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Yesterday our phone number was finally ported over to Vonage. So far the call quality is fantastic and I am amazed by the amount of information we get on the Vonage web site for our account. It is all live and shows a ton of detail. Almost too much detail as I scared Val today with how much data I knew about the calls coming in to and out of the house. You can also receive your voicemail as an email if you want. Very cool and excellent use of the technologies that are out there today.

So far, so good Vonage.

My trip to Phoenix is coming to an end so I thought I would check the weather forecast back home. Do you think people that live in Phoenix realize how good they have it?

Look at the difference between weather forcasts.

Microsoft announced they are going to release Windows Vista to enterprises in November of 2006, but the consumer version will be pushed back until January 2007. People all over the world are pouncing on this one but I have to wonder why? It’s 2 more months. Big deal.

The only people this will probably hurt is all of the computer manufacturers that earn a large part of their revenue in the 4th quarter of the year – the Christmas buying season. This could definitely hurt the HP’s and Gateways of the world since they need to have products configured and shipped to retail stores for most of their sales. This probably didn’t mean too much to Dell since they build everything to order and can probably recover from a slip in a ship date easier than the others. This is why Dell’s model rocks.

But there are many OS X fans on the Internet (remember, I’m a huge Apple fan) that either see this as yet another opportunity to bash Microsoft or see this as Apple’s big change to make huge gains in market share. I don’t get the senseless bashing. All it really does it turn people away from it. They may even be less inclined to check out all the great things OS X has to offer. But I don’t really see this as a huge opportunity to make big gains with OS X. We *think* Apple will have the next version of OS X released by the end of the year, but there will be a surge whenever it comes out. I don’t think we can attribute that to Vista’s slip. All Microsoft or manufacturers have to do is one thing and the Vista slip becomes irrelevant; for all purchases made after the date that Vista ships to the enterprise, include a free upgrade to Vista when it is released. That would appease 99% of new buyers.

Vista for consumers slipping a whopping 2 months will not bring devastation to the computer industry. Windows will remain dominant, Linux will still chip away in the data center, and I will still be happy with my PowerBook running the latest version of OS X.

Using Entourage more and more while traveling and it is really working out pretty well. The Sync Services seem to work as advertised. I wanted to get all of my Entourage Calendar items on to my cell phone Date Book so I would be sure not to miss any meetings. Since I did not see a way for Entourage to communicate with my cell phone, I decided that iCal was the solution. I have been successfully syncing Contact and Calendar data with my Motorola e815 for a month now via bluetooth, so I figured the key was to get the Entourage calendar items over on to the iCal calendar.

Since I am communicating with my corporate Exchange account I have 2 Entourage Calendars listed; Calendar [On My Computer] and Calendar [Exchange]. I just have to make sure the Entourage Sync Services were set to synch up iCal with the [Exchange] calendar and within seconds all of my Entourage appointments, with reminders and location, were listed in the Entourage iCal calendar.

On the next iSync all of my appointments were available on my e815 and reminders for appointments that were past due today were popping up. Exactly what I wanted. Almost. Entourage had done its part perfectly, but iSync let me down here. The Location field, available in Entourage and iCal, does not sync with the phone. There are a ton of messages about this in the Apple Discussions, so I am not alone in this one, but I can’t get on Microsoft about this. This one looks to be all Apples to fix. I did file a bug report on the Apple web site. We’ll see if anything comes of it.

But I will fault Microsoft with something that drove me nuts about Entourage today. But first, you have to understand that I use Outlook at work every day, so there are things that happen with the Outlook client that I expect out of Entourage since they are both from Microsoft. In Entourage signatures are attached to the account you are using. The signature will add itself to every message you send. It doesn’t matter if you create the email, reply to it, or forward it, the signature is going to attach if you have selected a default. You can configure Outlook to only apply the signature to messages you create. I want the same control in Entourage. As a workaround I removed the default signature and just add it from the toolbar when I create a message. Not optimal, but it will work from now. Microsoft should fix this one.

So I am pretty happy with Entourage so far. I think Microsoft did a good job with it and I would give it a 7 out of 10. I still question why Microsoft didn’t just give us a real Outlook client. Without telling us the real reason they leave the door open for guys like me to speculate that they did it to further protect the Office for Windows product. If Microsoft gave us a full Outlook client like the one for Windows there would be more of a chance that OS X could be used in the enterprise. We wouldn’t want that to happen, now would we?

UPDATE – Looks like I can’t be too upset with Apple over the Location field not syncing with my phone. As I look at the fields my phone has in the Date Book, I only see Title, Start, Duration, Date, Repeat, and Alarm. Some people are working around this by adding the Location data to the Title field, but this doesn’t really work for me since the Title field is not very long on my phone and a lot of the meetings I have, or get invited to, have longer names. Looks like just carrying my phone to remind me of meetings is not going to work out too well. At least I get a reminder about the meeting, I’ll just need to be near a computer to dig out the Location data.

Maybe it’s Motorola I should be upset with.

I try to make it a point to never discuss work on my personal Blog, but today I have to mix the two a little bit. Since I switched over to Entourage last week I have been happy with it. One thing I have never been able to try, since we were still on Exchange 5.5 at work, was the new OWA integration from the internet.

This is not just web based email anymore, this interface now provides seamless access with handhelds and allows you to access your corporate email from a local client across the internet. Securely. I’m not positive if this is their RPC over HTTPs implementation, but I have to admit it works pretty well.

