Today actually marks a full 30 days of Vonage use here at the Meister House, and things are actually going pretty well. For the first twenty-one days, only one telephone in the house was connected up to Vonage, mainly due to the tunaround time to keep your existing number caused by telephone companies doing their best to not let another customer make the switch to VoIP technology.

Once our existing telephone number was switched over, I simply disconnected outside telephone company connection connection, allowing the internal house wiring to be used as a simple network. This allows us to simply connect the Vonage router to one telephone outlet and use any other outlet normally with our existing telephones.

Judging the difference in quality between Vonage and a regular telephone line is difficult in the case of the Meister House. The local area has long been plagued with poor telephone lines, which are often full of static as water and snow seep into the outdoors equipment. Additionally, most long-distance calls made with the new service have been to cell phones that are on the other side of the country. However, I haven’t come across anything in terms of sound quality to persuade me that the monthly $24.99 unlimited calls plan is overpriced.

One of the free features that I’ve really come to like is the ability to have a copy of any incoming voicemail messages you have sent to you as an email attachment. I also suspect that we’ll get around to using other features like SimulRing and repeat dialing as we get used to the service.

Overall, I have to say that I’m happy with the service from Vonage, and it’s certainly cheaper than many other “all-you-can-eat” long-distance plans available from regular telephone service providers.

Today is the 6th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day, for those of you who’ve managed to melt your company network due to opening up virus-laden emails you shouldn’t have, or pestering the IT staff to recover a file you deleted a month ago despite being told to back-up by your boss.

So show the guy in charge of your network and servers a little love today.

Games Revolution has an article up by Duke Ferris in regards to the recent up-surge in news items and proposed legislation to fight the so-called epidemic of youth violence in America being caused by violent video games.

The core point of the article, however, is: “There is no epidemic of youth violence in America.”

Despite the increasing number of hyped news articles and opinion pieces over the “worth” of video games that contain violence, the statistics coming in from the federal government is that violence, and crime in general, is down among young people. In fact, it’s at it’s lowest point in twenty years, as many independent studies have shown.

Something to keep in mind the next time you see a breathless television journalist keeping their ratings high by interviewing yet another politician who talks long and hard about how they’re going to “protect the children” with proposed laws that never make it out of congressional sub-committees, all while the hard decisions are conveniently never made.

Users of the alternative web-browser Opera will be happy to hear that version 8.02 is available for download.

In what has become something of an Internet cliche, yet another anti-piracy measure by the software industry has been cracked within twenty-four hours. In this case, it’s the “Genuine Advantage” requirement Microsoft has implemented on their Windows Update website.

BoingBoing has the details.

VTech released a new Vonage-compatible cordless broadband enabled telephone yesterday.

The Vtech IP8100-2 is an expandable system that features two cordless handsets that communicate with a central base station that can be directly connected to your broadband network, providing full local and long-distance telephone service through Vonage’s VoIP network.

The system can be expanded with up to two additional handsets and currently lists at $149.95, with a $50 rebate from Vonage after sixty days of service.

Mozilla’s open-source Firefox web browser will no doubt get a boost in the number of users, at least according to a recent article from CNET’s News.com which reports that Internet Explorer 7 will not be available on Windows 2000 or older operating systems.

Many users of Windows 2000 have felt that Microsoft has never really given the operating system the attention it deserves. Released in February of 2000, the OS brought lackluster sales from corporate users unconvinced that the time was right to upgrade the legions of Windows 95 machines many companies relied on.

The release of Windows XP on October 25th, 2001 did not help matters, effectively making Windows 2000 a lame duck within the Windows development branches, leading to little real support, both from Microsoft itself and from third-party hardware and software developers.