Making the switch to computer-based calling

I have been a user of Vonage for my main business line for at least four years and mostly a happy customer. But a series of anticipated moves this summer got me thinking: do I really need this service any longer? And so I have come up with a rather strange plan, so stick with me here for a minute while I explain how I got to my post-VOIP mobile telephony world.

I spend about $60 a month for my business telephone service: half on Vonage, half on AT&T for providing DSL service to my home (which I share for both home and business connectivity). This summer I will be moving across town and splitting off my office into a separate location. First I thought I would just get a cable modem and move the Vonage box and line over to run on that. That is the beauty of tying your business line to a VOIP service: it can move with you. Plus, with the cable downloads at 10 Mb, I can get those mission-critical movies and other image files that are so important to my day-to-day work life.

But the more I pondered that situation, the more I thought I would be better off if I got one of the AT&T broadband PC modems and used my computer for all my outbound calls. The modems are free with rebates and a two-year service plan, and you pay $60 a month for unlimited Internet access. Some of them are USB so can work with desktops, laptops, Macs or Windows. This is the same $60 a month that I was paying for my business line. The downside is that I won't get anywhere near 10 Mb downloads, but that might cut back on the opportunities to view unneeded visual content.

I am already a big fan of Skype, and they offer an unlimited Skype Out subscription for less than $3 a month to everyplace that I would call with the Vonage account for the most part (you can get more expensive packages if you want to call international places). You can also purchase an inbound number for Skype for a few more dollars a month, but the number of people calling me doesn't justify this, yet.

There are a couple of important caveats to note here. First, I make a lot of calls to conferencing services, so I need to be able to continue to dial touch tones after the initial call goes through. With Skype, this isn't a problem: you get a cute little keypad that you can type in your conference number and PIN and away you go.

Second, more importantly, I no longer will be using the actual telephone that has been sitting on my desk for the past 16 years. Granted, this phone has been in many difference cities, and at the beginning of its life was used on New York Telephone where I was paying something like two cents a minute for local calls. The more I thought about my solution, the more I began to miss this old friend and desk totem. As a friend of mine said, it is like you have to clean out the last boxes from your old bedroom at your parents' house. I will miss the concept of this old Ma Bell ringy-dingy most of all -- even though it doesn't serve any current purpose in my new post-VOIP life.

I don't mind the headset, and in fact I have a whole passel of Bluetooth headsets that should work on my Mac and Windows PCs for the calls, if I don't want to use the wired one.

But the third issue is the most important one. To make this trick work, I would need to port my existing Vonage number over to one of my wireless phones. The only way to know if you can do this is to go into an AT&T company-owned store (there are other franchise stores that look exactly the same so it pays to call their support line and find out) and ask them if it is eligible for porting.

I called my local AT&T store and first was told they couldn't port any Vonage numbers. Then after I persisted, they said I could and just stop by. So far so good.

So what I have in mind is extreme mobility: I should be able to make calls anywhere I have my laptop, as long as I have AT&T broadband service (which should be in most of the major cities I am in). This also has the extra advantage that I am not trying to find Wifi service or have to pay extra when I am in a hotel or airport, because usually those places have wireless broadband. If not, I can use my cell phone, which will be my primary business line. And under the worse case scenario, I can carry an Ethernet cable (remember those) and a phone card and use a payphone!

I am interested in your experiences with the AT&T broadband PC cards, so leave a comment on my Strominator.com blog if you don't mind. Do you think I am crazy, to contemplate doing this? I think it is kinda exciting.

Choosing the right email listserv

Choosing the right email listserv

I am doing a seminar tonight here in St. Louis that talks about how to use blogs and other Internet tools for self-published authors. And one of the first things that I wanted to talk about has to do with email lists. Ironic, but the underpinning of Web 2.0 is something so old that we take it for granted.

Email is at the core of just about anything else that you do on the Web: it is the primary notification mechanism for Facebook et al. when you make changes to your site. It is the way these social sites find your network of contacts, and the way that you keep your audience informed of what you are doing, too. You can have the best Web site going, but you need to remind people about what you have on it. Ironically, that was the original reason that I started Web Informant lo' those many years ago.

Why bother with an email list when you can just send out a bunch of emails from your desktop? Several reasons: First, you get a more professional means of communication that can manage all the bounces and mistaken reply-to-everyone situations. Your desktop program isn't designed to send out a message to hundreds or thousands of recipients either, while the list servers are. You also don't have to reveal all your subscribers in the "To:" field, which I still see from certain PR people. (Hey, thanks for sending me your contact list! I will be sure to take note of whom you think are my colleagues.) Finally, a list server or list provider can manage unsubscribes automatically, as well as post your messages in an archive that is available online for anyone to review.

