Please note that in the introductory minutes to yesterday’s keynote at MacWorld, there was strong reinvented presence:

Northwest Airlines has a dramatic new visual identity. Compare this to the old look.

Daniel Burka did some high-quality investigative journalism and got the real story of the new Formosa location.

The RSS feed for the Drive Around the World just got converted to a full feed (i.e. the full text of posts, including photos, rather than frustrating excerpts). This is great, and makes it far easier to follow the expedition. Thanks!

I’ve been experimenting with VoicePulse Connect!: I’ve got a Peterborough, NH number set up to send calls, via IAX, to my Asterisk server, and I’m dialing out from the same server, again via IAX. The advantage of the incoming setup is that it allows toll-free calls from my customer in southern New Hamphire, and the advantage of the outgoing is that I can make long distance calls for 2.95 cents/minute ($US) in North America.

Quality-wise things have been mixed.

I bridged a call into my Eastlink line (also running into the Asterisk server) with an incoming VoicePulse call yesterday (using the handy Asterisk MeetMe application, which makes it very easy). The people on the other end of the VoicePulse call were on a speakerphone, and their voices were “pixelated” (for lack of a better word). There was another person, not on a speakerphone, conferenced in on their end, and his quality was much better, so I assume this is a mixture of challenges of the speakerphone (which has never been excellent) and silence detection cutting off quiet voices (people closer to the speakerphone came in much louder).

For regular handset-to-handset calls, I’ve found incoming calls on the VoicePulse number to be very clear and “telephone call-like” while outcalls, both to the U.S. and Canada, have suffered, at least today, from a lot of clicking and popping and crosstalk. Of course because of the number of steps along the way, it’s difficult to isolate the source of these problems, and I’m sure at least some of them are bandwidth related, either on my end, or somewhere along the way.

So far I’m willing to continue to experiment, as the quality is still “good enough.” It’s possible that with some configuration changes on my end, I can improve things too.

Norman Kunc, who is my sister-in-law’s sister’s mother’s husband, was on Sounds Like Canada on CBC Radio this morning talking about disability. He’s a powerful speaker, with a good message; if you have a chance to hear him speak, you should take it.

The point he made that hit me most strongly was a suggestion that we need to learn how to see the intrinsic rather than comparative value in people. In other words, judge me for what’s inherently good (or bad) about me, not by comparing me to others. If we all did more of that, I think we’d all be happier.

Kudos to the Sounds Like Canada, by the way, for putting URLs in their daily show logs.

The CBC Archives on the web, which remains a beacon of sanity inside the sometimes crazy online presence of the corporation, has an excellent feature on the Toronto and Montreal subway systems. Well worth a browse and/or listen.

Note that if you’re behind NAT, and forward port 5060 to an Asterisk server to allow connection to remote SIP proxies, and have a Mac running iChat behind the same NAT, you’ll probably run into problems (I did) because iChat is, under the hood, a SIP client itself.

I’ve been doing some additional experimenting (read “procrastinating” or, more charitably, “long term R&D”) with Asterisk, the open source PBX that now answers my phone.

Tonight I added a “The temperature in Charlottetown is X degrees” line to the opening salvo, pulling the current temperature from The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

You can hear it for yourself at (902) 892-2556. Don’t worry, you can hang up the phone before you disturb me. Or you can ring through and say hello!

Just for the record, I’ll mention here that I asked Brent, creator of NetNewsWire whether it was possible to easily export the subscription list as OPML via Applescript. His response: “There isn’t a simple way. I’ll take it as a feature request.”

I mention this simply in case others are thinking that it should be simple, and can’t seem to find a way nonetheless.