product or service being advertised. If it’s not useful or entertaining, why would you put your reputation behind it?

Many companies have failed at their attempts to artificially create viral content, now companies are actively hindering it to their own detriment.

When my little girl went from being a benign, unmoving lump of sleeping, drooling baby to a terroristic unplugging, biting, chewing, eating, swallowing, gagging, breaking, pulling, tugging beast of a toddler, my home decor changed. When we moved into our excessive 4 bed / 2.5 bath home in 2007, we had dreams. We had a guest room, and a Disney room, and my home office taking up about 25% of the under A/C space. When the beast began terrorizing our home, we retreated into a fallback position and isolated her to the safest room in the house, my former office. I was relegated to the Disney room. It’s purple. Very purple.

When moving between old office and new, as is my tradition in packing, I crammed everything into boxes with the knowledge that should I come to need an item, I would go searching through the boxes piled in the “supply closet” of my new “office”. In almost two years, I have not touched these boxes. Today was a day of reckoning when I was reminded of an important rule: Don’t use old Cat 5 and other copper cables.

There are people who will disagree with me, and I accept their disagreement with the knowledge they are wrong. Cat 5 (ie. network cable)  and copper coax cable (ie. cable tv cable) costs between $0.25 and $1 per foot. On a new VoIP phone, you need anywhere from 3 to 25 ft. of Cat 5 depending on the location of your phone / adapter in relation to your router and with the assumption that you are not using a wireless solution.

Many homes, like mine, have an accumulation of old cables, and when you get a new ATA (analog telephone adapter, aka. that veyeop thingy) that inexplicably comes without one, you go to the pile, untangle the least confined cable, and hook it up. Time and time again I have gone through ten and twenty minute troubleshooting sessions with people (and, in true ‘Dr. heal thyself’ fashion, spent hours myself) only to find that a strange or intermittent problem with connectivity, registration, or voice quality was remedied by putting on a fresh Cat 5 cable.

In fifteen years of working with networking setups, one in ten intermittent or quality issues end up being plain old bad cables (remember from previous posts, 50% are unplug or partially unplugged cables). Just in my five years of VoIP experience, I can’t count the number of times voice quality issues have been wiped out completely by getting fresh cables with good connectors. Considering the cost is < $15 for almost any project, save yourself the time and hassle. Throw away the old Cat 5 and coax cables, buy fresh ones for the new install, and you are eliminating a huge point of failure for years to come.

Good things come to those who wait…to cancel. On the heels of the “announcement” that Verizon Wireless will be doubling their early termination fees, I found myself considering how commerce and service has changed. As I have mentioned in our previous chats, I pay some $400+ a month for my extended family and I to have Verizon Wireless. Every month I give Verizon about $400, and on top of that, have spent over $2,000 on phones and another $500 on applications, ring tones, and content (that’s phone specific — if I buy a new phone, I get to buy new applications, ring tones, and content).

Businesses routinely (and almost exclusively) employ “short-timers” for their front line contacts — people that work at most six to twelve months answering phones, then move to another company. Customer service itself seems to follow the same pattern of always looking six to twelve months ahead, and making all judgements on a short-term basis. Have you been a great customer for 10 years? Who cares. What have you paid us lately?

*** Begin Digression ***

In VTC tradition, I digress here to share my most recent customer service experience with Verizon Wireless. In September, I was planning a trip to Florida which would necessitate me an aircard device for work. No air card, no trip. On the Wednesday before my trip, I started trying to setup the MiFi device and just hit the wall. I got nothing but vague errors and “failure to initiate.” After exhausting the interwebs (Yes, I did google, re-google, and uber-google), I bit the bullet and called Verizon. I called them at around 9:30am.

The first technical support rep couldn’t help. This sadly, was expected. After some time, I was handed off to a “tier two” rep who walked me through a series of attempts before admitting she had limited hands on experience with the device. This was where my experience took a drastic turn from the ordinary. She offered to try some options and call me back in “a couple of hours.” At 5pm, well after the “couple,” I called back. I asked for the rep I had spoken with, luckily getting the same center where the original call landed. The call taker took my information and told me the original rep would contact me shortly.

To my surprise, the story didn’t end there. My phone rang after a few minutes, and the original tier 2 rep apologized and explained that she had spent her entire day working with anyone who knew anything about the device. Based upon the number of things we tried over the next 45 minutes, I am convinced she did in fact spend her day doing nothing other than researching how to get my MiFi working without a warranty replacement. Not to avoid the replacement, but because she knew I needed it fixed the next day.

By 6pm we had given up hope, and I opted to do a warranty exchange, mentioning I would check with the store near my house. If they didn’t have it, I would call back to get one shipped. I hung up the phone and tried calling the local store, got no answer, and got distracted. Ever get distracted? Happens to me. In fact, I just got distracted right now.

Ten minutes later, my favorite rep from Verizon called me. She offered to contact the local store and find out if they had a replacement, and if they didn’t she could go ahead and get one shipped. I was floored. Even thinking about it now… I’m still floored. Re-floored.

