Technology and gadgets. I love them. Recently, there was talk of software giant Microsoft buying poor Yahoo.com. Yahoo used to be the number one search engine back in the day. People used to think nobody could out-search Yahoo. How the mighty has fallen. Google has taken over as #1 and it’s not even close these days.

How did Yahoo lose such a large market share? They were #1. They started expanding to mail, games, groups, and chat.  Everything except web search.  They lost their way.  Or another way to put it is, they got lazy.  Lazy, as in slow to react.

This got me to thinking about other similar large market share losses. Speaking of Microsoft, they did the same thing to Digital Research. Digital Research had practically the entire market share of microcomputer operating systems with their CP/M.  But Bill Gates came along and bought an OS from Seattle Computing and with some modifications, sold it to IBM for their brand new microcomputer.

Today, people don’t even know what CP/M is, or was. They’ve never even heard of Digital Research and Gary Kildall. What happened there?  Missed opportunities.  Yes.  But they could have fixed that.  Did they not realize how big IBM’s computer would be in the market place?  Perhaps.  It’s pretty complicated, but I can sum it up this way. They got lazy.

Speaking of Yahoo and Google, what did people do before the Internet?  Today, if I want to buy something, a couple of clicks of my mouse and I can buy anything under the sun online. Before the Internet, people used the Yellow Pages.  Many people are too young to have even used the Yellow Pages.  It’s a big book that has the phone numbers of every business near you. It also had some ads in it too. Sort of like what Google does now, but slower, builkier, and only locally.

How did AT&T/Yellow Pages lose their entire market share?  By the time AT&T realized what the Internet could do, it was too late.  They didn’t even see it coming.  They got lazy.

While we’re on the topic of printed media, does anybody read the classified section in a newspaper anymore? Ahm. Does anybody read a printed newspaper anymore? I don’t. I get all my news online. The classified section used to be the profit center for newspapers. But these days, EBay.com and craigslist.org pretty much destroyed that market.

Why didn’t the newspapers create those websites? Same reason Yellow Pages didn’t create Google.com. They were too busy printing the next day’s newspaper and finding new advertisers.  The daily grind.  Oh, and they got lazy.

During the early days of micro computers, people used Dot matrix printers. These were printers that used print heads that moved across the paper to print by using ink ribbons. Epson, a Japanese company, ruled this market. If you wanted a printer, you bought an Epson.

Then, a instrumentation company called Hewlett-Packard or HP started selling laser printers. These printers were more expensive but made documents that looked like they came from a print shop. It was also fast. Much faster than the dot matrix.  By the time Epson realized what happened, they had lost their entire market share.

What happened to Epson? They were so busy making new dot matrix printers and improving their old models, they didn’t look at new technologies. Basically, they go lazy.

Well, I saved the best for last. During the 80′s, Sony had a product called the Walkman. It was a portable cassette player that would allow the user to play music on the go. You could listen to music while commuting, or jogging, or just hanging out. They sold tons of these things.  It was a great idea.  They owned the market that they had basically created from scratch.

Then a computer company called Apple decided to make a digital music player.  That’s right.  A computer company.  They also created a music store online on the Internet.  Even though Sony owned a record company, they didn’t figure out that Apple stole their entire market share until it was too late.

Now, Sony is scrambling to try to regain their market share.  But they’re busy with Blu-ray players, HDTVs, Playstation 3, Playstation Portable, and tons of other products.  They have so many products, they forgot about their Walkman market.  As a matter of fact, according to PC Magazine, in a list of customer satisfaction, Sony MP3 players rate #7 after Apple, Microsoft, Archos, Samsung, SanDisk, and Iriver. What a joke.

Big Sony. Are they lazy too?  You bet.

The word “lazy” doesn’t mean they weren’t working hard at all these companies.  In fact, these companies were all leaders in their markets.  I’m using the word to mean that they were sleeping on the job. They were so busy with their day to day business of making money, and cranking out new versions of their old products, they failed to see the future.  In some cases, they weren’t even looking.  Slow to react.  Lazy.

Sometimes, you have to stop what you’re doing, look up, come outside the box, and take a fresh look at things. Some people are good at this, and others are not.  Some companies are good at it.  Others, not so much.

This sort of “laziness” can happen to anyone.  Even regarding your daily life.  Personal or professional.  Are you sleep walking in your life?  Are you too busy working and paying your bills to realize you could be rich?  Are you too busy with the rat race to talk to your kids?  Or your wife?  Do you just look at today or do you look into the future?

Are you lazy?

