16 thoughts on “Visit from Tim Clarke”

  1. Wow!!

    Well, who knows if Tim will stop on by again, but if he does.. Hi there!

    SMC, wow, that was a long time ago.. my one year tour ended abruptly and I never got to say g’bye. Tim was nice enough to help me acclimate (until weird circimstances made me have to flee to Georgia for 2 years). Hi to Lisa as well, if you’re reading.

    Its interesting that Tim is working with nurses and midwives, as I happen to be in my Mother/Baby clinicals in this, my final semester of nursing school. At some point in the next 2 weeks, I should be assisting with an actual delivery.

    So, if you’re reading, Tim.. stick around, check out some of the old blogs (they get nice and heated sometimes), and come back often. You’re always welcome.

  2. Our QB Situation is Abysmal

    Tim,

    If you come back, please comment on the abysmal quarterback situation facing the Washington Redskins.

    I bookmarked your website and visit the pics from time to time. That Maddie is a cutie.

    Sammy G

    1. Insular community…

      I still often think it’s somewhat bizarre that I’m keeping up-to-date with some of my longest friends via a weblog 🙂 Sammy G (7th grade, when I used to shout “f— you!” to everyone in the lunch hall, and we used to play “football” with triangles made of paper, field goals and all) and Jon B (hangin’ out in the garage playing “Fred The Cat” on guitar & bass while laughing our butts off) are the two friends I’ve had longer than any others on the planet, with Justin (Hey Justin! Hey Matt! Vrowwww….) coming in runner-up on that (kind of like being an older brother, I guess… if you’re the younger brother, you’ll never get to the be the older brother. Or something). And Ben (“I’ll give ya the time of yer life” <smack, snap, smack, snap> “Oh, if I were a rich man…”). And I guess it’s a weird way to keep in touch, but it works for me.

      And yet here we are. And hey, guys, I finally got on Vonage. Nationwide, unlimited free long-distance. Well, “free” if “free” means you pay $25.00 for the service. I really mainly want to find a way to give Qwest the finger. And this way, I’ll save $3.00 today, and even more once we get cable modem services out here in the boonies (first quarter of 2005, they promised!).

      Tim needs an avatar. Anybody have a relatively recent (or ancient) picture of him? Either send me a message to my blog inbox (available on the right as “view inbox” if you’re registered) with the URI, or send me an email to matthew at barnson dot org. Remove the “-nospam” for it to reach me and not bounce; the spammers have been hammering my inbox to the tune of 200+ messages a day these days.

      —
      Matthew P. Barnson

      1. Bye-Bye Baby Bells

        It felt so great when I first connected Vonage and gave Qwest the boot. I had a particular grudge against Qwest because their customer service had been lousy. Add to that my frustration at using Qwest’s slower-than-molasses-uphill-on-a-cold-day internet service when I first got to the midwest.

        Vonage is neat because it essentially emerged as the first major national provider of voice-to-voice service over your internet connection. And it wasn’t a baby bell. It felt cool when I signed up because, at the time, there were under 100,000 users. I felt like a true early adopter.

        I recommend everyone look at a Vonage-like service. It’s reliable and cheaper than the Bells.

        Also, for those of you who haven’t gotten Skype, I suggest you get that as well. It’s pretty amazing. Free voice-to-voice anywhere in the world. I talk to my buddy in Mexico with audio quality that sounds like he’s in the same room as me.

        Sammy G

        1. okay, color me curious

          In what way is this voice to voice the same or different than regular phone lines (I have Verizon) -I know nothing about it. Do you still have a number? Can you still fax? Do your phones still ring in the house?

          What are the top 3 reasons I should get it, and what are the top 3 detractors?

          1. Vonage (and Lingo, and Broadcom, etc.)

            In what way is this voice to voice the same or different than regular phone lines (I have Verizon)

            From a “regular Joe user” perspective, there’s no difference. You pick up a phone (any regular old phone, no special phone required except that it must be touch-tone), you dial the number, the person on the other end picks up and you talk.

            From a technology perspective, though, there are massive differences:

