Video

Hulu, VoIP, Hospitals & Ineffective Network Filtering

This past weekend it happens that I spent a day at Memorial Hermann Northwest Hospital. The why is a long story and not especially important for the moment. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the facility has an open guest Wifi network. That allowed me to do some work, blogging, etc while I was there.

A little later in the day we were moved to a room without a TV. Since we were going to be waiting a while I pulled out the Mini 2140 and logged into Hulu so that we could watch some TV. We watched last weeks episode of Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles.

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Review: Plantronics .Audio 480 Headset

plantronics-audio480usb_cu-120-copyLast Christmas my wife got me one of Plantronics .Audio 480 headsets. I’d seen this model of headset offered for a while, and since I’ve used noise reducing headphones for listening to music for many years, the idea of a similar approach to a VoIP headset was intriguing. She knew that I was searching out a wideband capable SIP soft phone and thought that a suitably capable headset might enhance my traveling arsenal.

My earlier experience with noise reducing headsets started with the venerable Sony MDR-NC10…which I simply loved, and had several sets over the years.  I found them both comfortable to wear and very effective.  The concept of soft rubber-tipped ear buds that form a noise blocking seal into the ear canal was simply brilliant.

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About My Blogging

audio-codes-320hdb-300About a week ago I read a tweet someone posted stemming from a conversation with their boss. The topic under consideration was blogging. The boss asserted that they should be posting more frequently, even if they are short posts. Their own impression had been that quality trumps quantity and longer, well-considered posts take time.

The initial tweet was met with a range of replies, myself amongst them. I instinctively agreed with the stance that quality is an imperative. However, as is often the case, after mulling it over for a while I’m not sure the answer is so simple or obvious. To borrow from my roots a Western Canadian cultural-ism, the better answer could be “that depends.”

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Netflix Streams On TivoHD, in HD

tivohd_wremote_rf_300rgb440Early in 2008 when Netflix officially dropped support for HD-DVD I thought that I’d have to terminate our Netflix account. We were getting HD-DVDs routinely, but had no plans to migrate to Blu-Ray. Still don’t really. However, my wife had been enjoying downloads from Amazon’s Unboxed service, even if they were all SD and marginal image quality. It was a suitable substitute for Comcast Pay-Per-View which you simply can’t use on a TivoHD because of cable card issues.

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Comcast Trouble Resolved With Help From Their Tweeple

I was incensed as a result of the past weeks trouble with the cable card swap that Comcast imposed. After considerable time spent on the phone in the afternoon I detailed the situation in a blog post early last evening. At the point when I wrote that post we had no clear path to solution, just the promise that someone would call us back.

Shortly after the blog post went live a twitter message was automatically sent to highlight that post. This caught the attention of @comcastcares, which is Frank Eliason, Director Of Digital Care at Comcast.

Frank & his staff are based in Philadelphia PA. The fact that Comcast has been using Twitter to stay on top of customer service has been known for some time. I had some cursory interaction with them during the long service outage in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike.

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