As you may already know, I don’t have a game console after selling my PS2 when I thought I was going to buy a PS3.  After the HD format war ended, I decided to go to the PS3 instead of the Xbox 360.  But Sony announced a new 80Gig version so I waited again.

The new PS3 is coming out shortly so I checked the Best Buy website last night (8/19/2008) and saw that they had them in stock at some stores.  I was very excited and immediately ordered one online for store pickup today, and went to sleep with my PS3 dreams in mind.

When I woke up, I noticed I had voice mail messages from my Best Buy credit card company. When I called them, they told me that they called to confirm the purchases and needed them to be approved by me, but because I didn’t answer my phone, they denied the purchases.

That certainly was not good news but I told them thanks for trying to protect me from identity theft, or whatever they were trying to protect me from.  No big deal.  I’ll just re-order online.

So, like the last time, I went to the Best Buy website to re-order the PS3.  Wait.  OMG!  Now, they are out of stock at the stores and cannot be picked up at the store.  NO!!!!!  Please tell me this isn’t happening to me.

After crying on the floor in a fetal position, I decided to go ahead and order for delivery instead of store pickup.  Damn.  I was so close to picking up a unit at the store today.  But noooooo.  My credit card company wanted to protect me from myself.

My previous review of Ooma noted their referral system so I tried it out with a friend of mine.  I got a return email right away after submitting my info, and within days, I got a certified mail with my $25 Best Buy gift card as show below.

They took the time to use a form filling program to automatically put my name onto the letter they sent me.  That’s a nice little touch.  A lot better than some companies that send you letters that start with “Dir Sir or Madam:”

Now the only thing I have to figure out is what to buy with my gift card.

Ooma is a VOIP company that went online in 2007 and I wrote about it a year ago but didn’t feel it was cost effective at the time.

Well, a few things have changed in a year.  They’ve lowered their price from $400 to $249 (including a Scout worth $60 separately) and now are selling them on Amazon and Best Buy (in Los Angeles only).

Ooma Hub - Front

A little background check on Ooma shows they formed in 2005, is located in Palo Alto and had an initial funding of $26M. I’m hoping that’s enough money for them to stay in business for more than one year, which is how long it will take for me to break even, after switching from Vonage.

I visited my local Best Buy and picked up the black Ooma box and took it home.  Regardless of anything else, these guys know how to make things look sexy to a gadget loving geek like me.  Everything looked great, starting from the quick install book, to the design of the Hub, and even the packaging.  Nice.

Unlike Vonage that gives you a black box that basically looks like a small cable modem, Ooma gives you what they call a Ooma Hub, which looks and works like an answering machine.

Ooma Hub - Back showing connections

The quick install instructions show how to connect Ooma with a cable modem, or DSL setup. The box even comes with the cables and adapters you need, depending on what type of setup you have.  I followed the instructions for connecting my cable modem to the hub and activated my account online.

One thing to note here is, you must decide during activation if you want to move your existing phone number over to ooma.  If you currently use a land-line, this decision must be made before you can complete your activation and will cost $40.  If you are with another VOIP (like Vonage), you don’t have to decide until later, but it will still cost $40 either way.

The Scout is another smaller box that allows you to hookup another phone in a separate room.  Although, in theory, you can do this with Vonage, Ooma gives you everything you need to make this work easily.

After everything was connected, I picked up my Panasonic cordless and got my ooma dial-tone.  Nice.

Time to do some testing by calling some people.  My initial reaction was that the voice quality was good, but not as good as Vonage.  There was nothing specifically wrong, but I think there’s a slight difference in quality the same way that sometimes cell phone calls sound a little lower in quality during a call.

One small annoyance is when your call goes through, you hear the ooma “music” which can sometimes drown out the receiver’s voice.  I read on the forum that you can ask for this to be turned off, but frankly, they should just get rid of this “feauture” because I doubt anybody wants it or likes it.

What I really liked is the way the hub works exactly like a regular answering machine.  When a call comes in, the line 1 indicator lights up red, then you’ll hear the caller, then when they leave a message, the message light comes on.  When you get home, you push the play button and listen to your messages.  You push the “trash” button to delete the message.  If you know anybody that doesn’t like voicemail because of the way that works, this will make them change their minds.  No more pushing “1″ to play and “3″ to delete on your phone.  Of course, you can listen to messages that way also.

My next test was to try to FAX something and this is where there was a failure.  The FAX machine would try to connect to the recieving FAX and fail.  When I did this same test with Vonage, it worked flawlessly.

