da | Working and not.

As of yesterday, a list of geeky communication things that surprisingly work:

My cellphone works with my mac, out of the box. I can sync my address book with the phone's, in both directions. [1] I thought I was going to have to buy a 3rd-party plugin, because the phone is new and older versions of it don't have mac drivers. This time, Apple got it right.

My (old, easy to remember- 519-575-3733) cellphone number is now running over VoIP, and I don't need to run the hardware (my friend Simon graciously gave me a server instance to play around with for as long as I want it). I was going to set up a homebrew voicemail system for it, and forwarding to my real cellphone, but I decided to keep things simpler (well, sort of simpler):

Grand Central is my voicemail. Also, my US phone-number. I have an Ithaca number [2] and a Carthage number, both which forward to my real cellphone (and any other numbers that I want- it rings them all at once, and if I don't pick up on a cellphone, the call is free). There are enough features I really can't remember them all, but: voicemail gets forwarded to my email; caller ID on my cellphone works properly, showing the caller and not Grand Central; and it's all backed by Google, so it's unlikely to just suddenly collapse and go away. [3]

I got off my duff and installed bitlbee on my server- the one I do IRC and email on. Bitlbee is a server that turns AIM, ICQ, jabber, msn, and yahoo chats into IRC sessions. I run "screen" (the unix program) to keep my sessions available from anywhere- so I can treat my laptop and work machine as the same computer, chat is always up, and I don't have to worry about whether an AIM session log is stored on my laptop or on my work machine. This goes on the list of surprising stuff because I've put off installing bitlbee for many months- my debian server's running the "old stable", and from experience I was concerned it would break something, updating packages from "new stable". All went fine, the install took 2 minutes. Rock. [4]

And all of these except the VoIP line were totally free, and the time I spent on them was surprisingly small. I would be happy to help you figure out any of these, if you're at all inclined. (If you'd like a GrandCentral account of your own, I have half a dozen spare invites- just give a shout and it's yours. With the provision that you offer up half a dozen of the invites they eventually give you!)

[1] Now I just need to transfer my text-file address-book into the Mac Address Book; which mostly means figuring out how to set an entry's category from inside the text import, since I have a huge text file with addresses. I give Address Book an 85% success rating- better than expected, but I will need to spend quality time with google to make that work.

[2] My Ithaca number is 607 233-4699. I plan to keep this number, so feel free to save it.

[3] It's very funny that I hate telephones (except, really, for receiving calls from friends) but I really saw this as the fun project worth doing right now. I do like voicemail, though. And I like tinkering with free services.

[4] My AIM is daatcoderdotcom. While I'll be logged into chat, there's no guarantee I'll see your message immediately- I need to learn to set my away message, 'cause I don't plan to be near my computer any more frequently than I already am.

And a list of things that unsurprisingly don't work:

The University's network is down. Again. So I'm still at home, since I'm blocked on most projects without outside network.

Also, the University has no hot water today or tomorrow.

Also, my beard is no more. I wasn't very happy with it- along with short hair, it didn't feel like me, and it didn't look as good as the last time I grew it. Also