I spent about four hours today with AT&T working on a phone line for a client.  This was a traditional POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) line, which is what most of us had in our house before Vonage or digital phone.  This type of phone line is an old, but very dependable, technology... or so I thought.  After today I am convinced that anything analog needs to be phased out.  We had one line out of four that was down and it took the AT&T tech five hours to get this line back.  As it turns out the copper pair shorted out inside of a cable in a corner of the building.  He was able to move this to a different pair but not before a lot of work to figure out the problem.  There was not any programming involved but simply moving an analog line over to a different wire.

When he was finished I spent some time chatting with him and he mentioned that as a repair tech they spend most of their time on POTS lines.  He went on to say that they very rarely have a single problem like this with digital circuits such as T-1, ISDN, or PRI.  You could also bundle SIP trunks (Session Initiation Protocol: a Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service) into this but AT&T does not typically sell SIP trunks.  The repair tech also stated that the new digital technologies are faster and more reliable for the end customer.  It would be nice if we could move away from POTS lines and start to move our telephony delivery into the digital age.

We have so many options for phone with VoIP or digital trunks.  If you would like to learn more about these we are always available to help you understand anything you may be unsure of.

If you frequently run multiple programs simultaneously your desktop can get extremely cluttered.  This can get annoying if you're working on one program and want to minimize all the other windows-- in previous versions of Windows you had to minimize them individually.

But thanks to Windows 7's "Shake" feature you can minimize every window except the one in which you are currently working in a single step.  Click and hold the title bar of the window you want to keep on your desktop.  While still holding the title bar, shake it quickly back and forth until all of the other windows minimize to the taskbar and then let it go.  To make the windows return, shake the title bar again.

You can accomplish the same thing by pressing the Windows logo key () + Home key combination; although doing so is not nearly as much fun.

How is it that when you get home, turn on your wireless laptop, and scan for networks you see every network in your neighborhood, yet you go to an airport and see just one of them?  What is it that you actually see anyways?  You see a network named "smith family" and one named "Jones."  They are called SSID; short for Set Service Identifier.  Basically it is the name of your network.

We know wireless has its limitations in range so how does it work that an entire airport has one SSID?  The term is called "clustering."  Wireless access points are spread out every so often and all chained together with clustering.  We are taking a group of wireless access points and grouping them together.  This allows for someone to stay connected no matter what side of the airport they are on or how far away they are going inside the facility.

Think about this the next time you are in a large environment and impress one of your friends by telling them you know about wireless clustering.  You might get called a tech nerd but if you are reading this blog you sort of are anyway, right?