I was explaining jajah to my wife the other night. I explained how anyone can go there, enter their phone number, enter the number they want to call. Then your phone will ring, you pick up and it phones the number you want to call and you’re done. Free phone calls, well mostly free phone calls.

She looked at me skeptically saying “well then why doesn’t everyone use it?”

I didn’t have a decent answer to that. Now that earl’s on the scene, I’m using jajah through bbcalls and it works fairly well. It’s integrated with the address book allowing me to simply choose a contact and select ‘jajah call’ and go.

Wow, interesting that I wrote a post today with the words digital tether in it and just now I received an email about the impending domain expiration for the domain digitaltether.com which I apparently own.

Ok, that’s actually not interesting at all as I read it over. Anyway, I never came up with anything interesting to do with that domain.

I made the switch to a new blackberry. As I’m not a fan of calling my new “device” Pearl, I’d appreciate you referring to it as Earl thank you.

My main reasons for the switch? Smaller, lighter, and it’s just a new gadget to mess with.

Pleasant surprises? Trackball works very well. Data speed is significantly faster and makes browsing the web possible. The voice recognition software is just cool. When I noticed the voice stuff I assumed it was one of those train it to recognize my voice deals. Nope, push a button and say “call 9 6 7 1 1 1 1” and you’re dialing pizza pizza.

Stuff I can take or leave at this point? Camera, mp3 player. Maybe I’ll use those more down the road.

I had a chance to try again tonight with Firefox and I could see buttons that would allow me to give my money to Apple. Apparently flock is looking out for me and decided not to show me checkout buttons. I’m liking that browser more and more.

I’m sure all the kids in the orchard will be quick to let me know what I’ve done wrong. I was contemplating buying the new shuffle but I reach this screen and can’t figure out the next clickity click to point my mouse at. I don’t get it, do you have to buy two things? I’m no expert but you’d think it’d be simple to find the ‘give you my cash’ button.

I should have known better than to get too excited about this until I tried it. Unfortunately all I’ve been able to get is errors.

I made the switch yesterday to Rogers Home Phone. It gets installed next week.

The biggest reason to switch for me is simple, to save money. For the first year, $30 a month gets us unlimited calling in North America. I now have four services with Rogers and they offer you 15% off them all if you have four. That works out to more than $30 so this is almost a freebie for us.

Now the questions remains, is the service any good?

I’ve spent significant chunks of time in both Microsoft(MS) and non-Microsoft development worlds. With recently moving back to the MS world, the differences seem to be highlighted to me in stark contrast. One issue I feel I’m becoming a broken record on is MS’s approach of tying code bases to the development tool(IDE), specifically their Visual Studio tool.

What I’m referring to here is MS’s solution and project files. They are part of your code base as most projects put them under source control. If you want to move to a new version of the IDE, say VS 2005, then you must migrate your existing files to a new version. At that point, developers using VS 2003 can’t open or use the projects and solution files and must upgrade. Can you run a MS project without being tied to the MS tools? Of course but it’s a lot of work and you’ll generally irritate hardcore MS guys and are left out of some major features of the toolset.

The same issue exists with the .NET framework itself. If you want to move your code base to using 2.x of the framework then you need a new IDE, VS 2005.

So what’s the big deal? To most people entrenched in MS development, nothing. To non-MS people, this can be a big issue and surprises them. They’re used to having the freedom to use any IDE they like or maybe using several depending on what they’re working on. On every non-MS project I’ve worked on, the notion of putting anything related to a development tool into the code base is considered taboo and you do your best to avoid.

Every other technology framework I’ve worked on has little to no dependency on specific development tools or IDE’s. A new version of Java is released, you get the new version of java and it’s compilers and you’re good. It’s been a while since I’ve worked on a Java project but I’ve never had to upgrade Eclipse or VI when a new version of Java is released.

You want my conspiracy theory, or maybe this is just plain obvious economics? MS makes money selling Visual Studio not the .NET framework. Having these hard connections sells IDE’s. You want to move your code base from .NET 1.x to 2.x? Go for it, it’s “free” except of course having to upgrade every developer’s IDE.

My jaded biased view is that I seriously doubt this has anything to do with technology and is all about selling upgrades. I’m not complaining, just talking out loud.

I signed up for the trial of Mark Hurst‘s gootodo yesterday. I just paid for the upgrade today. The 10 todo limit is a joke and makes it practically impossible to truly test the app. The good news is that at $3 a month, paying for a 6 months ‘trial’ is very affordable.

Obviously I like it so far. Very simple app that works quite well. The email integration itself makes it very painless to use, allowing you to simply send your todo’s as emails to addresses like today@gootodo.com, tomorrow@gootodo.com, dec25@gootodo.com etc.

While I’m not running around to get it setup, this is a great idea. It’s a simple concept and leverages the fact that when we’re on our own networks at home, we rarely require it’s full resources. When we’re out in the world, generally we can see someone’s network and they’ve probably got bandwidth available. So why not share your network with people willing to share theirs?