Vonage

I decided to sign up for Vonage yesterday. I get poor mobile phone reception at my apartment, plus I needed to get a number with a local area code to operate the front door buzzer here. I didn't want to wait on Vonage to ship a phone adapter, so I went to Best Buy and bought a Linksys Vonage phone adapter (which is free after rebate when you sign up for Vonage). I hooked it up to my local network, plugged a phone in, and registered on Vonage's web site. 5 minutes later my phone was working.

So far I've been pleased with the service. I talked to Jason for about 15 minutes last night, and didn't notice any difference from a traditional landline in terms of voice quality and latency. Also, it's only $15/month for 500 minutes (more than I need) with every feature I know of (call waiting, voicemail, call forwarding, etc.).

Send me an email if you want my new phone number.

UPDATE: By the way, if anyone reading this decides to sign up for Vonage, let me know and I'll refer you. That will give you one free month of service, and give me 2 free months.

Steelers

The Pittsburgh Steelers play in the NFL playoffs at 4:30pm today. Being from Cleveland, I'm presented with a dilemma. Should I root for the Steelers or not? On one hand, it would be nice to have some excitement around town. On the other hand, they are the Steelers. Perhaps the best compromise is to root for the Steelers until they reach the Superbowl, then hope they are defeated in a heart-breaking loss. That oughta soften them up for the Browns next season. :-)

I'm Famous

Well, maybe this doesn't qualify as fame-worthy, but a story written about my Extreme Blue experience (along with the other Extreme Blue interns from Case) did appear on the Case homepage.

Netflix

I reactivated my Netflix account last night. You can see the movies I'm currently watching in the sidebar. If you have a Netflix account and want to be my Netflix Friend (so we can see each other's ratings), let me know.

Relocation

The movers from Graebel picked up all of my stuff from the house on Monday and delivered it to my apartment in Pittsburgh today. It was great to have other people do the heavy lifting, especially the furniture and TV. I'm having a bed delivered on Thursday, so I won't have to worry about moving that either. The only heavy item I'll have to move myself is my G5, since I didn't want to be without it for a few days.

Moving services are really great when they are being paid for by the company, but as nice as they are, I doubt I could bring myself to pay movers if I were moving on my own. Hopefully I won't have to move anywhere (without company support) for awhile.

Blog@Case

The Blog@Case blogging service is now in open beta . I'm really glad to see the university providing this portal; hopefully it will foster the creation of a community of student and faculty bloggers. I see that professor Vincenzo Liberatore has already started a weblog.

The service is running Movable Type and has integration with Flickr and del.icio.us.

Squirrel Hill Map

A guy advertising an apartment on Craigslist has created a cool map that shows the locations of the major shops and attractions in Squirrel Hill. My apartment is on Hobart Street, off of the left side of the map. Work is on Murray Avenue, off of the bottom end of the map.

Pittsburgh Blogs

While searching Google for Pittsburgh weblogs, I found PghBloggers.org , which provides a directory of blogs written by Pittsburghers. Looks like they are having a blogger meetup on January 19th.

The Wendover

I signed the lease for my apartment in Pittsburgh today. It's at The Wendover . Work is a 10 minute walk, as are shops, restaurants, banks, and movie theaters. Being able to walk to work will be great, since (1) I don't get enough exercise, (2) I dislike driving in heavy traffic, and (3) I'll be able to listen to podcasts.

I took some pictures of my apartment, but haven't transferred them to my computer yet. Next up: getting ready for the moving company's pickup on Monday morning.

UPDATE: I've posted photos of my apartment on Flickr .

Pittsburghese

Phil pointed out to me that Wikipedia has an entry on Pittsburgh English, also known as Pittsburgese . Apparently "yinz" is a Pittsburgh construct. The Wikipedia article pointed me to Pittsburghese.com, where there is an MP3 discussing Pittsburgh English.

Cavs Vs. Hawks

My whole family, along with David, Andrew, and Mike, went to the Cavs game at Gund Arena tonight. The Cavs beat the Hawks, 101-85. The Cavs were only ahead by 1 point going into the fourth quarter, but they dominated in the final 12 minutes to win big.

Our seats were in the upper deck, but they were still pretty good. As a bonus, Andrew, David and I stopped at White Castle on the way home.

Pittsburgh Driving Tutorial

This Pittsburgh Driving Tutorial is hilarious (and scary). My favorite movie is the last example in Lesson 4:

This is the car to watch. He pulls the classic Pittsburgh no signal left turn from the right lane near broadside.

After watching this, I'm really glad that my apartment is within walking distance of work.

RSS UPS Tracking

As a note to myself: UPS package tracking via RSS .

Disclaimer

Now that I've announced that I'm going to work for Apple, I want to make sure that expectations for this blog are clear:

This is my personal blog. Things I say here are my thoughts and opinions, not those of Apple. Links I post here are items I found personally interesting, and do not necessarily represent Apple's interests. Please do not link to or quote this blog as as evidence of any action or future action on Apple's part, since nothing on this blog is written as part of my position at Apple.

To quote Eric Albert :

What, explicitly, does all of this mean? It means that if I say something here, it isn't Apple's viewpoint, nor is it the viewpoint of my team at Apple, nor does it mean that Apple is engaged in an internal debate on the issue, nor does it mean that I don't have a completely different perspective on the issue when I'm at work.

For further reading, I refer you to the disclaimers written by Eric Albert and Chuq von Rospach , which I agree with whole-heartedly.

Starting at Apple

Yes, in case you haven't already heard, I'm starting work at Apple on January 17th! I'm really excited. The team I'll be working with seems like a great group of people and, let's face it, I've always been a Mac geek.

I accepted the job back in November, but I didn't post about it until now for a couple of reasons: (1) I haven't had time to do much blogging lately, and (2) I wanted to have a disclaimer ready so that my comments on this blog are not misconstrued.

2004 In Review

I haven't posted in awhile, and hopefully posting frequency will pick up soon, but I want to recap 2004 before I forget.

• Had a good, fun spring semester. It was bittersweet, though, since Jason and many of my other friends graduated in May and dispersed throughout the country.
• Participated in IBM's excellent Extreme Blue internship program. The experience was amazing, and I met a bunch of really cool people.
• Did some part-time consulting work for a startup with a cool Mac application. This was the first time I'd done work for a startup, and I'm glad for the experience.
• Interviewed for a number of full-time jobs, and ended up accepting a position with Apple .
• Graduated with my B.S. in Computer Science from Case .

I'd say that it was a successful and exciting year.