After reading some forum posts, I decided to try changing the settings in the Hub.  More specifically, to change the “Quality of Service” settings.  To do that, you go to setup.ooma.com from your browser to access the ooma hub directly.  Click on “Advanced” and you’ll see the screen below.

Next to “Upstream Internet Speed,” enter your speed.  You can find out what your speed is from a website like speedtest.net.  Click “Update” to save your new settings.  After making this change, I tried the FAX again without success.

Once again, I went back to the ooma website and finally found the document describing how to send using a FAX machine.  They said to use “*99″ before the number you are dialing.  My HP printer/FAX also allows me to enter a “pause”, which I did.  This did the trick and the FAX worked properly.  Apparently, this code tells ooma to put the call in a “high quality” or digital mode.  Whatever it does, it works.

So at this point, I got everything to work the same way that I had it on my Vonage service, except no monthly fees.  Nice.

As with Vonage, you can go to the ooma website, which has a “lounge” where you can listen to your messages (instead of using the hub) and change your settings.  As with Vonage, you can have an email sent, and/or a text message sent to your cell phone when a message is left on your phone.  You can also set how many rings the caller gets before the voicemail picks up.

One thing that should be noted here is, when you activate your account, you are automatically signed up for their “Premier” service free for 60 days.  This service normally costs $13 per month.  One of the key features they give you is the ability to screen calls.  This is feature is not available on Vonage at any cost.  Like a regular answering machine, you can listen to the call, then pickup the phone if you want to take the call.  I don’t want to pay per month so I’m not going to have this service available to me after the 60 days is over. Oh well.

A feature available on Vonage is the ability to see a list of all calls (incoming and outgoing) listed in your account online.  Ooma currently does not have this feature.  So if you need this feature for some type of accounting, you should go to Vonage.

One final nit pick.  There was a minor bug with the ooma lounge and Firefox 3 in listening to your message, but this works fine with IE7.  [NOTE:  Between the time I wrote this after complaining about it on the ooma forum, and right now, this bug has already been fixed.  Wow.  That was fast.]  This shows how new this service is and probably not being used by millions of people yet.  They are still working out some kinks on the website.  However, their forum and blogs shows they are very dedicated to customer service and this gives me hope that things will be okay in the future.

Ooma also has a referral system where if your friend also buys from a Best Buy in Los Angeles, you and your friend both get a $25 Best Buy gift card.  Not bad.  I’m sure this won’t be going forever so might as well take advantage of it before it expires.

All in all, so far, my ooma has worked properly and I’m happy with the service.  Of course, the best part is no more monthly fees.  You can’t beat the price. As long as they don’t go out of business in the next year, I’m golden.  Every year after that, I’ll be saving about $250 per year.

I’m just waiting for Verizon or Time Warner Cable to call me to see if they can match the price.  What a great phone call that will be.

Salesguy: How much are you paying for phone service?
Me: Nothing.
Salesguy: Excuse me?
Me: I don’t pay anything.  It’s free.  Are you going to beat that price?
Click.  Followed by a dial-tone.

Update 6/9/2011:
I finally got that call from Time Warner Cable that I’ve been waiting 3 years for. She offered their service for $14 and asked how much Ooma was monthly. I told her it was free and of course, she said she couldn’t beat that price. She also said she was hearing more and more people saying they had Ooma. What a buzz kill for these poor cold callers. I should have recorded this conversation. Damn it.

When my external CD player for my Toshiba Portege R205 laptop broke down, I had to find a replacement.  After looking around, the only other small external drive was the LG Slim Portable Double-layer DVD reader/Writer.  I found it on the Best Buy website but at the time, they only had it for store purchase only for about $120.  One thing that this unit has that my Toshiba also had, is the ability to operate just on the USB connection without a power adapter.

In the picture below, you can see that the LG is slightly larger but not by much.  The Toshiba opens on the top, whereas the LG slides out the front.  The Toshiba is slightly thinner as well.

Size comparison - Toshiba (left) LG (right)

The picture below shows a closer view of the LG writer.  If you lay it flat on your desk (as pictured), you need more room than the Toshiba unit which opens on the top.  However, the Toshiba unit was just a CD reader only.  So you get a ton more features with this LG unit, including LightScribe which “burns” the label straight onto the DVD.

Front view

The only thing strange is that according to the documentation, some USB ports do not output the proper amount of power to burn DVDs.  To get around this problem, this LG unit comes with a second special USB cable that plugs into the “power” input shown below (left).