            1. The adapter (it looks like a little black router, like the one used to hook up to your cable network) uses a protocol called “SIP”, or “Session Initiation Protocol”. You put this adapter on your network in front of your regular NAT router. This way, the adapter can enforce “Quality of Service” on your line, so that even if you’re downloading a massive file at maximum speed, your phone connection won’t skip a beat.
            2. As far as the adapter is concerned, it doesn’t care how you’re connected: satellite, cable, DSL, or other high-speed link. As long as the latency is low, you’ll get a fine connection. Satellite has a pretty bad problem with latency, though, so performance for people using that hookup method is somewhat spotty.
            3. As a side effect of this “I don’t care how I’m connected” behavior, you can actually completely disconnect your old land-line phone line. The VoIP service just works. You can take your VoIP adapter with you when you travel, plug it into an available broadband network, and you’ll begin receiving calls to your home number right there, wherever you are.
            4. Right now, E-911 service doesn’t work correctly across-the-board with any VoIP provider. Reason being, if I understand correctly, in order to hook up to the E-911 network, the VoIP provider has to pay a flat fee (a rather HEFTY flat fee) to each municipality (or county, if unincorporated) where they want to use E-911 services. Rather than that, when you dial 911 on your VoIP phone, you get routed to a “PSAP”, or Public Safety Access Point. This is generally the 24-hour non-emergency hotline with your local police or fire department. This one bugs me a little bit, but only if there were a babysitter or something.
            5. Calling quality is, at least compared to my Qwest connection, considerably clearer. There is, however, slightly higher “latency” (time between when I speak and the other side hears). It is equivalent to the latency you’ll encounter on any digital mobile phone network (like Sprint): about a quarter of a second. It’s kind of like how occasionally I talk overtop of someone on my cell phone because we didn’t realize the other side was speaking yet.
            6. Can you fax? Yes, but from what I’ve heard, faxes don’t often reach their maximum speed, and many people report problems with certain fax machines. There’s a second jack on my adapter expressly for a fax machine, and for an extra $5.00 a month you can get a dedicated “fax line”, where you can get reports on faxes transmitted, received, etc. on the Vonage service.
            7. Do your phones ring? Yes. Even if your computer is off. You just disconnect your internal phone lines from your “D-Mark”, or demarcation point (usually a gray box) on the outside of your house, and then plug one of the lines from your adapter into any phone jack in the house. Voila, all your phones are connected to the VoIP network. Some people have reported occasional problems with this, though. What my wife and I did was to buy “V-Tech” phones, where there’s a single base station and you can have several phones that don’t have to be plugged into a phone line — they all use the same base station. Kinda’ cool little cordless phones, and you can have several of these cordless phones in your house without them stomping on one another’s frequency (a common problem in houses with multiple cordless phones). Make sure to buy ones that use 5.8GHz or 900MHz, though. 2.4GHz is commonly used for wireless computer networks, and if you have a 2.4GHz cordless phone in a house with an 802.11b/g network, that network’s going to die every time you use your phone.

            The top three things that are very cool about a VoIP phone:

            1. Feature-for-feature, VoIP delivers much more “bang for the buck”, if you have an existing broadband connection, than a regular POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) line. My Qwest bill, if I had most of the features of my Vonage line, would be around $44.00/month just for my phone line. Plus long-distance charges. My Vonage bill is $25.00 a month, which includes unlimited long-distance in the continental U.S. and Canada.
            2. In our case, we were able to reduce the number of minutes on our cell phone plan (because we used our cell phones for the long-distance) and save even more money.
            3. It has the “cool factor” going for it, and you’re able to flip your local telephone company the bird.

            Top three things that suck about VoIP phones?

            1. If your power goes out, so does your phone. However, the way we work around this is we have a “UPS” (Uninterruptible Power Supply) that is way, way too big for just this little adapter, so we probably have several days of juice to power the phone.
            2. No E-911 service, as mentioned.
            3. You will experience occasional technical difficulties you never did with your existing phone. For instance, if there’s a “storm” on the Internet, or if a backhoe cuts through your cable, you’ll have problems. Your phone line is only as reliable as your Internet connection.
            4. OK, four things: it’s not as easy to set up as they say it is. Particularly if you have an existing network. In my case, I had to plug it in, muck around with my cables because their CAT-5 jacks are “crossed over” (they can’t detect if they’re connected to a switch or to a PC, and they assume they’re connected to a PC, so you have to un-cross-over it to get it to connect to a switch), reboot my PC, connect to the web interface on the adapter (a simple process that’s outlined in the user guide), change it to a static IP, and then everything worked.
              On a regular cable line, yeah, you can just drop it in to replace your router. It “just works”, and is very simple to configure. My connection is weird because, well, I wanted a static IP on my line. If you don’t have a static IP, it should be gravy. If you want to continue using your existing router, you need to be aware that there are two “network address translations” going on, and that if you want, for instance, to run an externally-available web server on your PC, you have to configure both the Vonage adapter and your existing router to make it work.
            5. OK, five things: Line Number Portability (LNP) sucks. It takes a long time to move your phone number from your old land-line to the VoIP line, which means you may be waiting weeks or, in some cases, 2-3 months before your local phone company gives up. So you’re paying two bills during that time, and living with having two separate phone lines. That’s where we are now.

            Basically, what it boils down to is VoIP is a great choice for people who have a mobile phone in addition to their land line and broadband connection. If the only phone you possess is your land-line, you may want to hold off on VoIP until it’s a little more mature. Also, if you are not remotely technically savvy, it may be confusing to set up. Vonage has good tech support 24 hours a day to walk you through it, though. I’m thinking of seeing if my technically-challenged father-in-law can do it 🙂

            —
            Matthew P. Barnson

          2. Question on configuration Vonage adapter with static IP

            Do you have some documentation on how this can be done????

