This afternoon I received an email that said the following…

Welcome to Midwave Products LLC!

Congratulations Avery,

This e-mail is to confirm your recent/successful WaveEGreetings.com
order! Log in online and get instant access to hundreds of E-Greeting
Cards!

Billing Telephone Number: **********

As part of your service with the WaveEGreetings.com program, you will
receive:
Unlimited access to ecards for every occasion!
Send greetings to your friends and family.
Create unique and personalized greetings.

Your WaveEGreetings.com account can be accessed by going to
www.waveEgreetings.com/login.asp and entering in your username and
password below;
username: ****************
password: *************

For your convenience you will be billed a monthly fee of $14.95 on your
local phone bill for the phone number you provided which is **********.
Although, there is no affiliation with your local phone company, these
charges will appear on your local telephone bill on the Transaction
Clearing bill page as being billed on behalf of Midwave Products, LLC.
There is no long term contract and the service can be cancelled at any
time.

If you have questions or concerns and need to contact customer service
just simply reply to this e-mail and we will be happy to assist you.

You can cancel the service by calling 866-982-3699or by emailing us at
support@waveEgreetings.com and include your home telephone number or
simply reply to this email stating “cancel”. Or write us at PO Box 17598
Suite# 77145, Baltimore, Maryland 21297-1598.

Thank you and Congratulations on joining WaveEGreetings.com

Sincerely,
WaveEGreetings.com Customer Support
—————————————-

AT&T ENDUSERS:You have the right to dispute the Midwave Products LLC
charges billed on your local telephone bill. You are not legally
responsible for Midwave Products LLC charges incurred by minors or
vulnerable adults without your consent. Your local telephone service
will not be disconnected because you fail to pay a charge by Midwave
Products LLC except that nonpayment of certain regulated
telecommunication charges may result in disconnection of service in
Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina and
Tennessee. Enhanced Telecommunications Service Providers may employ
other agencies to collect delinquent charge, even if your local phone
company has previously adjusted them from your telephone bill.

My first thought was that this was a phishing email and I checked out the links in the message and the site of waveEgreetings.com because….

To be honest I’m not that hot on FREE ecards really – much less a $14.95 per month subscription (!$!$!$???) It all seemed legit and so I sent a message to the support@ email mentioned in the message I got to cancel immediately and make sure that no charges ever appeared for this on my phone bill.

And…

—– The following addresses had permanent fatal errors —–

(reason: 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected support@waveEgreetings.com)

—– Transcript of session follows —–
… while talking to smtp.secureserver.net.:
>>> RCPT To:
<<< 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected support@waveEgreetings.com
550 5.1.1 … User unknown

So…. I tried replying to the message as instructed as our second option to cancel….

—– The following addresses had permanent fatal errors —–

(reason: 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected membership@waveEgreetings.com)

—– Transcript of session follows —–
… while talking to smtp.secureserver.net.:
>>> RCPT To:
<<< 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected membership@waveEgreetings.com
550 5.1.1 … User unknown

By now I was fairly primed for a phone call and called the number listed in the email. I looked on their website to try to verify that this really is the number of Midwave Products LLC – but their site does not have contact information and I was NOT about to login to an account I didn’t want in the first place to see if they posted a phone number inside the gates. –CORRECTION– I do see that they do have their phone # on their main webpage – it’s in the VERY small print after the box to check for agreeing to the terms and conditions….etc.

So, I called and about 5 minutes after my call I was told that I was the next caller in line and my call would be handled by the next available representative. There was a pause in the music and then a click and a fast busy. I was hung up on!

So, I called back and was connected fairly quickly to a representative who asked for a confirmation of phone number and address. It was canceled in short order.

First off, I really DON’T LIKE to see services “conveniently bill to your telephone bill.” I have seen lots of companies do this and they most all have been scams. One company I know had a sudden charge on their bill for webhosting from God only knows where. I DID THEIR webhosting. Our best guess was that somebody called up and asked some questions and they suddenly had a $100 a month charge added to their phone bill. They canceled in short order and the phone representative I spoke with said that they had a lot of complaints from that particular group. I remember going through similar problems with long distance slammers at one point as well. I seem to recall even one more “service” that we found a charge for on our bill that was not something we authorized.

