colin dellow's bln

To complement the many electronic forms of contact that OARBS has, we recently bought a much more traditional form of communication.

It's called a telephone. OARBS can now be reached at (416) 907 2549.

Unfortunately, OARBS can't do anything the old-fashioned way (really! It's in our purpose statement that we want to have an "innovative culture") so what seems like a telephone is really just an electronic arrow. Our phone is a VOIP phone, or voice-over-internet-protocol phone. What this means is that regardless of where we are, if we have a broadband internet connection, we can plug our phone in and receive and make calls as we normally would.

If I want to go to BC to work for a semester, I could cart the phone with me -- no extra configuration hassle, no extra cost -- and work from my BC base with a Toronto phone number. If Dan wanted to work out of Israel, he could - and he'd still be a local call for our Toronto clients.

Another inducement to use this technology is the fact that it's easy to get local access numbers for different regions, and to have them all route to the same phone. For $20 extra per month, you can be reached at numbers local to people in Toronto, Victoria, Winnipeg, Montreal and Halifax. Astonishingly cool.

Furthermore, since the service is digital by design, call tracking is easily performed.

And did I mention this is priced much more competitively than traditional phone service? For further reading, I suggest the Wikipedia article on VOIP.

OARBS progress continues!

On Monday, Dan will have his third meeting with York Region District
School Board staff, specifically with a group of about 10 principals
and vice-principals. With this meeting, we hope to get school-level
administrators excited about what OARBS can do for them, and get
referrals to IT and purchasing staff to open up lines of
communication.

OARBS is now in Google (http://www.google.com/search?q=oarbs) and MSN
(http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=oarbs).

It's interesting how these engines differ - MSN Search was really fast
to include OARBS.com, Google was really slow.

Conversely, Google was relatively fast to include this bln
(http://cldellow.blogspot.com/) and MSN has yet to include it. Yet,
when you search for references to OARBS within this site, you will see
that Google (http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acldellow.blogspot.com+oarbs)
has no hits. This is insane, because I have at least three articles
that mention OARBS. My suspicion is that Google did not believe OARBS
was a word until recently, and thus did not index the word. Now that
oarbs.com exists, I've noticed Google no longer suggests I've typoed
(Did you really mean "orbs"?) and I think it'll soon begin to show
more interesting results for "oarbs" searches.

So I got an email from a guy saying "Hey, Colin! I really want to buy your CS134 textbook. Phone me - 519-XXX-XXXX!" So I phone him and we set up the deal. At 2:30AM.

Yay Waterloo and CS students.