She put me on hold for about ten minutes and contacted the four stores in my area; all of which did not have a warranty replacement. She then began the shipping process and told me it would ship out the next day, arriving on Friday (and effectively damaging my travel plans). At 10 am the next morning, I went outside (shockingly) and found a FedEx notice that at 9:30am they had attempted to deliver my package. Just thirteen hours after I spoke with the rep, the replacement device was at my house, and all because someone at Verizon took total ownership of my situation. It made me feel like I was the only customer they had ever serviced. Every previous experience in the past two years with Verizon they ended with some mocking line about “have I done everything possible to make you happy today,” to which I reply, “No, not at all.” In this experience, they didn’t need to ask, because we both knew I felt like an extremely important customer. V-I-Patrick.

*** End Digression ***

In the five years I have had Verizon service, there have been around ten times that I have truly wanted to cancel. With the amount I spend on my service, it kills me to be slighted, or treated like a dog from their customer service, sales, or technical support teams.

My problem is a catch 22. With six lines of service, all with different anniversaries, I would have to slowly cancel each line at the end of it’s contract. Or I could choose option B and pay approximately seven million dollars. Either option makes me feel like a hostage. Yes, I’m still in their service. But it’s not my free-will making the choice — I’m in a commitment.

What does all of this have to do with VoIP? Annual plans, early termination, and “no contract” signups. In the VoIP world, these are mostly unregulated marketing terms. Annual plans usually save anywhere from 10% to 20% off from regular, monthly service. But to get the discount, you have to pay up-front, at the commencement of the service. Usually, it’s between $200 and $250 (paying each month would instead cost around $250 – $300 for monthly service) to avoid – a commitment.

The catch: refundability. (Yes, it’s a word. No I don’t care if it’s in the dictionary.)

Always read the fine print to make sure you have an out. If the service does not live up to expectations, if for some reason you are unable to maintain your internet, or if you find a better offer elsewhere — you’re going to have to break your contract. Typically, the termination fees and prorated amounts will leave you paying well in excess of the $50 – $100 saved by paying up front.

These contracts commit me to the product or service I have purchased for the duration of the contract. They do not commit me to the company itself or create any sense of loyalty. In fact, their first obstacle in creating loyalty is that we have started with their assumption I would not be staying with their company without being bribed with a discount. If VoIP or Mobile companies want to keep me as a happy satisfied customer, they’ll treat me like a VIP. If they do, I’ll be a walking billboard. If not, if they make me stick with them out of commitment — well, we’ll sooner or later end up in Divorce. After all, there’s a big difference between loyalty and commitment.

The structural faults, many of them legacies of the 1980s, represent once-in-a-lifetime dislocations that will take years to work out. Among them: the job drought, the debt hangover, the defense-industry contraction, the savings and loan collapse, the real estate depression, the health-care cost explosion and the runaway federal deficit. “This is a sick economy that won’t respond to traditional remedies,” said Norman Robertson, chief economist at Pittsburgh’s Mellon Bank. “There’s going to be a lot of trauma before it’s over.”

America’s structural burdens have hit home most profoundly in terms of jobs. The U.S. workplace is “in a profound, historic state of turmoil that for millions of individuals is approaching panic,” according to labor consultant Dan Lacey, publisher of the newsletter Workplace Trends.

The latest recession has hit white-collar workers particularly hard, both in terms of layoffs and slippage in their real wages. “These people can’t believe what is happening to them,” says Illinois opinion pollster Mike McKeon. “They decided they didn’t want to work in factories, so they learned how to use computers. They were rewarded with service-sector jobs[...], but now they’re out on the street and no one wants them.” Open season has been declared on corporate bureaucrats. “The middle manager has gone out of vogue in corporate America,” says Lacey. “Indeed, the word manager is the kiss of death on resumes.”

One major obstacle to efficiency remains: a runaway U.S. health-care system, whose costs are rising at the rate of more than 9% a year and today stand at $2,500 a person, more than twice the level of most of the world’s industrialized economies. Such costs add 15% to the price of every new motor vehicle, for example, a margin that single-handedly threatens to eliminate the entire cost advantages achieved by Ford and Chrysler.

All of this looks familiar…same headlines we see over and over about the current catastrophic state of the economy. Why post it? Because these are excerpts from a 1992 time magazine article.

How about:

[...] plan calls for an $80 billion four-year public-works project to rebuild roads and bridges and create a national fiber-optic information network to enhance learning and to link homes, schools and offices. Clinton also wants a national education and retraining program, financed by a 1.5% payroll tax, for all employees from the mail room to the executive suite.

[...] would reduce personal income tax rates 1% across the board, saving the average family about $5 a week, which he would offset with mostly unspecified spending cuts.

Wow! It’s Obama’s change! Except that first paragraph begins: “The heart of Clinton’s” and the second begins “Bush”.

Just a moment of hope, because we have been in this hole before and the way out can’t be that different from the last time.