My Stupid New Phone

My absurd and ridiculous electronic toy arrived today. It is a Skype telephone. I can use it while I am in my home and while I am at my office, which is where I spend a lot of my time. Then again...I have a cell-phone which I can use while I am in my office, at home, and anywhere else for that matter.

I purchased the option for unlimited free telephone calling within the United States only to have my wife tell me that we already get that with our cell phone.

What the heck is this thing even good for?

I am about ready to start randomly calling people around the world so I can take advantage of the virtually free international calling rates.

Really, the only place this phone is useful is when I am travelling in a foreign country and sitting at a Starbucks. Of course, that happens about once a year, so I'm really thrilled with my wise purchasing decision.

Skype offers an option called 'Skype - In' where you can actually get a dial-in phone number for your Skype phone. Then again, when I went to their website it was described as being in 'beta' and is apparently glitchy and unreliable. Just what I would expect for my attempt at being on the bleeding edge.

For the record, my Skype-In telephone number *will be* (it isn't active yet) 636-486-4040.

You can call me morning, noon, and night, so long as I am in a wireless hotspot, have a good connection, and happen to have remembered to keep my phone with me and turned on.

Until then, you can contact me on my Skype account which is 'jratcliff63367'. The wacky, hard to remember number in my login is my zip-code which, it turns out, nobody else ever happens to be using when I need to create a new account.

Skype is actually a quite nice chat client and the voice chat is exceptional as well. I called my friend John Oberschelp with the phone this evening and I thought the audio quality was pretty good. We, intially, had quite a bit of lag but that cleared up over time. We also got some echo which was probably the speaker and mic being getting feedback on the phone.

On Monday I will try to call some of my friends in Zurich and Sweden just so I get a meaningful use-case out of the phone.

While I am posting I might as well mention I just purchased my first new 16mm feature film in over a year. I bought the classic 'Revenge of the Nerds', an uncut LPP print that is suposed to be in excellent condition. There is one other film I am planning on bidding on, but I won't say what it is since someone reading might try to snipe me.

I did bid on a 16mm LPP print of 'Adaptation' but I didn't meet the reserve price. The reserve was $850 and I just couldn't bring myself to pull that trigger. 'Revenge of the Nerds' only cost me $300 and I can show that one over and over again to the teenagers and my geek friends.

Finally, today I tried out Vista. My hard drive completely fried on one of my machines so I bought a new 300gig drive and a copy of the business version of Vista. Our IT person at work installed a dual-boot so I can switch between XP and Vista.

I will say this about Vista. It is incredibly beautiful. Just pretty as can be. That said, no freaking software runs on it. Not even Microsoft's *OWN PRODUCTS* run on it!

And, by default, no application can write to the hard-drive, so virtually all software fails until you disable some security otpion that only our IT person figured out.

Kind of like some people I have known in my life... pretty.. but stupid...

Finally, speaking of stupid, I just ran across one of the most stupid blogs I have ever seen in my life. Somebody needs to call this guy on a Skype phone and tell him to see a shrink.

P.S. Just a brief update. My stupid Skype phone is not as stupid as I thought it was. I just called my friend Matthias Muller-Fischer in Zurich Switzerland at his home and talked for about 20 minutes. Total cost, roughly twenty cents. And the voice quality was excellent and the delay wasn't too bad at all. The IQ of this phone is raising by the minute..