A Blog for Graymad

I'm trying to decide whether there's a case to be made for the utility of the Smart Displays being marketed by ViewSonic and Philips, among others. Smart Displays are essentially an LCD monitor that runs a customized OS that allows you to connect wirelessly to a Windows XP-based desktop (or laptop, one assumes) PC.

Welcome to anyone who's visiting from the PDC Buzz page. I have to say that any day you can get listed on the same page with folks like Chris Sells and Brad Abrams is a very good day, indeed!

I should've known better than to taunt Mother Nature. After we got our power back from Isabel (after 30 hours), I changed my MSN IM handle to include “(power's back...take THAT, Isabel!)”. Apparently, Mother Nature takes these things rather personally, because our power went out again Monday morning at around 5am. Unfortunately, this time around, it was us and about 5 or 6 other neighbors who were out, while the rest of the neighborhood had power.

Ole Eichhorn sings the praises of Vonage, a service that allows you to use your internet connection for telephone service, using a standard telephone. According to Ole, it's cheap ($60, one-time fee), and will be big.

Been a while since I posted, so I'll catch up on a number of items:

Duncan writes:

...to read before doing.

So I thought I had my network migration plan all set...just drop in a couple of new NICs, as Brian Desmond suggested in the comments for my last T1 post, and I should be good to go, right? Well, almost. The web server, which is running Windows 2000 Server, was no problem. Already had another NIC in the box, just enable it, run the cable, and it's good to go. My mail server, alas, is running Windows Server 2003, which doesn't like my Netgear FA310TX 10/100 nics very well. It's possible to make them run, but the result is lots of socket errors with my mail program.