I just wrapped up reading 1 and 2 Kings in my quiet time. You know…the two books that have an overview of Israel and Judah after David and Solomon were kings? Well, I got lost a few times about who was king when so I went looking on the internet for a timeline. I found two that I thought were helpful to me. I’ll link to them for future reference and also just in case you need them.
In the US, when we wanted milk, we would go to the store, stand in front of a very large section of the store that was behind glass doors. It was refrigerated. We would choose whether to spend our $4 – $5 on whole, skim, 1%, 2%, chocolate, no fat, store brand, or name brand milk. It came in gallon or 1/2 gallon jugs, or quart or 1/2 gallon paper containers. Sometimes you could find pints or 1/2 pints too. We would make this, most of the time, our last stop at the store (even though it was all the way in the back) and our last stop of the day. That way, we could go home and get the milk in the fridge before it got warm. Get it warm and it would last less than the week or so on the drink by/sell by date. We’d never buy milk sitting out in the middle of the store.
Well, here in Serbia (and most of the rest of the world I would imagine) you don’t buy fresh pasturized milk. You buy UHT milk. What is UHT milk? Basically, instead of just removing some of the microorganisims in the milk (like pasturezation), everything is killed in the milk. For more than that, follow the link to the wikipedia article. What’s that mean? Well, basically, until it is opened, you can keep it on the shelf. For months! (Yes, I know you can keep fresh milk for months in the freezer and just thaw and shake when you are ready to use it, but…it isn’t the same). So, basically this is trez convienient. You can go to the store, buy milk, and shop the rest of the day and not worry about your milk.
For the most part, the differences between the US and Serbia aren’t that bad: we can turn on the tap and get drinkable water, we can go to a (sort of) large grocery store, there are (mostly) all of the convienences we have in the states, but there are differences.
Here is one…when you go to the grocery store, all four wheels on the cart swivel. Here are some pictures:
I tried to take a video, but I couldn’t bring myself to swing the cart around in the middle of the isle with people looking on. Perhaps later…who knows.
…the talk of the town this week. Why? Well, we took Lydia out in our bike trailer for the first time. I really liked it, but as we rode, Cyndi–who was riding in the back–said people were stopping, looking, pointing, laughing, etc…. I guess our “cover” and the idea of being grey have gone totally out the window. Oh well…we took some pictures and thought we would post them for everyone to see.
We had our first storm here in Serbia two nights ago. We went to bed about 22:30 (that’s how they say 10:30 pm here). I got woke up at midnight or so to what sounded like a freight train outside. Let me tell you, it poked the rain down, it was windy too boot, and we had thunder and lightning. It was something else!
This is a picture of the sunset from that evening. It certainly doesn’t look menacing, does it?
When we started thinking about going overseas, a big challenge we had was communication: we needed a way to communicate. Most of the people I knew overseas used Skype. Some people were able to just pick up the phone and call the US for fairly cheap (like I was in Thailand). Some people had vonage phones. I didn’t know too much, but I knew I wanted to be able to pick up a phone and call the US. And I didn’t want to spend a bunch.
That, in my mind, rulled out Skype. I didn’t want to have to sit at a computer to talk to people. I know, I could buy skype wifi phones, but I didn’t want to shell out that much money for a device that only worked with one thing. That kinda sorta left us only with Vonage. We signed up and got a vonage phone. We pay for the $30 unlimited/month deal and get to have unlimited calls to anywhere in the US as well as several european countries.
In the meantime, I heard about Truphone. After looking into it, I thought that it was cool…I could, with the right phone, have a VoIP phone on my cell phone. I ended up and bought a Nokia e 65 and set up Truphone. Everything seemed to work wonderfully in the US. However, when we got overseas, we ended up and ran though two NAT hops and truphone didn’t want to work. Bummer, but I really like my phone so I keep it.
Over the past several weeks, I have tried out three of four different apps. I started with fring. It would let me have a skype client thing on my phone. Well, that was pretty cool, but I didn’t want to have to have all of my friends readd yet something else to their skype lists. But, it also let me use SIP. Pretty neat….I went looking at some of the options.
I stumble on the GizmoProject (fring has them listed at the top of the SIP list. I started looking at the top and went down.). This is interesting, I think. I sign up for an account and start playing around with it. Turns out it is pretty cool. And, they have an app that will integrate the phone with Gizmo just like truphone did. The only bad part is I don’t have a real inbound phone number. Or do I?
I also happen to have a Grand Central account that I got (thanks Mike!) just to play around with. I never did too much with it before I left the US, but I wonder if I can use that number to send calls via sip. Well, it turns out that Grand Central will indeed forward calls to my gizmo number! So, I now have a way that people can call me by dialing a US phone number and have it ring my cell phone. Well, as long as I have internet access that is.
So, what do I wish I had known before? Well, Vonage service seems a tad pricey. But, it is unlimited…that is a plus. It doesn’t matter who we call in the US (or several European countries) but it is free. But not very portable (no, I’m not going to pay them more for a softphone/USB stick phone account). What happens when/if we travel?
Let me say right off that the IDEAL solution would be if my employer would offer some sort of SIP PBX that I could hook into. Take some of the inbound DIDs and give those of us overseas a number in the US people could call. We could then bring our own SIP device and have what I have right now. Then, they could give us the ability to make outbound local calls (doesn’t cost them extra). With that, we could use any of the various calling cards to call people. And if security is an issue, why not just encrypt the SIP traffic ? Actually, that sounds like a rather cool idea. Then calls from the home office overseas wouldn’t cost squat and everything would be secure.
Anyway, back to reality. Are we going to dump vonage? Probably not. However, I would have probably just gone with Gizmo and my phone had I known about it before we signed up for vonage. We’d probably end up and spend less per month on phone calls and the solution would be very portable. AND, it would still work in the US when we returned (and there, I could have an unlimited data plan too boot).
[Update 06-04-2008 08:09:56] Truphone v. 4 seems to have fixed the connection problems I was having. It is back to my preferred VoIP solution on my phone now. I’ll continue to test and let you know what happens. For more information, read this post .
[Update 2012-12-26 06:50:05] Removed a link to http://www.mobilevoipforum.org/showthread.php?t=1895. It was dead.
