Still tring to figure out which Twitter/Facebook tool I like best. I’ve been looking at Seesmic and Tweetdeck. Prior to this, I was content with Twhirl, and using the web interface for Facebook (FB). I don’t spend a lot of time in FB, and actually send in most status update thru Twitter (with a app in FB to pick up the tweets and update status). I’d go to the FB web interface and comment, etc. With Seesmic and Tweetdeck, tho, you get multiple applications merged into one UI. The apps are very similar in the way they use columnar layouts for the activity. Generally, I find Tweetdeck a bit more intuitive, but it seems to not process some FB status messages; not sure what’s going on there…I can see the updates on Seesmic or in the FB web interface. Another contender is the “lite” version of FB. Dispense with all the “noise” of the FB standard interface, and just see status updates with application foo. Run that and Twhirl. One thing that I do know is that I really don’t like the web interface for Twitter, so I’ll want some application to help me there, and all of these will do it!

I’ve been officially on Vonage since 8/31, and working great except for one thing:

My wife calls her mother every day at 5PM…and like clockwork, it was dropping the call at 5:10PM. No problems at all with other calls. I say great, it’s a feature! A M-I-L filter! Alas, I needed to see about fixing it. It dawned on me that this was happening 24 hours apart…hmmm, sez I, sounds like a DHCP lease timeout. When I plugged the Vonage box into the AT&T Uverse 2-Wire router, I left it on DHCP and it seemed to work fine. What I didn’t realize until my number ported and we started “production” use was that it was renewing the lease during the “scheduled” call between wife and her mom. A clue yesterday, when my wife said that her mother was talking, then her voice went away for about 15 seconds, and then came back. Previously my wife had been talking during the “event” and hung up before the new lease was issued. I checked the Uverse router, and yep, a 24 hour lease. Set it to give the Vonage router its current address as a static from the pool, rather than dynamic, and all seems well. I’m pleased not to have to put the box into the Uverse router’s DMZ, as I have my Airport in the DMZ and don’t want to change that as it’s working fine. Time will tell if I’ve fixed it for sure, but it looks good!

Working great…except for one odd thing…every time my mother-in-law calls, it drops the call, and even had to reboot the router once. Strange…maybe it has a M-I-L filter 😉

I’ve now figured out how to keep my old Apple Airport happy with the new AT&T setup. The way things were set up before, the Airport was plugged into my Time Warner cable modem, and thus was directly exposed to the ‘net. I had one port forward set up, to a RHL virtual machine running in Parallels on my iMac. This RHL box runs a WAIS server (freeWAIS-sf) with 20 years of postings to a flyfishing listserver indexed for searching. By putting the Airport into the “Enhanced DMZ” of the 2wire router, it shares the external IP of the native router, and the port forward from the ‘net to the VM works fine. Updated the Dynamic DNS link and it’s good to go!

By the way, the marketing foo from AT&T says that they only support 10 concurrent devices, but the 2wire box was set up to issue 200 DHCP leases. That was worrying me when I heard about the limit of “10 devices” but it looks like it’s not a hard limit. Also, AT&T does not try to keep you from pwning your own router, you can go in and make changes to the whole “home network” IP configuration. If you are curious about the box, the model I have (3800) is apparently very much like the 2700. The manual for the 2700 is here.

We’ve now had AT&T U-verse for about 48 hours. Retired our Time-Warner service. We have cable and internet; when I placed the order, VoIP was not available, but it seems it came available this week. I’ll put in an order next week to switch the traditional phone service to U-verse VoIP and consolidate all.

So far, I’m satisfied. The install was not entirely smooth. The installer was here for most of the day, and I need to have them come back out and replace one cable run (the set is pixelating badly). I got a bit frustrated with the internet tech support folks, as they wouldn’t/couldn’t answer my questions about hooking up my existing Apple Airport and network. I didn’t use any bad words, but I did make loud noises about bringing back Time-Warner ;-). That did get me a bit more attention, and enough additional information that things are OK now. I will be making a few more changes, though, as I don’t have things fully set up like I want. First, the Airport is set up in double NAT. I may want to put the Airport into the DMZ of the U-verse 2Wire router, as I want to to IP passthrough to a web server. Alternatively, I may be able to just pass port 80 traffic to the Airport, and then its port forwarding will go to right place. I think I know what to configure but I need to read up more on it. I need to go grab the manual for the router, if I can find the right one…seems like 2Wire doesn’t have a manual for the 3800 online, but from what I can tell from scanning the forums, the 2700 manual is very close. I think I’ll wait until tomorrow when the family is not watching TV, as I don’t yet know what changes force a router reboot.