I suspect that many businesses and individuals either don’t look closely at their phone bills and just pay it or…. are big enough that the person paying the bill is not the one authorizing charges on it and they don’t ask any questions.

I thank the representative at waveegreetings.com for the quick and easy cancellation. However, I will be watching carefully to make sure that there are no charges for this.

So…. this leaves me with a few questions.

1) WHO would pay $15 each month to be able to send electronic greeting cards !!!!!

2) Are there people that get a commission for signing up new leads for wavegreetings.com (my bet is the answer is yes…)

3) Have you ever had a strange charge on your phone bill?

4) Has anyone else had a similar experience with WaveEgreetings.com?

You know I wrote not too long about about the doublemyspeed.com scam sounding radio ads. It really sounds like MyCleanPC.com is a scam in the sense that it promises a lot but doesn’t (or can’t) really deliver the miraculous results that they claim. Part of the idea is that they are a registry cleaner and claim that cleaning the registry will make your computer as good as new. For most people this really isn’t going to make an old slow pc into a brand new speed demon. From that aspect this is a scam. Over promising and under delivering.

Of course I’m not saying that registry cleaners are a bad thing. They can make a marginally noticeable difference. Although if your computer is dramatically slower now than it used to be there are really a lot of other reasons than registry cruft. Windows updates moving you up from Internet Explorer 6 all the way up to version 8 on a system that was marginally spec’d when it was purchased will probably make it slow today. 512MB memory for Windows XP is not enough today even though pre-SP2 is was probably okay for most uses.

You will not see as dramatic an improvement with registry scanning as with a proper memory upgrade (assuming you don’t already have enough memory.) The other concern with registry repair software is that if the registry is corrupted bad things can happen. If the registry is damaged yours system will not boot properly.

That much said there are some free utilities that can serve the same purpose that mycleanpc.com claims to do. I usually steer clear of programs that claim to solve your computer speed and stability problems because they typically never do. The best ways to increase system speed and stability are 1) remove unnecessary software, 2) check that all hardware is in proper working order (bad hard drive can cause slow system responsiveness) 3) upgrade memory if necessary.

Save your money to put towards a new machine if the three above still don’t make enough of a speed difference for you.

Back in the day I had got a Frontier Labs Audio player… it was the Nexia predecessor to the nexblack. It really was a pretty good music player. It supported compactflash for storage (no interntal storage.) It used double A batteries and had real buttons. MP3 was the primary audio format – they had promised ogg via a firmware update, but the hardware really just wasn’t up to the task. I used it for several years which is not bad for a $40 or so audio player. Unfortunately it has become flakey in it’s performance sometimes failing to boot up when I switched it on and so when I was given $40 for my birthday I thought it might be time to shop for a replacement.

I’m a very picky shopper in so many ways. I searched and searched and searched. I didn’t want a touch screen music player. Why, they’re so cool? Yes touch screens are cool, but they also take more attention. I can’t reach for the pause button, or next button and switch by feel like I can with a REAL button. “but it’s confusing when there are a lot of buttons….” Please… phones have a lot of buttons and you still manage to use them. Really I wouldn’t mind having programmable buttons on an mp3 player so you could use them to skip between music/audiobooks/podcasts/etc…. that would be nice.

On the whole I like standards. I like things that can take a standard battery, use a standard memory card. Unfortunately there aren’t too many of those around. iPods have their own battery, in fact I found NOTHING this go around that would take a standard battery. Why a standard battery because that means choice and it also means something that I’ll use until it wears out. With a built in battery I throw it out when the battery won’t hold a charge anymore. It’s a waste. I used rechargeable batteries in the old Nexia and sadly it looks like my batteries have outlasted the electronics on it.