            Thank you.

          3. Included

            It’s included with your phone. You hook up a PC to the LAN port of your phone adapter, navigate to (I think it’s) 192.168.103.1, then configure it for a static IP instead of DHCP.

            Simple, really. Read your documentation that came with the phone, it’s in there.

            —
            Matthew P. Barnson

  3. Great to see…

    Tim if you come back,

    It is great to hear you are doing well. Your family is just beautiful.

    We should get together sometime and let the kids play. I am living out in Harpers Ferry, WV. We are always headed into civilization though (Frederick, Gaithersburg, Reston, etc.). I have 2 little girls of my own (Katelynn (3) and Elizabeth(6)).

    I am back at QO doing Set design / lighting / construction. It has become a fun hobby, and helps out the old H.S.

    The Quarterback situation with the Redskins is kind of a sore subject.. It is a shame that we can’t seem to fire on all cylinders.. oh well Monday night vs. the Cowboys… We’ll see what tricks Gibbs can pull out of his hat.

    Cheers,

    Jon

    1. We Want Dallas!

      Gentlemen:

      It is good to hear and see from you all. It’s nice to have found you all again. I’ll check back frequently. Incidentally, my regular email is timclarkejr@hotmail.com.

      Justin, if you end up liking labor and delivery, let me know how and when to put the hard sell on for nurse-midwifery. You’d be surprised how many male nurse-midwives there are – I was when I started getting press calls about them. I was also surprised by how many reporters ask the obvious question: so what do you call them, mid-husbands?

      As for our beloved Redskins, we will just have to wait and see. I am not going to the game – officially too old to sit out in the rain. And besides, they are predicting ‘epic’ traffic in order to get to FedEx tonight. And T.S. Jeanne is moving over the area tonight so who knows how that will impact things (advantage: Redskins). I am hoping they make it worth staying up so late to watch the game to the end. Because not getting much sleep is something I understand, what with two kids and all.

      Win or lose though its going to be a big sports day tomorrow here in DC tomorrow — likely going to get our baseball groove on again. All reports seem to point to the idea that baseball is returning and that a big event is being planned for tomorrow.

      Any suggestions for a new name? There is a movement afoot to name it after the old Negro League team – the Homestead Grays. It’s got to be something – not the Senators – that evokes some history. And not be so dumb as the Wizards.

      Hmm – long-winded today. It’s no wonder then how I ended up in public relations, a profession known for long-winded con-men.

      1. 18-21

        18-21 Cowboys. If only the receiver had been a foot further to the left on that final catch of the game, they might have had some chance for a field goal to tie it up or perhaps score.

        Brilliant conversion on the second TD, though. I’m hoarse from shouting at the television set 🙂

        —
        Matthew P. Barnson

        1. So Robbed!

          I’m jealous of you folks watching the game from western timezones, where its still a reasonable hour when big plays happen. I am getting way too old to sit up all night waiting for the miracle in Landover.

          Granted, if they had scored the TD instead of a FG, after three attempts at getting the ball in had failed, that would have done it for our Skins. And if Gardner and Coles hadn’t dropped a couple. And there is the question of time out use. But the alleged contact that resulted in the Cowboys getting the ball on the one? That was so vile – receiver had been all over our guy. The fumble recovery was a blown call too.

          But Brunell did play an inspired second half. Lots of total yards in the end. And the Skins did have the ball for something like 35 minutes. That’s gotta count for something.

          Well, on to Cleveland then.

          Tim

        2. If Only

          Hmmm…

          If only the Skins had a QB that could move the ball, then there wouldn’t be the need for late 4th-quarter surges. It’s amazing how the owner can spend all this money for great players, but fail to have a solid QB. They’ve had a different starting QB for the past 7 seasons.

          1. That’s what we noticed, too…

            That’s what we noticed, too: their quarterback last night didn’t scramble well, and didn’t throw the ball quickly. He’d kind of back up a few steps, panic, and then toss the ball out-of-bounds in the general direction of a receiver after waiting entirely too long and telegraphing his choice of receiver for 5-10 seconds.

            At least he didn’t throw interceptions every time. But comparing him even to the aging… crap, what’s-his-name? Dallas’ quarterback… Vinny Testaverde. Anyway, Testaverde was much, much more professional and in-control behind his offensive line in comparison.

            —
            Matthew P. Barnson

          2. No Arm Strength

            Brunell’s arm strength is gone. The first half, he was closing his eyes and heaving the ball downfield, hoping a receiver would run underneath it. He couldn’t place the ball on throws more than 40 yards.

Comments are closed.