Monday, February 9, 2009

OOMA: Voice over IP Telephone Service

I recently installed an ooma system in my home to act as a second line for work. So far I am very impressed.

For those who are unfamiliar with ooma, it is a box that provides Voice over IP (or VOIP): telephone service via the Internet. This is similar to Vonage or Comcast Digital Voice. Rather than using the regular telephone connection in to your home, the connection is digitized and sent over the Internet. All VOIP systems are integrated with the Public Switched Telephone Service (PSTN) so you can place calls to anyone with a telephone even if you are using VOIP.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Yay Netflix

So I guess I am lagging being the cutting edge of cooldom, but it has taken me this long to finally sign up for Netflix. I've known about it for years, of course, but always thought that I would never actually want to see a sufficient quantity of movies in a given month to justify the monthly fee. But with a young one in the house it seemed that we were making far too many trips to the local Blockbuster and paying way too much to rent a single disc. So I subscribed.