Why standard storage? – that’s probably rooted in my use of Linux as my primary operating system. I’m suspicious of so many devices that will only talk to program x or operating system y. That’s another of the things I don’t like about the iPod. They have to check in with apples itunes before they serve their basic purpose. I should say assumed purpose because the assumed purpose is that they’re a music player…. really the basic purpose is to make money for Apple through sales at the itunes store. That’s where the money is for Apple, not in the hardware. So, that’s the price you pay for a good audio player. I don’t think so… what if Honda had home automation software and in order to first drive your Honda automobile you had to plug it into your house once and authorize it through Hondas home automation verification so it could “sync up” and activate. I would hope people would pitch a royal fit over that. But I digress……

Having a removable memory card is nice JUST in case the unit is designed to work with just one operating system or need a driver or a particular version of an operating system. I cringe at devices that instruct you to first install a CD with the driver and then connect your brand new _____ (fill in the blank) electronic gizmo. I like things that CAN work with a computer if you want, but they don’t HAVE to. Computers and operating systems change, that shouldn’t keep your electronics from working. That’s why I like standard storage….

I looked at a lot of audio players and really kept coming back to the new version of what I got for my wife last Christmas. Last Christmas she wanted an audio player and I got a relatively cheaply priced Sansa Clip. I think it had 2 or 4GB of memory and FM radio and for her purposes it was really ideal. I didn’t start looking there because her model only allowed internal memory but as I searched and ran out of other interesting prospects…. I looked at the Sansa and found they had a clip+ as their new version of the Sansa Clip and it did accept a memory card (microSD).

As luck would have it the 8GB version of the Sansa Clip+ shipped for 39.99 to me and I’ve used it quite a bit since I received it. There are a few minor things that I don’t like about it, but overall it has been a fantastic replacement for the old Nexia. First it has real buttons (not backlit like the old Sansa Clip). It would help if they were backlit buttons and I wouldn’t mind at all for the unit to be a bit larger to have a bit more battery capacity to make that happen. I think they traded off the backlit buttons for the microSD card reader. I have added a card as well and loaded that and the internal memory with music, audiobooks, podcasts and a bit more.

One of my frustrations with it is that even if an mp3 is placed in the audiobook folder, but is tagged as something else (blues I think is the default MP3 genre tag)…. the file shows up in the music listing instead of audiobooks. I would think folder choice would trump id3 tag. (Yes I know I can just retag them…. but I haven’t yet.)

I like the way to add a song to the go list and rate songs although I haven’t yet seen the benefit of rating them (more frequent playlist rotation?) I like that there is an option to start audiobooks back where you left off, but using the id3 tag to consider one as music circumvents that and means you HAVE to go back and retag your audiobooks to make sure they observe the same rule.

The earbuds that came with it were surprisingly comfortable. This is coming from someone who a few years ago went on a multiweek quest to find a pair of earbuds that I could tolerate using.

The sound is really very good from the unit. Before purchasing I did a lot of reading and saw spectrum analysis of the devices output and it is by default flat across the board which is fantastic in my opinion. There are eq templates that you can use for different effects. I like the fact that it supports MANY languages as I’ve studied a few langauges and may use this to try a few out.

The USB cable that came with it is ridiculously short. I LOVE that it’s a standard USB to mini connector, I’m glad to see that being accepted as more of a standard. The belt clip is nice although it would be good to see it as replaceable if it cracked. However I suppose their logic is that this is a $40 player and if something breaks it will be pitched in favor of a new one.

The old Sansa Clip has a problem with pitch accuracy from what I read. They say it has been improved with firmware and this one is even better, but is not perfect. I wondered if it would be an issue for me as I only read about this after ordering. In a word it’s been irrelevant to me. I found some comparisons a/b of a 1000 hz tone and really I could discern a slight difference, but not much. The alteration is on the order of playing 1003 hz instead of 1000 hz. I haven’t yet, but many times I’ll cut on the keyboard and practice my relative pitch along with songs…. when I do that will be a real test of how much of a nuisance that difference could be, but at the moment I really doubt it will be an issue. (I’ve had pianos further out of standard tune than that.)

One other little annoyance from this device is that plugging it into the computer automatically puts it in sync mode and disrupts playback. After that it rebuilds it’s index and loses it’s place if you were in the middle of an audiobook. That has frustrated me more than once. I’m glad I have a wall to USB charger as I found that plugging it into a dumb USB port like a wall charger port doesn’t switch modes and JUST charges the device. (Although I’ve never seen this device claim to be fully charged. I left it for overnight and a good part of another day and still saw the charging graphic.) Also, syncing with linux works just fine. I even created playlists to start organizing my huge collection of music. (Plays OGG files too, quite nicely.)