Why just pretty well instead of extremely well? Well, I guess you have to take in to account that I have a HUGE mailbox at work. It was close to 700MB and had tons of messages in it. After setting up Entourage to connect with our corporate OWA server I gave it hours to sync up. Many, many, many hours. It was still only about 25% of the way done. So I took the easy way out and logged in via Citrix and used the full Outlook2003 client to archive off all of my email that was more than 1 month old. Our Exchange Admin should be thrilled since that took over 500MB of email off his live mail system.

Once I did that Entourage performed much better and I used it most of the day today while working from home. It doesn’t really seem to be a true live connection, but it seems like more of a sync that happens every minute or so, depending on how you have your client setup to operate. My Outlook Calendar came down as an Exchange Calendar in Entourage and all of my meetings and reminders worked perfectly today.

I would say the only thing I have left to figure out is the address book. I want to use the Global Address Book from the Exchange server from my Entourage client but we do not publish out LDAP info externally and I have not found any other way to do it yet. I can use the person’s full email address to send new messages and can reply to email just fine, but I’d still like to be able to browse or select people from the GAB without needing to know if they use a middle initial in their smtp address or what that initial may be.

I’ll update more as I learn more but I have to give Microsoft credit where credit is due since I give them such a hard time on just about everything else. Nice job guys. I don’t know if this is all from the MacBU or a combination of people but I am very impressed with how effortless this was to get working. Now if I can just get that address book figured out!

While checking out the nature in and around Asbury Woods in Erie, PA yesterday, we were able to get about 7 seconds of film that still needs researched, but looked to us a lot like Bigfoot.

I’ve posted the video HERE so you can judge for yourself.

Since I had already switched from Apple Mail to Microsoft Entourage, I am more open to trying more applications from other vendors. I have gone back and forth between different browsers numerous times, but I usually end up back at Safari.

Since I was making a few changes to my site/blog, I had to work a good bit from the Blogger web site. They really don’t support Safari but I have not had too many issues using it. I think they list spell checking as something that does not work but it has always worked for me. Publishing has always worked pretty well, but I have always had problems when I would need to republish the entire blog. It would get to a certain percentage and just hang there.

So I tried the same process with Firefox and Camino and not only did the republishing work without any problems, but I had a much richer editor to create my posts. I was missing out on a lot of features.

So I am back to Camino for now. I like Firefox, especially when you add in the Simpler Blue theme, but I still think Camino is a hair faster and is working great so far.

If you have been blindly using Safari since it has been out you may want to check out Camino and Firefox to see if you are missing anything. The speed will not disappoint.

UPDATE – as fast as I could post this I found a problem using Camino. I was expected an email to my GMail account and it hadn’t arrived yet. I am using entourage as a POP client to GMail. So I went to the GMail web interface to check the spam folder. When I clicked on the link for Spam it would not do anything. When I click on this same link using Safari or Firefox it worked perfectly. So I am over to Firefox until I get this one figured out. On a side note, does anyone know how to get a POP client to retrieve email from the Spam folder as well? 99% of the time I don’t need it but that 1%…

UPDATE 2 – And I’m back to Camino. Thanks to Chris for posting in the Comments, I found this link in the Camino support forums and found my answer.

Changed the main page to only display the 8 most recent posts. All other posts archive off in to the Archive links on the right. I figured that 8 would be good in case I actually keep this thing updated daily, plus 1 more entry. I also turned on the Backlink feature in Blogger to show if any other sites are linking to my site. It’s pretty much Blogger’s answer to Trackback.

You can still support Valerie in her American Stroke Association Marathon by following the link HERE.

I’d have more to update if I could actually take advantage of it. I am still waiting for my phone number to get ported so I can activate the entire house. For now I just have a single phone hooked up to the Vonage modem. It works fine. Voice mail works fine. The web dashboard for your account and the control you have over everything is fantastic. Very nice job Vonage.

There was a problem with the physical address Verizon had me listed at so my porting request got bounced back. I straightened it out on the 12th so I guess it could be another 10 days after that. I sure can’t blame Vonage for that one. Everything is setup and I’m ready to go – come on Verizon – let’s port that number!

Free time is not always a good thing. When I have too much of it I start to think about what I can do to pass the time. Since Microsoft had just released an update Microsoft Office 2004 for OS X I decided to switch over to entourage for my email to see how well it works. I had no problems importing all of my accounts, messages, rules, and signatures, so I really didn’t have that much to do. Everything worked very well and I was up and running in around 15 minutes.

There was nothing wrong with Apple’s Mail program at all. I was just bored and curious so I felt like changing. I like how entourage now supports OS X sync services so my address book and calendar are now in sync with everything else I sync with. It’s nice have the calendar integrated in the with the mail client since I am used to Outlook at work, but I still think iCal is a little better for me because you can have multiple calendars and publish and subscribe to other public calendars as well. The only weakness I see with the entourage syncing is that it can only sync with one calendar in iCal, and that calendar is a new one listed as entourage in the iCal interface. So if you have a bunch of calendars in iCal you have to switch their items over to the entourage calendar for them to automatically sync with the entourage calendar. This is simple enough to do but takes away from the reason for having multiple calendars in the first place. Entourage now supports spotlight search but I have not had a chance to play with that yet.

Other than that entourage seems like a very nice mail client. All of my rules are working perfectly and email is flowing with no issues to report. I’ll stay with it until the next time I get bored – probably when leopard ships and Apple improves mail again.