Over the years I have used many different technologies to maintain this humble email list, so I have had some experience with the technology. If you are starting a new list, you have three basic choices: the free, the cheap, and the pricey. While price alone is a good way to decide, there are some other reasons that are less obvious. Let's talk about a few typical providers for each category: Google and Yahoo Groups (free), Mailman hosted by EMWD.com for $4 a month and iContact. If you don't want to read how to do this and want to watch one of my screencast videos that actually shows you the process, go on over to http://yourpersonalgeek.tv now.

No matter what method you choose, you will need to assemble all your email addresses that you want to start your list with. You can export these from your email program into a text file, and then bring up the file in a word processor program. The first time that you do this is painful, no doubt. You have to cull through all your correspondence, and I guarantee you that many of your addresses will be outdated, given how quickly people change jobs these days.

For free list servers, I like Yahoo Groups. It offers a lot of control, easy list management, and the Web-based control screens are easy to understand and figure out where things are located. There is one big downside, though -- the ability to set up large lists quickly. Yahoo only lets you add 10 people a day to your list without asking them to opt-in. To get around this, you can use Google Groups, which supports lists up to 500 names. Google Groups has fewer features though. I use Yahoo Groups for supporting many community lists that I maintain.

To get started, go to groups.google.com or groups.yahoo.com and click on the create a new group button at the top of the page and fill out the form. You can cut and paste the email addresses from your master list right in the Web form and you are ready to go. With both Google and Yahoo, you have a few parameters that you want to make sure you set correctly in terms of who can join your list and how they see messages from you. I suggest you experiment with just a few names as a test before you add the entire list so you can get the hang of things.

Mailman is a more professional program and gives you all sorts of control over the message and recipients, and it is what I currently use for this list. I recommend the provider EMWD.com – there are others but they are more expensive. You need to obtain an account for $10, and this will give you access via the Web to a series of control screens, fill-in forms, and zillions of parameters. This is more complex than Google, but you have more control. As I said, each list only costs $4 a month to operate. You need to set up a subdomain that points to their list server, and you can usually do that with your registrar's control panels.

But this may not be fancy enough for your purposes. If you want to add Web links in your emails and track who clicks on which link, such as for promotional purposes, then you want iContact. I personally don't like rich HTML emails but I know many of you want this, so I mention it here. The cheapest plan is $10 a month for up to 500 names. If you have 2500 names, the fee increases to $30 a month. The more names, the more you pay a month. The advantage of iContact is that you can send out very snazzy emails, with pictures, color, and links to Web sites, and maintaining lists is all they do. You don't have to mess with setting up domains or servers, either. And like the others, everything is set up with a series of Web forms that are fairly easy, with lots of control over how the newsletter will look like.

So there you have it. Good luck with your list.

Buying XP shouldn't be this tough

Over the weekend, I helped a friend of mine buy a new laptop. What was
amazing was we actually went into a retail store, found the model she
was most comfortable with and was in stock. We actually left the store
with it under our possession.

What wasn't amazing was how hard it was to purchase it, and how much
Internet research I needed to do to enable this fabulous shopping
experience.

You see, my friend wanted to stick with Windows XP. And the moral of
my story, which I will provide up front, is that if you want XP on
your future laptops, you better buy it now because it is only going to
get more difficult.

According to Microsoft's own Web site, XP Pro will no longer be
available in the retail channel after July 1. Although OEMs and system
builders will have until Feb 1, 2009.

There is an exception -- for the immediate future the XP Home version
will be available for ultra-small PCs, but these are probably not the
PCs that you want to outfit your corporate fleet with.

Before heading to the Office Depot that is literally a block from my
house, I spent some time looking over the major PC vendors' Web sites
and seeing what they had. Here is where the story turns ugly. My
friend wanted to spend less than $1,000, have a 15.4-inch screen, and
a keyboard that was solid enough for a demanding typist. That seemed
easy to satisfy, until I started looking around.