One thing that appears to be resolved it that I was told by the AT&T folks that they only allowed 10 active DHCP leases…which as most folks know is not enough in today’s world. I’ve probably got at least 15 things that want an address today, and more in the future. I believe from my reading that this is a marketing limit, not a hard limit, best as I can tell from looking at the router configuration pages. That’s why I have kept the Airport inline. I may be able to retire the Airport if that’s so…this will evolve!

One thing that I was somewhat worried about was the Aruba AP61 I have that builds a GRE tunnel back to my office network. It didn’t work through the double NAT, but when plugged into a port on the 2Wire router, it works fine.

I am very pleased with the bandwidth. I ordered the high end option, which is 18Mb downstream and 1.5Mb upstream. That appears to be about what I’m getting…maybe just a smidgen less…the Speakeasy.net speed test is showing 17.3 down and 1.45 up; empirical observations seem to confirm that it’s fast. The presentation of all services is IP-based, with configuration of 25Mb down and 2Mb up for the system aggregate. This is coming to my house on copper pairs that were buried ~1988. It’s copper from the DSLAM as well. The tech ran a new wire (RJ-11 termination) to my office that brings all the bits in. From there, the way it works is that you have 4 ethernet ports and wireless (b/g) for data, 2 VoIP ports (not currently in use in my config), and a coax for HomePNA (for the TV boxes). The coax runs back to the distribution splitter for your old cable system and feeds that. Two of my systems are working great (though one required a new RG-6 cable run); one that the tech thought was working is really unwatchable right now, and will also need a replacement cable as the RG-59 that was in the house is not up to the job). One system has a DVR, and the other boxes are slaves, and can feed from the storage (fairly generous disk) there. One thing is that the only system that can pause live TV is the one with the DVR, but that makes sense. You must have a box @ $5/mo. for every TV; there is no basic cable equivalent.

One thing I really like is the web control of the DVR through the Yahoo portal. It’s very easy to use, and I’ going through and setting up movie after movie to record. Don’t know if I’ll have time to watch any ;-). I have not tried to access it through a mobile browser, but supposedly, that works well.

The bottom line is that we’ve got many more TV channels, better/innovative features for that, and better Internet for about the same bux as Time-Warner. We’ll tweak the channel lineup after the summer and see what we’re really watching, and maybe shave a few dollars off…we started with the primo package.

I’ll keep this updated as it moves along…all for now!

After a week of being blackberry-less, I think I’ve finally gotten moved back into the replacement-replacement blackberry. The first one they sent was dead (apparently the Alltel warranty repair folks had put a board in a replacement frame that had been “killed”). Next replacement arrived exactly a week after my unfortunate adventure with an OS update. Well, I’ve learned my lesson on this. The blackberry is a very sensitive beast, and while I like to keep current and have new features/functionality, I’ll wait until Alltel/Verizon certifies things so I can get support, since I’ve determined that I like less not having a working device. A week with my old RAZR has restored caution. Good thing I had a backup before I started all this foo!

Oh well, I didn’t follow the old adage, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and I tried to do an update on my Blackberry. I backed it up (all the databases) and then started the upgrade process. It went fine for a while, but then hung while reloading the operating system. Attempting to restart the Blackberry got the dreaded white screen of death. I did what I knew, googled a bit, poked thru the Crackberry forums, and gave up and called Alltel for advice. Got a very knowledgeable tech support person, who walked me thru some steps to try and reload a basic OS on the Blackberry. No luck :-(. Fortunately, the device is still under warranty, and they are sending me a new one. It’s due to arrive by the 19th. For now, I’m back to using a dumb phone ;-).

It will take me a while to get things put back together, I fear…I have a list of 20 apps that I want to reload and reconfigure…too bad that the Blackberry doesn’t save the apps as well as the data when you do a backup.