FM reception is really worlds better than the old Nexia. I had at one point talked to their support about sending it back because I couldn’t pick up ANYTHING with the NEXia on FM and we have some pretty strong signals out here even though we’re on the other side of a mountain from town. Well, one day I was walking in town with it and flipped over to FM and found a few weak signals there so… it worked it was just deaf as a post on FM.

The Sansa Clip+ on the other hand does VERY well on FM in comparison. I can pick up quite a few stations even out here at the house. The don’t all come in crystal clear, but they’re there. Recording I haven’t yet fully tested yet. I hope to give a go to that before too long soon. I’ll try to update then and let you know how the recordings sound. From what I can see you can also record from FM onto the memory card with this one.

So, that’s it for now…. I’ll follow up with more if and when I need to, but at this point it seems like a solid low end player and if you want an audio player but don’t want to spend more than $50, the Sansa Clip+ would be a great choice.

–update–

I thought I’d post a few more details and references here on the Sansa Clip Plus 8GB. My unit has firmware version V01.01.05A

Firmware updates can be found in the future at this page of support on the clip and clip plus. At this point in time (January 2010) there is not (as far as I know) an update for the clip plus.

Sandisk does have the Sansa Firmware updater here which is designed to check for updates for compatible devices. It is windows only. (No Mac/Linux version). From what I’ve seen though it should be possible to update the firmware manually on the device without the help of the firmware updater.

The forum for the Sansa Clip Plus can be found here.

The manual for the Sansa Clip Plus can be had here (pdf).

I have had one event where I couldn’t get the device to come on. It had frozen up and would not power on with pushing the power button. I had just had it connected via usb to charge and I think it had gone into somewhat of a power saving mode there before I disconnected it. So, what I did was reconnect it to the PC and one tap on the power button which seemed to wake it up. Then I disconnected, powered off and it came back up just fine. It seems to me that a power saving mode when hooked up to the pc might be a bug that can be addressed with a future update.

Oh and also if you are hunting for a wall charger for your sansa clip plus or other usb powered devices you may want to take a look at this device for the home and this one for the car.

As you may know we had a good size snow storm here in the mountains of western North Carolina. It’s not unusual, but we will many times go a few years between these big storms. This one brought a tree down on the phone line just before it branches to our house and one other. I called Verizon the first night (Saturday) and got a (!$!$!$!) robot attendant that told me many outages were reported in our area and it should be fixed by Monday at 9 something AM. Not wanting to waste the time then with holding for a person I resolved to call a second line. At this point I could see the line hanging to the ground from the pole and knew they were not aware of it though. I called from a cell phone (of course…)

Monday about mid-day I called verizon back. (Our phone line had not magically reconnected.) This time I got a person who told me that there were many outages in the area and our service might come back as those were repaired. I assured her it would not, that I saw the line that feeds only these two houses laying in our back yard. She assured me she would make a note of that on the record and they would take care of it. Tuesday while we were out my wife checked voice mail (we have verizon voice mail and so even with the line severed it takes messages.) They had called the night before to tell us that they had located the problem with our outage and it was an issue in their office and our service was restored……

The cable was still dangling from the pole in our back yard and our phone was still dead as a post, which I told the automated attendant when I called back. So, when I called back you will hopefully understand my frustration to find that they had cleared ALL the trouble tickets generated from my previous calls. I got to talk to a person whom I told that the line was still laying in our back yard. “So, you don’t have a dialtone?” ……. NO! This is a spur that feeds two houses with phone service off the main line. A tree snapped the line loose. No dialtone it is dead as a post!

She said a crew could come the next day. They did and were repairing the line at about mid-day (Wednesday). Wednesday afternoon about 3. I attempted to call the other number on this spur to be greeted with a “this number is currently being serviced” message. Calling them on a cell number I found out they were hearing one ring and then nothing on the main line, but could call out. They needed to make yet another call to verizon. The representative then changed something at their end and finally things were working again.

Now, I know it’s been a disruptive storm and I recognize many areas are hard hit and it takes time to fix things. My frustration with Verizon through all of this has been that they cleared the trouble ticket without asking if the problem was solved, without acknowledging my calls about the line dangling 15 feet behind my house. They just declared it fixed.

