Tom Raftery’s I.T. views

GrandCentral is an offering from the original creators of DialPad, which gives you one phone number for all your telecommunications.

According to GrandCentral’s site, with a GrandCentral account you get:

• One Number…for LifeTM - Pick a number that will not change when you move or change jobs.
• ListenInTM on Voicemail - ListenIn on your messages from any phone before answering.
• Screen Your Calls - Know who is calling every time, even for blocked numbers.
• RingShareTM - Upload your MP3s to play for your callers instead of the standard ring.
• Block Callers - Block telemarketers or annoying callers and never get bothered again.
• Switch phones mid-call - Switch from cell to office or home your callers won’t know.
• Customize by Caller - Pick phones to ring, greetings to play and music to hear based on who is calling.
• Voicemail Everywhere - Get your voicemail online, through the phone or in your email.
• Voicemail Storage - All of your voicemail messages will be saved online, for LIFE.

This all sounds great and it seems to be getting very good reviews but with the recent telephony problems I have had I have a couple of questions:

• If anyone reading this post uses GrandCentral - is it good/reliable? and
• When will it be available in Ireland?

I have written before about what a crap service I am receiving from voip telephony provider Blueface. Now I know why they are called Blueface.

Yet again today the Blueface service is down and I can’t make outgoing calls from my landline. And anyone who has called me on my mobile knows just how bad mobile reception is here.

It will be difficult to extract myself from Blueface now, as the contact number I have given everyone is the number Blueface have given me.

For anyone considering using their service - don’t. Use any other telephony provider, even Eircom! Really.

UPDATE: - I seem to be having problems with incoming calls as well - if you have been trying to ring me, ring my mobile - +353-86-384 0828

The Google Earth blog notes that there has been a significant update to Google Earth and Google Maps images.

On checking Cork, I found that it has been significantly updated with recent high-res images. However, Rushbrook, where I am based, is still only available in low-res. In this screen you can see Rushbrook is on the West side of Great Island and just to the right of where the high-res image ends!

So close!

Jeff Nolan is a former executive at SAP (Jeff led the Apollo Strategy Group for SAP - aka the Oracle Attack group) and recently joined a silicon valley startup called Teqlo.

I will be interviewing Jeff tomorrow for the IT@Cork pre-conference podcast series.

If you have any questions you would like me to put to him, feel free to leave them in the comments.

I read on Conor O Neill’s blog this morning that Windows Live Writer has a plugin which allows insertion of Events. The Events can be added from Eventful using Live Clipboard or via a search Eventful button in the plugin.

To give it a try, I entered the information about the it@cork 2006 Annual Conference into Eventful. I then tried to use Live Clipboard to copy the data across into Live Writer but I couldn’t get this to work - I kept getting malformed XML errors.

Undaunted, I then tried the Search Eventful option and this worked eventually (the search facility is poor so it takes a long time to find the event you want). However, I found the Event in Eventful and it added it in to this post (below).

 The formatting isn’t great (of the Description field in particular) but other than that it seems to work quite well.

According to the download page:

The published post included correct hCalendar microformatting

 This is interesting - a tool supporting Microformats coming out of Microsoft - the shame of it is that when I last checked it has only been downloaded 149 times.

Wednesday, November 29, 2006 All Day 2006 it@cork National Technology & Business Conference - Business without Boundaries 09:10 OPENING ADDRESS ‘Bricks to Clicks’ Speaker: Eddie Hobbs, SESSION 1 - THE FLAT EARTH PHENOMENON 10:00 Early Pioneers of bookselling and art on the Web Speaker: Conor Kenny, Kennys.ie (… Rochestown Park Hotel Rochestown Road Cork, Cork   Ireland Download iCalendar file

Pat reported this morning that Smart Telecom’s phone service was down. Their upstream provider, Eircom, cut them off for non-payment of bills leaving 40,000+ of Smart’s customers with no phone service.

Were I cynical I’d suggest that Eircom did this as a cheap means of acquiring 40,000+ new customers.

The Irish telecom’s regulator, ComReg (aka Eircom’s lapdog) knew this was coming for a long time and never bothered stepping in to try to resolve the dispute - why would they? It is not as if ComReg gives a toss about the consumer. Nope, yet again they (in)acted in Eircom’s interest.

It will be interesting to see what position Isolde Goggin will be offered in Eircom when she steps down as ComReg Chair.

I have written previously about Microsoft’s Hotmail and what a lame excuse for a mail platform it is - in response to that Microsoft gave an account on their new mail platform, Microsoft Live Mail and I have to say it is a serious disappointment.

One of the biggest problems with Hotmail to date has been the fact that they delete all your mail if you don’t log in for 30 days. This has caused loads of people (myself included) lots of pain as we see several years mail disappear never to be returned.

With Windows Live Mail, that 30 day login has been changed to 120 days in an effort to overcome this problem. However, the proper way to fix this would have been to allow POP access to the mail. Live Mail’s main competitors (Gmail and Yahoo! Mail) both allow this functionality. POP access means you can access the email through an email application such as Outlook or Thunderbird and as these applications poll the servers every 30 minutes or so, it means as long as they are running on your system, you are logging into the servers and will never fall foul of the 30-day limit.

Another reason to allow POP access to email is so that you can read your mail when you are not connected to the ‘Net.

Furthermore, I was made aware of another deficiency of Live Mail this weekend at BarCamp Ireland where one of the speakers bemoaned the fact that you cannot export your contacts in Live Mail! As far as I recall this was possible in Hotmail.

It seems incredible to me that Live Mail would try to lock you into a crummy application by not allowing you to export your contacts. Then again, lock-in is Microsoft’s middle name, isn’t it?

I’m trying out Windows Live Writer - it is an offline blog editor. Normally I don’t use these preferring to do my blog writing directly in the WordPress interface. I’m happy to see it handles Technorati tags but it doesn’t sit well with the Tag plugin I’m using in WordPress (Ultimate Tag Warrior).

There is a Flickr plugin (and a Firefox plugin - shock!). However, there doesn’t seem to be any compatibility with WordPress Categories. Yet!

The main advantage of an offline blog editor is that it allows you to write posts when you are not connected to the ‘Net however, as I am connected most of the time and the WordPress backend is more functional that the Live Writer, I’ll be sticking with WordPress for now.

This is a photo I took in Zurich airport recently. The tv screen says Boarding at 15:00 while the clock on the right (correctly) shows the time as being 15:15. We didn’t get to board until nearly 15:25.

Even in Switzerland, where everything is supposed to run like clockwork, Aer Lingus manage to be late.

You wouldn’t mind so much if they only told us what was going on and when we were likely to be boarding.

Incredible.

BarCamp Ireland is on here in Cork tomorrow.

I’m going and have volunteered to give two talks.

If you are going, say hello!