Ever since I began to implement GTD I’ve been on the lookout to simplify and slim down projects. For one, I eliminated a number of e-mail accounts and was left with Gmail, .Mac, vanity, and work. Next on my radar is telephone service.

There’s no reason to have a home phone, work phone, mobile phone, and softphone. It’s silly and embarrassing that technology can’t merge them together into something more manageable. I don’t give my mobile number to just anyone but that shouldn’t preclude me from taking business calls on it and maintain a separate voice mail account. But since I can’t, enter the myriad of other telephones and service platforms.

Ideally I consolidate to a single phone device using traditional cellular networks and VoIP (via SIP). Of course, the biggest players in the VoIP market (Vonage and Skype) have closed their SIP-based services to the outside world. Thus my Nokia E61 (with SIP capability) is rendered useless. There are other options like Truphone but Skype dominates and allows me an area code in my home State.

While I wait for the perfect marriage of mobile and SIP I’ve discovered dual-mode phones which offer POTS (plain old telephone system) and Skype services. That’s getting somewhere since most mobiles don’t have a Skype client (at least not one which works well). It appears some of these dual mode phones even support SIP for those players (like Gizmo) which don’t lock out their SIP network.

After much Googling I discovered Dualphone which appears to do POTS+Skype/SIP. Pricing isn’t too bad ($100-150) but what about SIP support? To find out I keyed http://www.dualphone.net into my browser and after a brief wait I got this lovely message:

All day today. Not once could I get through - just the mocking error page vomited by a Windows server. It’s not Windows I should be sore with, it’s the Dualphone people who (clearly) don’t monitor their web site. What’s the story? No webmaster? Five employees doing the job of fifty? Maybe there isn’t even a company - just a bunch of people spread around Earth connected virtually.

In any event…if you operate a business which uses the Internet as a means of communication, please monitor your site. If not, then take it down because a broken web site is worse than a non-existent one.

A friend’s PC died the other day (for the third time) and he decided to replace it with a Mac. Although the PC’s hard drive failed he had a backup on an external hard drive.

Hoping to kill two birds with one stone, my friend brought the external to the Apple Store in the hope of copying his documents to a new Mac. He wasn’t happy when the Genius Bar told him the external drive wasn’t being recognized. They tried it on another two Macs with the same result: no volumes.

What next? The Genius recommended he contact DriveSavers to recover data from the PC’s internal drive or the external. He took his new Mac home with what he thought was a dead backup.

My phone rang with questions about recovering the hard drive. I suggested he attach the external to his PowerBook and see what comes up. He called back an hour later with good news - the external drive mounted and he was restoring data.

What happened? Apparently the “genius” failed to use the On/Off switch of the external Iomega hard drive.

In any event, this marks my 7th switcher.

Some Mac blog has an article describing the typical cycle of Apple product releases and a color-coded chart (green means OK to buy while red means wait). Too bad I can’t find the story.

All is not lost as MacRumors has a detailed buyer’s guide including the last release date and average days between new Apple products. If you’re in the market for a new Mac (like I am) whip out your calendar and circle a date. Hint: June, September/October, and January are popular months for announcements or releases and usually correspond with Apple events.

By the time a child turns 18 months old they’ll be uttering a few discernable words like mommy, daddy, milk, and whatever else. Most discernable are the words “no” and “mine” along with the physcial act of grabbing items away from others.

It seems that children are born selfish. Considering they are just beginning to understand right-from-wrong, they haven’t learned from others how to be selfish. They just are. Wanting what they want, when they want it. Immediate gratification and short attention span.

Parents and teachers encourage kids to “share” and demonstrate that “we need to be nice” all the while the child is fighting an innate urge to gratify themselves.

Thus, is being selfish an instinct? Should it be changed to ensure that Society runs smoothly?

What about adults that run amok, filled with greed and exploiting others? As children, were their selfish tendencies left unchecked or did adults force them to “be nice and share” to the point of retaliation?

The new DST came and went and the Earth continued to spin. During a Google for a Nokia DST update, I found a Brit very angry that America (correctly known as the United States) had to do its own thing.

Who cares? Enjoy the daylight in whatever form it comes to you and wherever you may live.