January 2009 Archives

I already do telecommute regularly. The company I presently work for has promoted this and it works well since a lot of my work involves teleconferencing and remote computing anyway as our work force is scattered across the globe.

I am, however, attempting to find ways to save money. Who isn't, these days?

Right now, I have a cell plan and a regular landline type phone. In fact, I use Vonage for my landline, so my costs for keeping the land line are already fairly low (have a corporate discount through my company, to boot). They could be lower, though. They could be free, since the majority of my land line use is the aforementioned teleconferencing via 1-800 type conference bridges. Skype does toll free for, well, free. The connection and voice quality equals that of the Vonage device simply using my laptop's built in speakers and microphone.

Here's the trouble: I don't want to use the laptop speakers/mic. I'd rather use a headset. Further, I don't want wires. I have several Bluetooth headsets, including a lovely comfy set of stereo headphones (the Motorola S9). Should be simple enough to pair the headphones with the computer and change the sound settings to do Bluetooth, yes?

Welllll, in spite of me being all geeky 'n smart 'n stuff, and in spite of having found a lovely tutorial from O'Reilly on just how to set all that up, I have not yet been able to get it to work. I am using an IOGEAR Bluetooth dongle. It will pair with the headphones, but the audio is not routed through the headphones. Anyone who knows anyone who might be able to help me with this is invited to contact me.

[UPDATE: Bluetooth problem solved. Found, downloaded, and installed the latest Bluetooth drivers. Although I have an IOGEAR dongle on a Dell computer running Windows XP, the Lenovo drivers will do just fine.]

Problem number 2 for this is that Skype does not appear to let you set up pauses in your dialing. Y'know what I mean? You can program a short pause into the dialing sequence on most auto-dialers. Dial the first 10 digits, then have the phone wait a few seconds for an announcement, then dial another string of digits (an access code, for example). Conference bridges are set up that way -- one common 800 number, then you dial a bridge code, then sometimes a series of key presses to activate the conference or log in to it, or whatever. Those "p" key presses are necessary!

I have found some forums on Skype that discuss this, but haven't been able to spend time looking into them in depth. Again, anyone who knows anyone who knows anything about how I can overcome this, please let me know.

Before I left the New Year's party early Thursday morning, I made sure I wasn't breaking the law.

I had, of course, been careful to have only one glass of wine, early in the evening. I ate food, drank lots of water. I drove the speed limit. My car's lights were in perfect working order. I signaled when turning or changing lanes. And I made sure I did not have a license plate frame that obscured the word "Arizona" on my license plate.

Yah. AZ has a law that makes it illegal to obscure the word "Arizona" on your license plate. Most frames issued by dealerships, or the ones you can buy to show just how much you love Westies or show your support for your favorite high school football team are now illegal. You can be fined anywhere from $140 to $160, depending on the locality in which you get pulled over. Moreover, it's a primary offense, so even if you're not doing anything else wrong, the cop can pull you over and cite you if your frame covers the state's name.

Ostensibly it was made illegal for safety reasons. Used ta be you could easily tell what state a car was registered in by the plate's colors. Then states started changing plates more often than my fastidious and fussy neighbor changes his underwear. That is true even without accounting for the specialized plates for cancer, historic vehicles, child abuse, environmental awareness, universities, veterans, and having voted for Obama.

The idea is that victims of car-related incidents or police can now more easily tell if the car involved in the incident is an Arizona registered vehicle.

There is something fundamentally wrong with that reason, however. See, the law only applies to cars that are registered in Arizona. So a car involved in a hit-and-run just might be one of the many, many, many cars registered in Minnesota, Vancouver, or other northern place that crowd our roads for 9 months of the year.

My belief is that this is really all about one more way for a state hit hard by the economic slump to squeeze more money out of her citizens.