I guess the next question is – why do you still have a land line? Not counting this outage I can remember one day. Exactly ONE that we were out of phone service for an extended time. On average we have had something about every 5-6 years that has disrupted power for several days. When power is disrupted so is cable and internet and their VOIP service. (Repeaters that they use to get the signal up here are powered and die exactly 15 minutes after the power goes.) Cell phones worked this time as it was our only real phone method to the outside (power was out for 3 and 1/2 days.) But, I’ve seen the cell towers go unresponsive or overload. So, the bottom line, is I like a land line for it’s typical resilience and for the diversity of choices. In fact, all our previous storms that I recall – snows of 1988/1993/1998 and the hurricanes (yes hurricanes) of 2003 the phone was rock solid throughout. We were without power from anywhere from 2-5 days for each of those though. Support on the other hand is something that I may have bald spots on the side of my head from dealing with. But when the line is physically connected you’ve got a good backbone to work with.

It looks as though this evening facebook chat isn’t working. In fact FaceBook has confirmed all sorts of problems with it’s site and various applications. Chat apparently has been affected. Status updates for some people are disappearing and just general instability. (This may include not being able to log in to your account or errors accessing and viewing AND posting content.) In other words don’t expect things to “just work”. In other news…

It looks like facebook is getting ready to add voice chat.

The voice chat will use Vivox and requires a plugin to be downloaded. Vivox provides chat for many online games. The service is also slated to add voice chat to applications through the use of APIs that can help to integrate it.

It should provide for high quality voice chat and can include group chats as well as person to person chats. They will also allow non Facebook users to join a conversation using dial in numbers similar to the way some teleconferences work. It looks like this could have some interesting impacts of further biting away at traditional phone usage plus nibbling at skype.

A lot of blackberry users are talking about a blackberry outage this afternoon and evening. It seems that the Blackberry internet service is unreliable at the moment with some users reporting a flat out outage and others say they’re getting bursts of email.

More detail seems to be that RIMs Blackberry Internet Service is down in some parts of the country. This may not be affecting enterprise customers. It’s looking like the last big outage was in April of this year for the Blackberry users among us.

Last Thursday I opened up my GMail and found to my surprise that I had an invite to Google Voice. I didn’t have time to deal with it at that time, so I saved it as new until Thursday evening and spent some time then playing with it. I had put my address in the waiting list some time back because the premise behind Google Voice (former GrandCentral) is potentially very useful for me. I’m self employed, I work from home, from the car, I’m onsite, I’m at clients locations and I also have some bits of time at a location that has wireless access. For many years I’ve had several phones to check messages on, and if I forget, then…. find a message when I get in at 8 or 9 in the evening on the house phone. It’s difficult to manage and I want to change it, Google Voice may be the way to make that change….. right now I’m just testing the waters though. It did feel kind of like a Willy Wonka moment of sorts though seeing that invite in the inbox! Read on for more….

First off, the setup went VERY well…. I was able to get a number in my local area that contained my initials which I thought was pretty neat. Verification of the home and cell phones went well and setting up an outgoing voicemail message was easy and worked great. My first few test voicemails the transcriptions were absolutely fantastic.

Other voicemails I’ve received have had less then perfect transcriptions, but for the most part they’re passable. In the online interface you can tell the parts that they have lower confidence in since they’re printed with a shade of gray. You can also rate transcriptions of voicemail. Incoming, outgoing and missed calls are logged and you can also annotate calls (and voicemails.) I like that, it could give me a chance to put in details about what was discussed if I’m dealing with a call or caller that I feel as though I need to document more carefully what is talked about.

The transcriptions are relatively fast and I am definitely enjoying receiving a notification by email and text when I get a new voicemail. Given that they’re already doing the transcription side of things it WOULD be interesting to see an option to leave yourself a message ala Jott, which could then plugin to another service (like calendar or gmail or tasks) Now, you can of course jerry rig together a way to do it… for the cellphone you can cut off the option to automatically go into the voicemail menu and set a custom outgoing message for that number, but you still won’t be able to make it automatically add a calendar entry or send an email (okay you might could rig up an email filter, but that would be a kludge…. get out the duct tape!)