None of the major PC vendors make it easy for you to buy a
pre-configured XP laptop. They all "recommend Windows Vista" and hide
their XP models several menu layers down or just don't tell you where
to find them. The two best vendors for XP are Lenovo and HP – possibly
because they have standardized on XP for their own employees, possibly
because they understand that this market segment isn't going away as
fast as Microsoft would like. HP sells actually two different versions
of XP Pro – one is called a "business downgrade" that sounds ominous,
the other is just the standard XP Pro. They cost the same, and they
have fairly wide support for XP Pro across their laptop line. Lenovo
has equally wide support. Both sites make it easy to figure out which
laptops can be configured with XP Pro pre-installed, even if you can't
sort by operating system directly.

The two worst vendors are Sony and Gateway. I couldn't find any XP
models on either site, and Sony makes it almost impossible to
determine what operating system is running on its machine until you
get into the details on each individual model. Toshiba's Web site
isn't much better.

I had better results going to Office Depot's Web site, which was
fortunate because as I said the store is very close by. There you can
quickly search on XP Pro and find a dozen models from several
different vendors, including Sony and Toshiba, which come with this
operating system. It is ironic and cruel that you have to go to a
retail vendor's site to find the details about a product that you
can't get on the actual vendor's site. This should be a lesson for
those of you designing Web sites, but I will leave that for another
column and another day.

In fact, the major PC retailers have done a much better job at finding
XP from their home pages – often a few mouse clicks is all that it
takes to narrow the field. BestBuy.com and CDW.com both will show you
which models come with XP: in CDW's case, they had nine results but
only two Toshibas were in stock.

So off we went to Office Depot. Amazingly, the Lenovo model they had
on display was the sole laptop running XP, and it was one that my
friend liked. We had to deal with a salesperson, who made several
mistakes and tried to get us to purchase the extended warranty, but we
left the store with product in hand.

Microsoft is making a mistake discontinuing XP to retail and corporate
customers. There are many people that aren't enamored with Vista, and
I have heard from many corporate IT managers that are going slowly on
its adoption. Buying a laptop is more of an issue, because many
vendors are making laptops that have network cards and other gear that
doesn't have XP drivers. If you have plans for major XP laptop
purchases this year, spend the money now while you still have a
choice.

Fail frequently

How many of us remember our failures more than our successes? My own divorce, the time I didn't get a research grant, the last job that I was fired from (come to think of it, there were some other messy situations that I still recall), the I time I rear-ended someone on a slippery freeway. The list goes on and on. You could say that I have had a full life.

Those of us in technology are fond of the line from the Apollo 13 book and movie: "failure is not an option." Back then, it was something to revel in, a bunch of NASA nerds working around the clock to figure out a strategy that would save the three astronauts' lives and get them back to Earth safely. It was a good story then, and still is.

But I wanted to talk to you today about a somewhat different point of view, that failure >is< an option, and in fact, those of us that fail frequently are better for it. The trick is to think of each failure as a learning and growth opportunity, especially how you can learn to triumph over your own business adversities. Easy to say now, especially as these failures are illuminated in the dim light of my faded memories, but still.

This isn't a new concept. For example, Jeff Atwood in his blog, Coding Horror, says, "Fail early and often." (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000576.html)

And Mitchell Ashley in his blog says:
"If you aren't seeing some failures along the way, it's a pretty good idea you're not stretching, challenging and really going for it. You're probably believing in your own assumptions and plans too much." (http://www.theconvergingnetwork.com/2008/02/fail-early-fail.html)

Other people have called this concept rapid prototyping: put something together quickly, barely working, to show your customers or clients. Then, based on this feedback, you go back and make small changes, get more feedback and sharpen your ideas.

And really, when you go back to our childhood, this is how we all learned a new skill, whether it is in playing sports, mastering the piano, or whatever. We took small steps, saw what worked and what didn't, and learned from our mistakes.

The hard part is to figure out the right feedback loop so that you aren't micro-managing everyone. This isn't good either: you have to give people the responsibility to make their own mistakes, so that they can really learn from them.

I got to witness this first hand this past weekend. I was attending a professional speaker-training workshop, and got to see first-hand how really good speakers can still fail and how they can tune their craft. It was like drinking from a firehose, but extremely worthwhile as I try to move into that orbit.

Part of the notion of frequent failure has to do with corporate culture, and the acceptance by management of a certain level of risk. After all, who wants a bunch of employees that don't produce? The other thing to figure out the right amount of freedom to try out new ideas and experiment, and to make these adjustments without a particular timetable or schedule of "deliverables."

This is the philosophy of many innovative companies. For example, last week I met Keith Sawyer, a professor here at Wash U. His Group Genius book talks about the culture at WL Gore (the makers of GoreTex and other products less famous). Employees have ten percent of their time that isn't allocated for particular billable projects. They are free to experiment and fail, as long as the other 90% is actually producing results. This is how they come up with some of their most profitable products, and failure at Gore is tolerated within this guideline.

