After about a year of work, the bridge is now complete. Catch the full story here, or just enjoy the completed project pics below or in the gallery!
Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Kelly and I got an AeroGarden 3 Elite from Katie and Øystein for Christmas, and we planted tomatoes on January 2nd. Here’s a picture of the first sprouts! Cool!
Thanksgiving Weekend is drawing to a close, so I thought I’d post the highlights! We had a very enjoyable holiday weekend beginning with my parents arriving Wednesday afternoon. While enjoying each other’s company, we ate lots of great food (due to the culinary wonders performed by Mom and Kelly), watched critters, went shopping, and had a fun time.
Dad and I also worked hard on the bridge, trying to beat nature’s relentless march towards winter. We made a lot of progress before the snow started flying – completing the entire load-bearing structure of the bridge. Now all that’s left is putting a road on top of it!
Not to be outdone, Mom and Kelly also had their fair share of projects. Check out the cool wreath they made exclusively from boughs cut from trees on our land! Go Kelly!
So, fun was had by all, and now Christmas races ever closer.
For many, this is old news. For others, this is irrelevant. But for me, this came as quite a shock on Saturday evening, as my visiting mother-in-law asked why her phone call didn’t go through back home to China. The reason the call failed was that Free World Dialup was suddenly not free.
A little background…
My family is spread across the world. My sister and her husband live in Norway. My wife’s parents live in China. My parents live in northern Minnesota. We live in Iowa. A couple years ago, I decided to see if I could optimize the return on our voice communication dollar. Being the geek that I am, I had plenty of extra old hardware laying around, so I decided to throw together an Asterisk PBX using the Trixbox distro and FreePBX. This allowed me to take advantage of the various low-cost SIP and IAX based call-termination providers out there to get low-cost domestic and international rates, as well as easily allowing quick and easy interconnection with SIP based peer-to-peer calling.
To use peer-to-peer SIP calling easily, you need a third party to provide SIP registration and switching. For a long time, Free World Dialup was probably the most widely used SIP registrar. For this reason, I set up accounts for myself and my family using FWD, and sent pre-configured SIP Phones to my distant family members. Then, I called their FWD number from our phone system, or they called our FWD number from their SIP phones, and we could talk for free over the internet using familiar, ordinary looking phones. It worked great.
Until this weekend…
when it stopped working. Mind you, this was not without warning. In fact, I received several emails urging me to send in $30 to keep the account. I simply didn’t believe them. In fact, I considered taking the time to report them to FWD, suspecting a phishing scheme. It didn’t even occur to me to dig deeper. Spending even a minute researching such an obvious targeted SPAM message seemed silly to me. Free world dialup not being free seemed so ludicrous that I didn’t believe it.
Bringing us to today’s rant…
Despite the fact they have ‘free’ in their name, and despite the fact they provide no value-add services like pay-per-minute call termination to non-SIP phone numbers, Jeff Pulver decided to make FWD a $30/year service. For me, that would mean $120/year to keep my mini family phone network up as configured. Comparing this to the one or two-cent a minute normal calls I can make all over the world without FWD, it becomes obvious that this would cost more than direct-dialing my family’s normal PSTN phones. So, this weekend I removed my FWD routing on my FreePBX console, signed up for free accounts over at sipphone.com (one of many such free providers), and will soon be re-programming my family’s SIP phones to use them. New numbers and a little hassle, but certainly not $120 of hassle for me, and definitely not $120 per year of hassle. I’m sorry to see FWD go, and I don’t blame them for wanting to make money on their efforts, but I seriously don’t understand how they intend on keeping up a viable userbase by charging money for what so many others provide for free.
