Disruptive Telephony

My blogging here (and across my other blogs) has been a wee bit light of late, largely because I began having technical issues with my laptop last week that ultimately culminated in its complete failure on Thursday. It had to be sent back to Ottawa for what I understand was a complete system board replacement. In theory I should get it back tomorrow and start being able to get back into my normal work flow.  Fun, fun, fun... (well, not really!)

Sorry about the second test post, but it seems something is not working right.  Posts are now appearing, but the heading is not.

Hmmm... new posts do not seem to be appearing on this weblog... so I'm just posting this from within the TypePad web interface before I contact TypePad support.

Please move along now... nothing to see here!  ;-)

Wow!  As I've been scanning my email and notes from the last week, it seems like it was quite a heck of a week to take off!  Lots going on... and much to write about.  We'll see  how much writing I get done.  As mentioned previously, I'm now at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas for "Mitel Forum", our annual event for solution providers, consultants, the Mitel User Group and analysts.  Should be a very good - and involved - event!

Don't expect to see much from me here for the next bit.  In a few minutes I'm shutting down my systems and heading offline on vacation for the next week.  I'll be back online Monday, June 25th, although I'll be travelling to a Mitel conference in Las Vegas for most of that week.

We're not planning to go anywhere extravagent... maybe some day trips around Vermont... some camping... work around the house... all in all just a pleasant way to spend some time before the heat of summer hits.

See you in a week!

Ever wonder why I wound up in Burlington, VT, after living in Ottawa, Ontario, for most of 5 years?  Well, maybe you haven't... but that and other items about me are now available in an interview that Martyn Davies has posted as part of his new "Bending the Needle" podcast series.  When Martyn was over here and visited me back in the winter, he recorded this brief interview sitting in my home studio.  He just recorded it on his handy little Zoom H4 portable recorder which worked quite well.  He also took this picture to the right, which remains among my favorite as far as pictures of me go.

Martyn had told me that he was teaming up with Dean Elwood from VoIPuser.org to do a podcast series and this "Bending the Needle" seems to be their work.  The subtitle is "Interviews with the Leading Edge Personalities in the VoIP Space" and so it's an honor to be among the first interviewees he has up there.  I'll subscribe and will be interested to see their other interviews.

Some of you reading this may be interested in the article on my Disruptive Conversations blog about a new service that lets you update Twitter from within Skype. 

The article itself is an example of the challenge I'm increasingly finding with some things falling into the "grey area" between my two main blogs.  This blog covers telephony, VoIP, etc., while Disruptive Conversations covers the "social media" of blogs, podcasts, etc.  The lines are pretty clear in some cases.

But the challenge is that the lines continue to blur.... communication that used to take place by phone is moving increasingly online and very often to "social networking sites" like Facebook, Twitter and friends... which I have primarily been discussing over on DisCon. Yet in the case of this post I just made, the integration was with Skype, a tool I normally discuss over here on Disruptive Telephony.  I wound up posting it over there... but I just as easily could have posted it here. 

I've toyed with cross-posting some articles into both places. It would be trivial to do since I use Windows Live Writer now for all my blogging.  The act of cross-posting is as simple as switching the weblog menu to a different weblog, updating the categories for the new blog and hitting "Publish".  But I've avoided that for a while primarily just to have one place for an article to live.  Am I being too much of a purist?  The blogs are designed with two different audiences in mind.  There may not be as much cross-over.  Or should I post in one and put a quick link like I did here in the other?

Thoughts?  Suggestions?

FYI, if you stumble upon some of my posts appearing over on a site called CircleID, that's okay... they aren't stealing my content... I have given them explicit permission to republish my entries.  One of the folks involved with the site, Ali Farshchian, contacted me originally after I posted the SIP Botnet story to the Voice of VOIPSA weblog asking about permission to republish that story (which he subsequently did).  He later re-published another post of mine and in further discussions I granted my permission for him to republish future stories if he notified me after doing so.   I'm normally a bit concerned about publication of my content on other sites, but in this case I do like the overall focus of CircleID on issues relating to Internet infrastructure - and I'd definitely suggest you give it a read as many of these issues around domains and just infrastructure issues in general will affect us all.  (And some of the stories are just plain interesting because they deal with the "plumbing" of the Internet and the dark clouds that we don't normally venture into and really only know that "magic happens" somewhere inside them and this thing we call the Internet just works.)

It's a school vacation week here in my part of the USA and I'm planning to be offline for the remainder of the week.  Getting outside with my family... going on some day trips, doing some landscaping and otherwise enjoying the beautiful weather we are having right now.  I expect to be back posting here on Monday, April 30th.  See you then.

If you are viewing this site in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (IE6)
there are problems with my new design that cause it not to render
correctly.  Until I can get time to fix it, your only choices are unfortunately to
either: 1) upgrade to IE7; 2) use Firefox; or 3) read the RSS feed.

My apologies... when I was testing the site design and navigation bar on top,
I tested the site with IE7, Firefox 1.5 and 2, and MacOSX Safari., but neglected
to test with IE6.

P.S. And if there are any CSS experts out there who know why my design
is messing up IE6, any such advice would be greatly appreciated.