So really, why I can understand why NASA says that failure is not an option, because after all they were talking about actual lives at stake, what we are usually dealing with in our lives is a bit less critical and threatening. Instead, may I suggest a replacement motto, on the order of "Failure is not an only option, but should always be encouraged."

Now I am not talking about promoting your least productive employees. What I do mean is that you want to give your self the permission to fail, and in doing so foster innovation in your company and make you a more agile business. But unlike the astronauts, by making it easier to fail you can avoid the bigger mistakes, and make smaller steps towards progress.

Start thinking about promoting the culture of frequent failure at your shop. It is the first step along the path towards being more innovative and agile. And if you are looking for some inspiration, it is worth renting the Apollo 13 movie if you haven't seen it in a while.

It takes a village to build a Web site

I am old enough to remember that Web sites started out being one-person operations, using simple, easy-to-learn HTML codes that didn’t take much beyond a text editor and memorizing about a dozen commands from Laura Lemay’s book. There were plenty of Web servers to choose from, and it didn’t take much programming skill to get one installed and up and running.

Now it seems like it takes a village to get your site updated and maintained. There are content management systems, advertising serving systems, Flash and streaming content delivery mechanisms, caching servers, databases, and more. So my question to you today is how many people does it take to update your company’s Web site? If the answer is more than two, maybe you need to rethink whom you have and why you need this entire crowd.

Sure, having a modern Web site is more than just putting up a couple of pages of text, and writing the right codes for paragraphs and bold face. I know that. But Web sites should be agile, should be frequently updated, should be easily updated, and shouldn’t take “approval cycles” or long food chains to get from the person that creates the content to the final stage where the world can view it. You want the content to be as close to the original thinker and creator as you possibly can.

Where have we gone with the Web? What happened to make it so difficult? Was it function creep, or security issues, or the marketing and legal departments getting mixed up with this technology? Was it because no one cares about what Web server you are running anymore (really it is a simple choice between Microsoft and Apache)? Was it because static pages of text with just a few images are so over and we have to embed video and Flashy objects to get anyone’s attention? Or because the browser is now everyone’s mission critical, must-have application and so much of what we do everyday involves going to various Web sites? Or because everyone is now a professional blogger and the average Web site designer has a bucket-full of tools to use? Or because everyone is using RSS feeds to keep track of new content and the actual site that contains this information is no longer really all that important?

It probably is some mixture of all of the above. I don’t mean to suggest that we want to go back to the really olden days, when we had command-line browsers that didn’t do much (remember Lynx?). I just think if you have a corporate Web site, take a moment to look at your chain of command, and see if you can streamline it. Let’s see if you can set a goal to update your site at least once a week, or even once a day. It doesn’t need to take a village, and your customers and your staff might really appreciate it, too.

The power of Pi

I have been doing some seminars on IT asset management for a client and as a result I have been talking to a lot of IT managers of some fairly large organizations. One of them mentioned to me his rule of π that I thought was worth sharing. As in the Greek letter that is a geometric constant of 3.14159. (I used to know more decimal places, and yes, I was one of those kinds of people back in high school.)



His rule is simple: anytime a consultant or an employee gives you an estimate of what something costs or how long it will take to complete, he multiples the estimate by π. Someone says a project will take two months, it really will take a bit longer than six. And so forth.



I got a good laugh out of his π rule, but then I got to thinking. Why are IT people so miserable at estimating costs and time to complete work? Maybe they are the worst group of people – certainly I have had general contractors who weren’t the best at this, but then I guess I should consider myself lucky that they were only a few days off schedule rather than by such a huge factor.



Sure, we’ve all read the mythical man-month and other works talking about how the more developers you add to a project, the longer it will take. But this isn’t just about that.



Maybe it is because IT people really want to serve their clients, and set themselves up for unreasonable expectations right off the bat by underestimating their work product. Or maybe it is because the work product is so ephemeral to begin with. I mean, it isn’t like a construction crew trying to rebuild a bridge or erect a new office building.



I guess I am overly sensitive to this because so much of my job revolves around hitting particular deadlines that are very definite. If I miss one, someone else along the editorial production process has to make up the slack, because the magazine has to be printed at a specific time or the article has to be posted online for a particular moment. I am proud to say that I hit all of my deadlines except for some unusual circumstances.