Of course, this is a free service, so…… don’t take the above as a complaint. Of course, you will pay for international calls, very good looking rates though. I don’t have the need to call internationally usually, but it looks like they have some of the best rates around. Yes mobile phones that you have are configured to land you in the “login” menu of your voice mail. You do have to enter a pin number (good default.) Also you can make outbound calls by logging in, pressing two and then dialing.

One thing that I thought was interesting is that with the call screening feature off (this is when you answer it announces who is calling and let’s you answer, listen in or send to voicemail) with the feature off for all or some of your callers their message will go to the voicemail of the first phone to answer (I wonder what happens if none of them have voicemail(?)) If I recall my telephony…. this may be something that they are stuck with due to the structure of call handling although it would be interesting to see a workaround for that which could bounce the caller back to the GV mailbox.

One problem that I’ve run into is that my number was not able to be reached by one local exchange. I tested on two lines, I tested both my and my brothers new Google Voice numbers (got them the same day.) Both gave a message along the lines of “we’re sorry but your call could not be completed, please try again.” I tried other numbers in the same prefix exchange and they worked (non google voice numbers) and I have also tried from several other cell/land lines and not seen anything similar. Unfortunately that would be the one contact that I had given my number to as my new number. I’ve sent two feedback items to Google on this, but it may just be a local phone switch needing an update/reboot (?)

So far that’s the big complaint…. Now for some less crucial ones. SMS messages – online services that do email to SMS gateway sending can’t get a message to you. This is one that I REALLY would like to see fixed. If this is about merging our communications media and simplifying with 1 number, then…. SMS email gateway inbound and MMS needs to happen in the near future.

I’m eager to see what future levels of integration they look at…. I think the idea of prowords to trigger a gmail message or calendar/task list item would be a good kind of integration and really start to rival some of the other services out there. In reality, this is a free product that is still in it’s beta stages and in this case, the beta label is probably more applicable than it has been with Gmail for the last however many years. It has great potential to change the way we use our phones (if not for the way cell phone calling plans may be pressured by this… I mean if your gv number is one of your “friends and family” do you really need to pick another 5 or 10 since that can be your outbound gateway to anywhere?)

Oh, another thought – although technically at this point in time the only kind of sipphone you can forward to is a gizmo5 number, I found a way to forward to most anything. With a gizmo5 free account you get the inbound gizmo5 number which you can find in your profile. You can also set gizmo5 to forward your incoming calls to skype, google talk or just about any other sip-phone or landline. So, I added my ekiga sip account in the gizmo5 setup, my gizmo5 number as a new phone at google voice, authenticated it and that seems to work pretty well. (My test call had about a 1 second lag – I’d like to test at some point and see if there’s less lag by doing gizmo5 directly… but that’s not a high priority for me right now.)

–update–

I had a chance to test out the following idea last night. Since Google Voice can forward calls to your gizmo number and since gizmo can forward all calls to either skype or another sipphone client – I decided to forward my gizmo calls to ekiga and test. I tested by “dialing out” via the Google Voice web interface where they first connect to your number (in this case ekiga) and then attempt to dial the receiving party. I tested this chain last night about 3 to 4 times and each time the call dropped mysteriously after about 30 seconds (not quite long enough to get to the voicemail beep – or if someone answered not quite long enough to explain what you’re doing.

So, today I did several tests taking one link o the chain out and went straight to my gizmo # (cut off all gizmo forwarding). This worked out fairly well and I’ve now had several successful calls this way. I don’t know if I had a call longer than 5 minutes, but I did have one that I thought was a bit longer (although I didn’t check the call timer.) It seems as though this is another angle that google voice could change things as I noticed that I was essentially using gizmo to call landlines without using gizmo credit. (Google voice calls my gizmo account, google voice calls the other person.)