Back view of USB power (left) and USB data (right)

Using this unit with the Toshiba laptop was a snap and I didn’t have to load any drivers or CDs to RIP CDs onto the hard drive.  I did’t try burning DVDs using the laptop but I did do so using my desktop and just one USB and everything worked fine.  It’s slower than my internal DVD burner but that’s to be expected.  Actually, one of my DVDs didn’t read properly on my internal drive but did read on this external LG unit.  Not sure what to make of that except that I was glad it worked.

This unit is clearly for laptop users and not desktop computers because the cable that comes with it is very short.  It’s longer than the one that came with my Toshiba CD reader, but still too short to go from the back of a desktop unit all the way around to the front.  So if you’re going to use it that way, you’d better get another USB cable.

All in all, I’m happy with my new external DVD burner.  If you want something for your laptop that you can use without a power adapter, this unit is for you.

Somehow, I missed the news that Time Warner was discontinuing Usenet Newsgroups for their broadband accounts on June 23, 2008.

So to my surprise, last week, I loaded up my Agent Newsgroup reader program, and couldn’t access any newsgroups.

In case you don’t know what Usenet Newsgroups are, it’s a pre-websites, different area of the Internet where people post messages, pictures, video and music on a “forum” like format.  The only difference is, unlike websites, there’s no “owner” of these newsgroups.  You can find newsgroups that deal with every topic conceivable, from hobbies, politics, technical issues, all the way to, of course, porn.  Or pr0n, as it is known to Internet savvy people.

So I guess with gas prices rising, Time Warner had to cut some fat to help balance their checkbooks, and getting rid of their Newsgroup servers must be their way to do that.

After looking around the Internet for the best newsgroup service, I came upon Giganews.com.  All the reviews had this service highly rated, in speed, price, and service.  It’s not the cheapest, but cheap and slow is not what I’m looking for.

Another factor in my decision was they let you try it out for free for 3 days, AND a discount (50% or 20% depending on account choice) for Time Warner subscribers.  Free for 3 days and a discount.  Oh, this was a no-brainer.

Sign-up was easy and they accepted my paypal for payment.  As per the agreement, they haven’t charged me anything yet because it’s only been 2 days so far.  I’ve used the service and the speed is great and all the newsgroups that are important to me (read pr0n) are available on this service.

I’m not happy that basically Time Warner has raised their prices by eliminating services, but I am happy with my new Giganews account so far.

With the launch of Firefox 3, and it’s supposed 15,000 or so bug fixes and new features, I joined everyone helping Mozilla obtain their download world record.

Some of the big new features are: one-click bookmarking, iPhone-line zooming, smart location bar, password manager, spell checker (YES!), keystroke find, better performance, and last but not least, mailto links to webmail.

What this means is, when you click on a link on a website that uses “mailto:”, you can have Firefox go to Yahoo webmail instead of Microsoft Outlook (the default).  This can happen when you click on things like “Contact Us” or “email me” on a website.

The new Firefox comes with a setting for Yahoo webmail, but others are also available with more work.  For Yahoo webmail, at the top, click on “Tools”, then “Options.”  You’ll get a small window with a bunch of options.  Click on “Applications” in the top area (see image below).

Next, scroll down to “mailto” in the list.  Next to it, you’ll see “Use Microsoft Outlook (default).”  Click on this to get the pull down menu and select “Use Yahoo Mail”, or “Always Ask” if you want to decide on the fly. And that’s it!

If you want to use Google mail, it’s a little bit trickier.  For the entire info, see Lifehack or just read on.  Type “ctrl-t” to open a new blank tab.  Type “gmail.com” in the URL area to go to Gmail and login.  Now, you have to type the following javascript code in the URL address bar, and press ENTER (one line, no spaces):

javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto",
"https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","GMail")

This will bring a line right below the URL area asking the following: “Add Gmail as an application for mailto links?”  Press the “Add application” button on the right.  You’re done!

Now you can choose between Outlook, Yahoo or Gmail.  Nice.

While we’re on the subject of Firefox 3, I’ve noticed a big speed improvement with AJAX websites like Google Docs, especially Google Spreadsheet.  It’s noticably faster than IE7.

If that’s not enough goodies, the photo upload feature works properly with WordPress 2.5.1 as well, unlike IE7.

Okay, that convinced you, right?

While the World Series of Poker 2008 is going on at the Rio, Microsoft has put their Surface OS tables in the lounges there.  This video shows some “applications” for the Surface, iPhone-like operating system, like games and ways to pickup on the ladies, or vice versa.

