Don’t call me DOM

I just got a brand new PDA-phone last Monday, a Tréo 650 running PalmOS.

I have been reluctant to cell phones for a long while, finding them rather invasive: when you own a cell phone, people expect to be able to reach you on it pretty much all the time and everywhere. At some point, the trade off between this cost and the advantage of being able to call some people all the time and everywhere tipped the balance, and I finally decided to get a cell phone for my personal usage.

After the video card in my desktop computer fried last week for some reasons unknown to me, I moved to use my laptop as the basis of my daily work environment for a few days. And now that my desktop is back in service, I’m thinking to move to a laptop-only mode. But this move is pending some hardware complements (e.g. a port replicator), and I decided that I should start using my laptop system right now rather than later; I’d rather not plug all my existing devices in the laptop since I would have to unplug them too frequently, so I’ve decided to transform at least temporarily my desktop in a simple X Terminal.

For my W3C work, I (and a good chunk of the W3C Team) use Vonage as a Voice over IP service that allows me to participate to teleconferences, call my colleagues, etc. for a very low cost.

But one of my issues with it is that, being with a US number, you can get spammers calling you at US hours, which may or may not match the actual timezone you’re in. I had asked a while back to the technical support in Vonage if there was a way to ask your line to be off (i.e. directly on voicemail) at well-defined times of the day, but to no avail.