Not many wine snobs share my love of Valpolicella. Thats fine by me, it keeps the prices low.

Over at wine library TV they featured the Corvina grape and I’m glad to know that there are other people that love it as much as I do. Its versatile and fruity enough for the casual wine drinker but complex enough for the snobbish if they can overcome that its not cabernet.

Click Here for the episode.

For a marketing campaign, Cartoon Network placed some lighted figurines of one of the characters on a popular [adult swim] show around some major metropolitan areas. [adult swim] is the block of shows that start at 10:30pm and are targetted to a more mature audience. They feature Futurama and Family Guy among others.

On January 31st Boston was gripped in a panic as some people thought the figurines looked like something menacing. That very night [adult swim] featured a bump apologizing for it. They were serious, it wasn’t a joke. However that didn’t stop the Boston Police from arresting some of the guys that were hired to put the signs up.

Today Cartoon Network’s general manager resigned.

No one is saying what happened in Boston was funny but lets not be extreme. National Lampoon has put this out making fun of the situation:

        24 Vs. Aqua Teen Hunger Force

This is as close as I can come to a video from 8th grade on my birthday.

I was a Packet8 customer for over a year for my home office. I had to really tweak my home network in order to get to an acceptable call quality. And when I was trying to use the phone I had to be sure not to have much else using the bandwidth at the same time.

All this and P8 uses a 32k codec. I really didn’t care for the sound. I have this nice Polycom desk phone that is supposed to sound great but didn’t.

People would try to call me and get error messages or nothing. I put up with this for so long because I figured VOIP services were relatively new and bound to be a little buggy.

The Packet8 router was nice enough and it had a higher quality codec, but it was configured by P8 not to use that codec unless you were calling Packet8 for your voice mail or customer service. That setting was not changeable. I think the idea is to save P8 some bandwidth costs.

So I embarked on a search to find a carrier who would let me use a higher quality codec (g711u)

I have friends who use Vonage. At first I was shy about it because in the VOIP forums there were lots of complaints similar to my Packet8 issues about Vonage. Finally one day after another inbound calling outage I signed up for Vonage.

It was actually hard for me to wait to write this article because I have to say my Vonage experience has me tickled orange. To put it simply: Vonage RULES!

At signup I filled out a few forms to have my number transferred. Most of the VOIP forums say this is hopeless and I really didn’t expect it to happen. Not only did it happen, but it happened within 2 weeks without a hitch.

The equipment that Vonage sent worked right out of the box. To be fair, Packet8 equipment worked right away too. The little box gets a little hot but it does what it does very nicely with no network reconfiguration needed.

So far I haven’t had any inbound calling troubles. The voice quality is good - I’d put it just below what a regular landline is and I don’t think the average joe will know the difference. No more sounding like a choppy cell phone.

I looked all over the web for a direct comparison between the two services but couldn’t find one. Packet8 has many happy and loyal customers. I think if they opened up the hq codec it would be better. I don’t know what the inbound issue is. Maybe too many customers and not enough interlata capacity to route the calls.

There is one thing Packet8 had that I wish Vonage did. Packet8 lets you set your outbound caller id name. Vonage just sends the number or sometimes “Vonage Holdings”. There’s some debate on if such a capability would be abused. The answer to that is probably yes….but at the very least Vonage could set it to the account holder’s name like the landline telcos do. I never set my packet8 line to anything but my name and if you know me you know that I’m all about setting it to “The White House”, “Empty Arms Hotel”, “The Moon”, etc.

So if you are considering VOIP. My recommendation is Vonage

I now know someone who knows someone who just got killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq.

Its like the 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon game with only 2 degrees.