November 22, 2011

Telecommuting is great for productivity (but possibly bad for families?)

Telecommuting GOOD! And also telecommuting sometimes bad, maybe.
June 3, 2011

Give a Hoot — Don’t Commute!

Our company purpose is to “Save Time.“This is best embodied by our animosity towards daily commutes. The concept is a terrible one — it leads to communities where people don’t know each other, where businesses fail even though they’re surrounded by…
June 2, 2009

More on Asterisk and IntuitiveVoice Evolution

Want to change the conference line access number in Asterisk/Intuitive Voice Evolution? It’s not all that easy if you don’t want the conference line to be something not in the 14000–15000 range. We like to have a nice long conference line…
March 24, 2009

According to a couple of studies, our core values help team morale

According to two studies, companies or teams or groups where the leader of the group is fair and honest will perform better than teams where the that is not seen as accurate.  This is kind of a “duh” study, but…
April 7, 2008

Thunderbird and Google Desktop

I love Thunderbird. I love using Google Desktop with it — two whaps at the “Ctrl” button and I get my search box, and I’m seconds away from finding any message. Unfortunately, Google Desktop still doesn’t index documents attached to email messages stored in…
March 14, 2008

Asterisk (Evolution) and Cisco 7960 phones

Asterisk plays very nicely with Cisco 7960 phones, and we have quite a few of them. Unfortunately there are some interesting configuration issues, and I thought I’d get them all down, with explanations and workarounds. We were having a problem where our phones,…

More on Asterisk (Evolution)

I wanted to change the email message that’s sent out when someone leaves a voicemail. The easy way would be to modify /etc/asterisk/voicemail.conf, adding the following to the “[general]” section: emailbody=New voicemail message received\n\nDuration: ${VM_DUR}\nTime: ${VM_DATE}\nSender: ${VM_CALLERID}\n\n\t\t\t\t–Asterisk\n Of course, on Evolution…
March 9, 2008

Asterisk and Evolution

We’ve just switched from a regular VOIP vendor to an in-house Asterisk PBX with a T‑1. The results have been good so far — we have much less delay on calls, and a heck of a lot more control over our phones and our…
March 7, 2008

J instead of smiley face in Thunderbird

So I’ve been using Thunderbird for about 16 months now, and I finally decided to fix an annoyance. Anytime I get an email from someone using Outlook (often), any smiley faces they use in their message come across as the letter “J”.…
September 5, 2007

Mythbusting — be careful!

In the Washington Post today was a story (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/03/AR2007090300933.html) about research by Norbert Schwartz into what people actually understand when myths are “busted.” (See “Metacognitive Experiences And The Intricacies Of Setting People Straight: Implications For Debiasing And Public Information Campaigns from…