I’ve been a Vonage customer for 3+ years now. Lately, though, the vultures and doomsayers have been close at hand as Vonage gets sued over and over. Since I have two lines, our home phone and my office phone with Vonage, I thought I’d hedge my bets and move my home phone to Verizon VoiceWing. The main appeal of going with VoiceWing was that they could actually supply E911 at my location.

That was a bit of a disaster. They sent the new modem pretty quickly, but the installation never worked. I spent about 3-4 hours on the phone with them over a couple of days and they were unable to get it to work.

There was nothing particularly weird about my setup. In fact, my Vonage adapters are sitting in pretty much the same configuration, right behind my main router. What became apparent after talking to the VoiceWing people is that they don’t have the capacity to deal with installation problems at all.

Luckily, I was able to cancel before the first month was up and got (most of) my money back.

Meanwhile, I’ll stick with Vonage for VoIP.

From the “it’s the little things that matter” department - I just saw changethemargins.com written up in the January/February issue of World Ark, a newsletter published by Heifer International. The idea is simple:

What if you could get companies to adopt narrower margins as their printing standard? It would result in a lot less paper consumption. Which of course means saving a lot of trees and cutting down on a lot of waste…but only if a massive amount of people changed their margins.

Not only would this save trees, it would save the energy and pollution associated with the entire paper-making and recycling industry.

Now, I’ve been finding myself turning into a whitespace kind of person. Less clutter, more visual appeal. But I’m willing to take the challenge to trim the fat, as it were, in the future.

This should also inspire us to look at the other places where we can make a small, seemingly insignificant difference. If enough people do it, it starts to add up.

Side note: Almost two years ago, I wrote about “going green” in my computing environment to save money. I’m happy to say that I’ve managed to save a noticeable amount on my electricity bill, and thus my carbon footprint. It’s sometimes a bit hard to tell, with kids coming home from college, changing weather patterns, etc. but electricity use in our house is trending down.

So I’m going to blame my recent lack of postings on my blog to the fact that, like Hobu, I was finding that a Plone-based blog was not so easy to deal with. I decided to jump into the blogging mainstream with WordPress, so here we go.

Along with the switch to WordPress, I’m going to expand from mostly geo-related topics to things I’m dealing with at MIT as well. So for those of you who want exclusively geo-news, link to the geo category and the geo feed in Atom, RSS, or RSS2.

I still have to switch over the Feedburner feeds and tweak a few more bits and pieces, but overall the new version is ready to go.

As I mention in the About page, I’ve kept the old blog intact so that all the permalinks still work.