This time of year I really appreciate QFC’s support of the needy – they make it incredibly easy to pick up a prepackaged $5 or $10 bag of groceries for the local foodbank. Every time I am in the store I grab one of these bags, it is a great and easy way to provide some help.

I’m curious to know what I can do with my Cisco ATA Voip interface box provided by Vonage. Shawn Djernes has a little how-to on getting to the web interface, tho I am worried that Vonage has password-protected it. Here’s a hack from last year that might let me in, I don’t know what firmware I have tho. Anyone have any recos on how to look into the box?

Update: some more good links over on dslreports like this guide to configuring the cisco ata186.

Well dang, none of these work, because they are all specific to version 2.14 or lower of the firmware and i am on version 2.16. Still digging…

Update: the cisco site has some more documentation on…seems like maybe i should try accessing the device thru the IVR and perhaps opening up the device for web config.

As rich mentions, Office Student and Teacher Edition is the way to go for home use of Office. $149 list, permission to install on 3 machines. So $50 a machine, and what do you get? Well the most visible improvement I see is outlook – outlook 2003 with newsgator is a pretty good way to read all my rss feeds.

Having Reshaped Broadway, Disney Readies a Second Act – I will make a special trip to New York to see a good Mary Poppins musical. That movie was HUGE when I grew up – Dick Van Dyke was brilliant in it.

Winds of Change.NET: How To Support The Troops – great set of links.

bubblegeneration - strategy, business models and technology – found via slashdot.

Amazon.com: Books: The Time Traveler’s Wife (Today Show Book Club #15) – wow, wow, wow! This is a great book. The story of a life-long relationship between a man suffering from random time travel events and his wife, and the effects that this situation has on their relationship. Just a wonderful story – great characters, a beautiful relationship. While time travel is a part of the story, the book doesn’t go over old time-travel ground but rather focuses on the relationship and how it evolves and develops. A great holiday gift.

Details on upcoming Shuttle SN85g4’s, CPU ID utility, DVD ripping, Hyperthreading, … the guy is a blogging machine!

XIII: Confidential…and it requires 2.5G for a full install. This seems like a new high for a single title, at least in my experience. All of a sudden an 80G drive doesn’t seem that big…

Needed some escapist reading and picked up The Road to Armageddon by Larry Collins based on a reco I read somewhere. What a piece of junk. Absolutely no style in his writing whatsoever. Nothing evocative at all. Uni-dimensional characters. Incredibly slow start. The pace picks up a little and I managed to get through the book but basically a piece of crap. Oh and a right-wing apologist theme all the way through; I am a little right of center myself but this was transparent and just plain painful to read. Even the binding on this book is crappy, like it came from a vanity press, not a commercial publisher.

Not sure I am really a believer in Social Software as a space, but Ross has a great collection of links if you want to get educated. I guess I just don’t think average people will ever go out and say “I need to get me some social software today”. People will use point solutions for staying in touch with family, friends, workgroups, potential dates, etc. But these solutions will be dominated by the application (“finding a potential match”, “workgroup collaboration”), not by social software.

Dealing with .pst Files – hey ben this is for you!

Phoenix unveils next-gen BIOS firmware roadmap – do I really want my BIOS bloating up to do all this stuff? I am not sure that I have benefited from BIOS bloat in the past…I think I’d rather have all these system management functions in my OS, wouldn’t I?

Walter At Work – cool, walter has a blog