Category: blog

We are doing some financial things, and needed to send some important documents. As many of my old friends at Open Text would not be surprised by, I needed to Fax these documents. Scan and email is not acceptable, it had to be a fax.

Not a big deal, we have Comcast with a voice line, and an old but very serviceable Brother Fax machine. It has served us well for probably 15 years.

I printed, filled out, and signed the forms, extracted the Fax machine from the hidey hole it was stuffed into, and connected it to our POTS port on our Cisco cable modem/router.

Dialed the number, it range, answered, and negotiated the line. All seemed good.

Key word: "Seemed".

Alas, after 5 minutes, and not completing the first page, I hung up and tried again.

No dice. Alas, my suspicion is that the POTS port is not really a full telephone line, analog converted to 64kbps, but more likely a VoIP compressed optimized for voice 8kbps channel. Pretty common, but it does mean that things that expect the full bandwidth (like modems and fax machines) will error like crazy.

So, off to the FedEx office, and $2.00 a page later the fax was sent.

Fax isn't dead, but POTS lines are on life support.

A recent life change is forcing me to become more organized, and to remove chaos from some areas.

One key area is my digital address book(s). Over the years, with my haphazard adoption of new technologies and platforms, it was inevitable that my growing list of contacts split among several services, would fester and be a moldering mess.

There are definite epochs in my contacts. The first significant epoch being when I got a gmail account in 2004. There, Google began collecting my interactions and creating “contacts”. This sort of happened organically, to support the gmail client.

Since I did little filling in of details, the vast majority of these contacts are little more than name and email addresses. Good for mailing, but not much else.

Add to this my personal domain (that you are reading this on silly), another gmail (google apps) account, and another set of contacts, equally chaotic, and thin on details.

Then in 2008 I joined the Smartphone revolution buying an original iPhone, and that became my go to device for managing contacts. This sync’d with the Mac “Contacts” application, so I had them on my desktop and on my phone. This is where I kept a bit more complete contacts, adding addresses and other information.

Somewhere along the line, Apple got smart, and allowed you to collect the various contacts from gmail and other services into the Contact application (and moved their repository to the iCloud service). This is helpful, and provides a central location to look at and manage contacts, and (hopefully) clean up the clutter.

Alas, 2 years, 3 or more repositories, and truly no rhyme or reason to my filing has caught up to me.

Today, I spent several hours first cleaning up my gmail contacts, and then organizing my icloud contacts. Now, I have a sane contact database (and quite a few more people I know than I would have thought).

The next challenge: My browser bookmarks. Shudder.

Who still uses their Yellow Pages local directory? Really, when was the last time you actually looked up a phone number or a service in there? Be honest.

Or, are you like 99.3% of the population who just hits google on their smartphone, and off you go? Or checks out Yelp for reviews. For the last 10 years or so, we would get our new directory in the early spring, recycle the old one, and put it on a shelf, never to be opened.

Lather, rise, repeat.

How wasteful.

Now though, you can opt out of receiving directories. The website YellowPagesOptOut will let you select which directories you want (probably none), and suddenly, this anachronism of the 19th century will be banished from your home.

On, and you can do your part to reduce the 1,400,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

Seems like a no brainer to me.