–update 7-18-09 –

I’ve had a chance to make several calls now using the web interface at Google Voice. One thing that’s strange is that calls initiated this way do not make it into your placed/received/missed call log. You would think they would show up in the placed call log the same as if you dialed up your GV number and then pressed 2 and dialed someone else, but…. they simply don’t get recorded. That seems to be a strange oversight. Also, I’ve read that one of the reasons that some exchanges may not be able to call into the GV numbers is that the blocks of numbers were so recently acquired the phone systems equipment may not have been updated with the information to route calls to them. It’s the responsibility of the carrier that manages the exchange that is unable to call in to update their routing lists. This has nothing to do with it being a Google Voice number, but with it being a “brand new phone number”. Essentially these are phone numbers that didn’t exist 4 months ago.

I’ve spent a bit of time over the last week putting some scripting together to build a new website. The site is morseringtones.com and as you might imagine there are morse code mp3 ringtones available there for download. I’ve put together a list of over 9100 names and there are 4 ringtones available for each name. These are played at 4 different speeds in morse code. For the quicker speeds the names are repeated multiple times to make sure you have a better chance to hear them if you’re using them on a cell phone. I’ve put things up to where you can submit ideas for further names if you like. I may be adding prosigns at some point in the near future and at some point may make it possible for people to go ahead and generate custom morse ringtones from a web interface. So if you want a morse code ringtone for your phone step over and take a look.

I’ve also bundled up the whole collection of them for download via lulu.com, more details can be found on the Purchase morse mp3 ringtones colleciton page.

In the future here I may detail some of the scripts that I’ve used to build this site. It’s all built on a linux server ( the generation of 9100 ringtones at 4 different speeds took about 6 hours.) I’m sure the scripts could have been designed differently but was quite proud of putting together the process for making the whole site so that future maintenance is minimal.

Anyway …-.-

Time Travel has been one of those science fiction themes that has been the MOST captivating. Not just for me, but for millions of people. I think the “what if”s are probably the most intriguing. What if I could get a message to someone… what if I could find out what happened …. Would those things even be possible, ethical? Up until now, it’s been more of an intellectual exercise, but I’ve been doing some reading on the subject and there is a very real possibility that time travel would be physically possible. Of course, physics classes for years have talked about how travel into the future should be possible. Simply travel away from the earth at near light speed and then back at near light speed. You will have only aged slightly while much time will have passed on earth. But, realistically traveling into the future isn’t as enticing as traveling into the past. We’re ALL traveling into the future one day at a time on the slow path. Here’s how one could travel into the past….

I guess I started out reading about the Large Hadron Collider breakdown and speculation that particles from the future had broken it. Much of that speculation is in jest because really the LHC wasn’t doing the things it was designed to do when this happened. But… there was reference to a Professor at the University of Connecticut who has theorized that time travel into the past is possible and is looking to raise approximately 11 million dollars to test his Space-Time Twisting by Light Project.

I read at his site and this article at ThePhoenix.com and it seems as though he has a sound idea. There are limitations to this, the main one being that you wouldn’t be able to travel into the past before this machine were activated.

Here’s the general idea. Concentrated light is forced into a loop. This loop bends space-time and allows particles from the future to enter the loop of light and exit at any point going back to when the loop began.

That’s the thumbnail sketch.

It’s a fairly mindblowing concept though. It makes me start wondering if there could be places in the Universe where there might be naturally occurring phenomenon like this (even horizon of a black hole perhaps with light forced to orbit the black hole?) Could it be that there is a “time lens” as I’ve been thinking of it that’s a naturally occurring phenomenon?

If there were a naturally occurring phenomenon like this, then you would be able to travel back in time until the beginning of THAT loop of light. Of course, if such a thing were to exist in nature the real challenge would be GETTING there and back (especially if it’s at the rim of a black hole…. if light can’t escape how do you expect to?)

Fun stuff to think about…. I believe I read that it’s been theorized that a light loop (I REALLY want to call this a “time lens”) could be used as an early warning system to monitor for particles from the future that might indicate problems in our future…. Almost wants me to dig out my own time travel short stories and start editing them to be a bit more scientifically plausible.

I’ve devoted quite a few pixels to this topic over on the Online Radio and TV site, but… in the United States broadcast TV will make the move to ALL digital in February. We have cable and the only way it’s affecting me is in my planning for the inevitable winter storms that will knock out the cable from time to time. Times like that we need over the air access to our local news and I’ve got the converter box for that. But, with so many people on cable or satellite – will the digital transition affect you?