Frankly, I’ve never seen attractive chicks like these playing video games, or even touching anything geeky, other than the iPhone.  Maybe the iPhone will finally bring in the good looking people into the world of gadgets and geeks.  One can dream.

By now, you should now about my hate/more hate relationship with hosting company globat.com.  As I got ready to change hosting companies, my yearly contract was about to run out on May 9, 2008.  However, on April 21, a full 19 days before my year was over, globat was kind enough to automatically renew my 1 year contract and sent me a lovely email to let me know about the order that was processed on my behalf.

We have processed your invoice [redacted] today in the amount of $95.40 and the charges have been approved.

Transaction ID: [redacted]
Date: Mon Apr 21 00:22:27 2008
Domain: [redacted]

Services breakdown:

$95.40 for [redacted] TeraByte Xtreme™

You can view this transaction and the invoice referred to herein by logging into our billing interface at

https://login.globat.com/cp2/account.php?page=change_info

If you have forgotten your username and password, please use the following link
https://login.globat.com/cp2/forgot.php or call one of our Expert Customer Service representatives for further assistance. 

If you have any questions or experience any problems with your web hosting account, please contact us at:

http://www.globat.com/about_us/contact_us/ contactform.htm

or call us at (323) 874-9000.

Please do not reply to this email as it is automatically generated.

Don’t forget that you can use 1-Click Renewal(tm) to conveniently renew your account in the fture! Just login to your account today to save up to 30% off regular prices! Use this now at:

https://login.globat.com/cp2/renewal.php

Thank you for your trust,
Jackie Otero
Billing Manager
Globat.com
(323) 874-9000

WTF!?  No, you di-int!!  You’re joking now right?  I normally don’t make fun of typos (because I make enough myself), but I had to highlight the “fture” typo.  Do they not have a spell check over there at Globat?   Add to that, the ”Thank you for your trust,” at the end really takes the cake.  Yeah, just the opposite globat.  There is no trust here.  In fact, I trust you’re going to screw me over.

So now I have to log into my account to find out how to cancel my new 1 year contract.  When I click on “Cancel Account,” I get this nice screen message:

Well, that’s so nice of them.  It would be too easy to let me cancel my account via the website over the Internet.  Since your motto is: “customers are our #1 priority,” we get to call you between 9am and 5pm PST to close our accounts.

To make a long story short (too late), I did make the call, and Jackie answered the phone promptly, and she closed my account and… wait for it… refunded my money!  What!?  This is too easy.  I was expecting a big fight and having to call the credit card company, and the Better Business Bureau, but no such luck.

Isn’t that the most ironic twist?  Only when I actually close my account, did I get good customer service.  If they had done that while I still had my account, I would have kept my account going indefinitely.  Instead, I had to spend about 4 weekends to convert databases, write code, and re-write FAQs, just so that I could move to a new host.  I would have preferred to stay with globat, but they gave me no options.  I cannot continue to give them money for treating their customers like trash.

Good bye Globat.com.  Hello 1and1.com.

In case you’re not familiar with Joomla, it’s a PHP/MySQL based content management system (CMS) that you can use to create entire websites with.  I already had a godaddy.com account for another website so I decided to try to set up the new website using Joomla.

Everything seemed to work okay, except for the SEF.  SEF stands for “search engine friendly URLs,” which means that your pages are made to look like they are in directories instead of long commands to the CMS.  For example, without SEF, you’d have a URL like:

http://host.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&id=3&Itemid=41

With SEF:

http://host.com/content/section/3/33/

As you can see, the SEF is preferred not only by search engines, but normal people as well.  I already had SEF working with WordPress for cochinoman.com, so I knew that it should work.  If you’ve had the same problem, here’s how to make it work.

First, setup your Joomla global configuration under the SEO tab as follows:

It took me a while to figure it out but the following article in the joomla forum told me everything I needed to know.  First, you must rename the “htaccess.txt” file to “.htacess”  Now, edit it as follows:
## Can be commented out if causes errors, see notes above.
Options +FollowSymLinks

# Uncomment following line if your webserver's URL
# is not directly related to physical file paths.
# Update Your Joomla!/MamboDirectory (just / for root)
RewriteBase /

The trick here is that when you do this the very first time, you must wait 1 hour for it to take effect.  This is where a lot of people give up and think their hosting account on godaddy isn’t working.  So did I.  Because of this initial delay, I suggest you do this first, then work on uploading and editing other parts of your website.

Once your server realizes you have created your .htaccess file, there will no longer be the cached delay and any changes you make will be immediate.

Everything works fine now with Joomla + SEF + Godaddy.com = success!