But when it comes to IT projects, a deadline is more a guideline than something hard and fast. The report isn’t done? Oh well, we can wait another week, not to worry. Or how about the opposite, when your boss gives you an artificially early deadline, you actually deliver the work on time, and then he tells you that he was really not counting on getting it today and will be too busy to review it until next week? Boy, does that make you feel like you really moved heaven and earth to get the work to him as agreed.



Sure, things are sometimes out of your control. People make mistakes, code has bugs, equipment takes longer than anticipated to configure, the dog ate my homework, etc. Some of the delay can be explained by developers who want to add “just one more feature” before they lock down the code for production purposes. Did anyone ask them to add the feature? Probably not, they just took it on their own initiative because it seemed like a good idea at the time.



When I taught high school computer networking, believe me I heard it all when a student was late with his homework. (And you should know, I didn’t let my students slide. A deadline is a deadline, after all. Most of them only made that mistake the first time, and then cooperated quite nicely afterwards.)



If we are going to move towards more realistic estimates, we need to do a better job of anticipating the problems with our projects, and also need to be able to communicate up and down the food chain when the first hint of delay or feature creep hits.



Think about the rule of π the next time someone asks you about when you will be done with something you are working on, and try to give it some thought before you commit.

Beware of online scams

I have had the dubious expertise of selling a lot of stuff via Craigslist, both here in St. Louis and also in Los Angeles. Over the past couple of years, I have come across some interesting scam artists who are fairly easy to spot. But today's email arrived with a new exploit.

Usually, we are selling furniture. My wife is an interior decorator, and we have been through a few decorating changes. Now, when you sell a bed or some other large piece, you are not going to get too many people from out of town who are interested, unless they are moving into town. So the first tip off that something is amiss is when someone from overseas responds to the ad and says that they will pay for it sight unseen, matching your price. This violates three principles right off the bat:

 People like to negotiate prices, no matter how good a deal you are giving them. Anyone who is paying your price is suspect right there.
 People want to kick the tires and make sure that your item exists. Doesn't matter what it is, but especially for furniture, because no photo can do any piece justice.
 Craigslist is hyper-local. Someone from out of town is suspect.

The legit customer is also going to want to think about his impending purchase, even for a few hours. And they will also pay cash, if you ask. (And you should demand cash, just because checks are so easily forged. Remember Frank Abagnale?) The con men are going to try to send you some kind of check, and mention that right off the bat in their initial email.

So my wife and I have developed our own parsing filter for these email responses, to separate the real offers from the fakers. All well and good, until we began advertising our apartment for rent this week. Today's email brought the following:

I am highly impressed with the information in the listing. I don't have any question at the moment. I wanna go ahead in renting the place from you. I'll be the only person in the property. I work as a Researcher for my company (GLOBAL LINK) and I am coming to the area to carry out some research. They will be responsible for the first month rent and security deposit. I wish to sign the lease agreement in person and will be signing a year lease as soon as i get to the States. I'll be moving to the States on March the 30th and i want the lease to start same date because I will be moving into the property directly. Kindly get the ad off from all listing because am taking the property for sure.
In the main time, I will like to secure the property asap so that i can attend to other important things for my move to the Country.
In order to proceed with payment, I will need the following information so that we can continue from there.
(1) FULL NAME AS IT WILL BE ON CHECK,
(2) MAILING ADDRESS,
(3) CELL NUMBER AND ALTERNATIVE NUMBER.
Kindly get back to me with the above information and in case of any query, please contact me on my phone number 0044XXXXXXX. Await your response asap.

A few things struck me about this email. First, why is he so eager? Second, why would someone from the UK (based on his phone number) in a financial services firm, move to St. Louis? Granted, we are becoming a bigger banking center with Wachovia buying JD Edwards, but still. Third, why is he using kindly so much? There is nothing kind about this, it is a business transaction. Fourth, the ALL CAPS is another tip-off. Fifth, the email came from Yahoo.com, rather than a corporate email account. Finally, why ask to remove the ad from Craigslist? Something didn't add up.

A quick check online found the managing director of GlobalLink.com in the UK, and about an hour later he was kindly replying with the fact that the gent didn't exist in his office. So case closed. But I just wonder how many people are less suspicious, or who don't check out their potential buyers, fall into his trap?

Craigslist is a great site, and we have sold lots of stuff over the years on it. And they do a fairly good job of warning you about the con artists. But this just shows you that the bad guys are getting smarter all the time, which means you have to, too.