Java, Vonage, Mac, and stuff

I'm getting closer to having an official project at work. Yay!

Had lunch with Dr. Bloch yesterday, after a week of scheduling conflicts. I have tremendous respect for this fellow. He even said one of my proposed extensions to Java was "not unreasonable." ...now, I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not, but hey, it's something. :-)

Got a Vonage line yesterday, so I now have another phone number. I'm thoroughly impressed with Vonage. The setup was something like this:
1. Vonage sends me a box.
2. I plug the box into my network.
3. I plug a phone into the box and pick up the handset.
4. The voice from the box tells me, politely, that I've plugged it into the wrong jack. I move it to the adjacent jack.
5. I have a phone line.

I used it to call my parents earlier today, and while the conversation did get choppy at one point, it was far clearer than a cell phone. (You can tell that I've used only cellphones for some time: when the conversation got choppy, I instinctively raised the phone up higher into the air. Needless to say, that doesn't work with normal phones.)

Now, I ordered Vonage because I wanted a real phone, but also because I'm a hacker and the service seemed neat. True to form, I've already modified things slightly. A few minutes of programming later, I had a plugin for Address Book on the Mac:

It works like this:
1. Click on a phone number in your address book. A menu pops up.
2. Click on the brand-new Dial With Vonage option.
3. Your Vonage phone rings. Answer it.
4. You hear ringing, as Vonage calls the number you selected.

It's that easy. (Now if I could just get my phone numbers to quit being so blurry! :-)

Speaking of being a hacker, my shiny new Quad G5 showed up today. I like it when people offer me discounts. Now, if only I owned a monitor -- it's not the same ssh'ing into a machine like this.

It's raining.