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I finally did it: disconnected my landline phone. I went with the Vonage $14.99/mo. basic plan which allows you to keep your phone number and call 911, with unlimited in calling and 500 minutes of outbound. In order to keep using Skype without having to use two different phones, I would like to pick up a two line phone. Vonage has a few interesting features such as call forwarding and also automatic forwarding to a phone number of your choice (such as your cell phone) if your Internet connection happens to be interrupted. Voice mail messages can be sent as e-mail attachments. You can even manually change the bandwidth usage (which affects call quality of course) if you have limited bandwidth.

My phone number hasn’t been switched yet but I have a phone plugged into the Vonage adapter and you could not tell the difference between calling through Vonage and calling on a landline. Installation was a piece of cake. No software is installed on the computer. Just plug the included adapter into an empty ethernet port on the router (if you don’t have a router you can get a router/voip adapter for free instead) and plug a phone into the adapter and you’re ready to roll. That is if you buy equipment directly from Vonage which comes preset with your account.

I would be happy to refer anyone and rake in two free months of service.

I have gotten tired of buying and trying to refill ink jet printer cartridges. Recently I shopped around to see what personal color lasers are costing these days and I was pleasantly surprised to find out they are much cheaper than they used to be. I settled on the Lexmark C522N for one reason alone: price.

When I bought it a couple of weeks ago from Techonweb.com (no, I never heard of them before either) the price was $233. Last night I checked out the Techonweb site again and lo the price had dropped to something like $176. But today it is up to $265.98. What gives?

Anyway, for comparison, the SRP on Lexmark.com is $499 and even newegg.com charges $299. It’s the cheapest personal color laser on the market from what I could find. So far I’ve been more than happy with it. The only cons are its size, the noise it makes when it calibrates occasionally, and (even though I only noticed this by reading online about the printer) its relatively lower print quality compared to more expensive printers.

PC Magazine review:

 
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Finished a light remodel of the boys’ bedroom this morning. Michelle painted the walls which were a very outdated sort of woodgrain paneling and I trimmed the windows and doors using pine boards. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a reminder that Librivox.org is the absolute best site for free public domain audio books.  Listened to A Tale of Two Cities this morning from 3:00AM to 8:00AM on a run to Pittsburgh.  Didn’t doze off once.  And talk about an active project.  Almost forty new releases in December alone.

I usually try to keep bragging publicly about my kids down to a low roar but I thought this was too cute not to pass on. The other day the boys were eating grapes. Lane says, “Scott, this grape must not have read its Bible and prayed.” Huh? The grape was extra small. Then it sank in. The song we’ve been singing:

Read your Bible, pray every day,
pray every day, pray every day,
Read your Bible, pray every day,
And you will grow, grow, grow!
And you will grow, grow, grow!
And you will grow, grow, grow!
Read your Bible, pray every day,
And you will grow, grow, grow!

Neglect your Bible, forget to pray,
forget to pray, forget to pray
Neglect your Bible, forget to pray,
And you will shrink, shrink, shrink!
And you will shrink, shrink, shrink!
And you will shrink, shrink, shrink!
Neglect your Bible, forget to pray,
And you will shrink, shrink, shrink!

This month’s free download at christianaudio.com is Andrew Murray’s Absolute Surrender.