The end of an era

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So it is with great regret that I must confess to you all that the end of an era is here. I feel like a small part of me has died inside. After standing firm for oh so many years I have finally given in and I have a confession to make...

My name is Doug Porter, and I have signed up for cellular service.

Those of you that know me know that this is a very big move for me. I have always had a love/hate relationship with the telephone in general. The cost of basic telephone service always seemed absurd to me, especially with the monopoly of the Bells in days gone by. So about 2 years ago I ditched my home land line and signed up with a VoIP service.

The VoIP provider I have used is Packet8.net. Like I tell people, VoIP is not for everyone. For me it worked pretty well for the way I use the telephone. It was cheap ($20 per month for unlimited local and long distance), and it worked fairly well accept for a couple of issues. Such as:

Whenever there were bandwidth or network issues the call quality suffered. Some people on certain cell phone services could not reach me at my VoIP number. And of course Murphy's law always prevailed and whenever I was waiting on or trying to make an important call the service went down.

But other than that, I was happy with it.

But I finally have come to accept that I really need a bit more connectivity these days, so I finally bit the bullet and signed up. I had my good friend Rob (who is the wizard when it comes to these things) help me find a great deal on a phone and service that would fit my needs. He set me up with a service deal (and a nice discount coupon) from LetsTalk.com.

So, supposedly next Tuesday I will receive my new phone and become a proud member of the Cingular network (which from the looks of the coverage map should cover me just about anywhere). Then it will be goodbye to Packet8. They have served me well but it is time to move on.

On another note, I have just tried out a password protected wiki called PbWiki (which of course being a Sybase user I thought would stand for PowerBuilder Wiki, but alas it stands for Peanut Butter. Because it is as easy as making a PB&J sandwich...get it..). Very simple and easy to use. I'm using it to collaborate with my friends on getting together information for our upcoming trip to JavaOne and San Francisco. If you need something simple then this fits the bill nicely.