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I’ve not written in a while but I’ve been pretty busy so now with the Easter weekend over I hope to do some more writing. I’ve been playing around a lot more with Skype lately. If you haven’t heard of Skype it’s one of many voice over ip or VOIP solutions out there on the web. It was bought up by eBay some time ago and allows for computer to computer phone calls as well as the ability to use your computer to call land line and mobile phones. Computer to computer is free and the calls to land lines and mobile phones are relatively cheap. My friend John who’s currently in Grenada has been using it to call me for some time now. The other day I finally downloaded the client on my laptop and John and I talked while he showed me the sunset over the beach near his school. Now I have to admit that it was a lot of fun talking to my friend that way. It’s neat to think how far we’ve come with technology in such a short time. I am in my living room in TN talking wirelessly to my friend in Grenada watching a sunset on the beach. It may not be the real thing but it’s not too bad. The delay is hardly noticeable and the sounds is crisp and clear. Even the video was nice. If you’re out there and you want to Skype me you can download the client and search me out. I’ve installed it here at work and at home. I have a web cam at work so try that out if you want to actually see me in action as we talk.

A while back I wrote about the use of FreeNAS as the software we used for our network attached storage system where I work. This was where we shared files and did backups of our documents. I liked its ease of use but over time I’ve noticed some quirks about it that I didn’t quite like. I won’t got into too much detail but using it with Windows machines sometimes meant having to do weird things to make the files read/write for everyone besides the owner. Other than that and some other minor issues when I was using Windows Vista it worked like a charm. Now we are taking some time to redo our setup and we’re going to be trying Openfiler. I’m going to be using a raid 1 hardware setup with two 500 gig drives and we’ll see what kind of performance we get out of it. After looking it over it looks like a little more configuration but a lot more granular control. I’ll post in the future how it goes.