This is the phone setup the I think is most flexible.

Having google voice is very very powerful. Having a fixed phone number tied to a number of hand held devices is great.
Because of google voice I was able to tie all of my phones into one places, my google voice number.

So when I am on the road, having Skype is great, calling customers.
(The 5115 everyman is the best headset on the market that works with Skype.)

These are the services I use for my phone setup, I think they are very very valuable

Configuring Skype with google voice is a bit tricky, you need to do the following:

I set skype to forward back to my Google number if I’m not on Skype, it works great, I disabled Skype voicemail so if I decline a call it goes to google voicemail and now with this change if my laptop is off and Skype is not running it still forwards to google voicemail.

This is the site that had the fix information.

The services that I use for VoIP are the following:
MagicJack

I found that there are a few

http://www.phonebooth.com/

DimDim, I recommend them!

• They are free and great overall to get you started.
• They do have a conference line that sometimes echos at times.
• Free unlimited conference line minutes, you can’t beat that!
• Unlimited free logins!
• The record feature never seemed to work for me.
• No downloads, no addon installs!

GoToMeeting, I recommend them!

• $49.00 per monthly for 1 account.
• $39.00 if paying annually, $468.00 per year for 1 account. Up to 15 people allowed.
• The BEST conferencing phone feature, very easy.
• The is a small download when presenting, so that is a downside.

Fuze Meeting

• A very good service overall BUT 120 minutes is the max amount per month on the conference line (toll free line or fetch feature.) 6 cents per minute adds up! They should make this unlimited for paying users.
• They have many price options.
• The record feature never seemed to work for me.
• Great Skype integration.

WebEx

• $49 per month.
• Per pay annually $39 per month.

Feel free to let me know of any others and I’ll include them in this blog post.

Ignite events let people do 5 minute presentation, very fast but if done right….great.

Here is one by Tim O’Reilly:

Another interesting presentation:

I found this great article on the web about my Lenovo laptop. Lenovo doesn’t make it very easy to reinstall windows on the laptop but this post really helped me so it may just help others with the same laptop questions.

The original post can be found here.

INSTRUCTIONS:

Windows XP Installation Instructions

F1 = BIOS Menu
Restart after each installation, even if it doesn’t tell you to.

Installation Steps:
1. Change BIOS
……….a. Config > Serial ATA (SATA) > Set AHCI to Compatibility
……….b. Hit Esc
……….c. Hit Esc again
……….d. Startup > Boot > Move ATAPI CD0 to the top spot (1)
……….e. Hit F10 to save and exit. The computer restarts

2. Install Windows

3. Take CD out

4. Intel INF Chipset
……….a. Auto-install

5. Intel Matrix Storage Manager Driver
……….a. Unzip to C:\Drivers\Win\IMSM
……….b. Double-click install.cmd
……….c. Restart computer and enter BIOS
………………..i. Config > Serial ATA (SATA) > Set AHCI to AHCI
………………..ii. Hit Esc ? Hit Esc again
………………..iii. Startup > Boot > Move ATAPI CD0 to the second spot (2)
…………………………1. Hit F10 to save and exit. The computer restarts
……….d. Install new device drivers
……….e. Computer will restart

6. ACPI Power Management
……….a. C:\Drivers\Win\IBMPM\Setup.exe

7. Video Drivers
……….a. C:\Drivers\Win\Display\Setup.exe

8. Audio Drivers

8.1 PCI Simple Communications Controller
Click here for drivers

9. UltraNav Driver
……….a. C:\Drivers\Win\Unav\Setup.exe

10. UltraNav Utility
……….a. C:\Drivers\Win\UnavUtil\Setup.exe

11. Hotkey Driver (on screen display only)
……….a. C:\Drivers\Win\Hotkey\Setup.exe

12. Atmel TPM
……….a. C:\Drivers\Win\TPM\Setup.exe

13. Intel PRO/1000 LAN Adapter
……….a. Use Device Manager > Ethernet Controller
……….b. Drivers > Update Driver > C:\Drivers\Win\Ethernet\Pro1000\Win32

14. Wireless Drivers

15. Thinkvantage Power Manager
……….a. C:\Drivers\W2K\PWRMGR\Setup.exe

16. Turn on Clear Type

Restarting/reboot a Windows XP remotely, use ‘shutdown’ command from the command console.
Run cmd.exe, and type ‘shutdown -r -t 0′ to restart the machine.

Another list I plan on adding to over time…

Online networking tools:

• Subnet Calculator

Unix/Linux networking tools:
dig

Simple examples of dig, the dns utility

To get an A record for an address:
$dig www.google.com

To get any record for an address:
$dig www.google.com ANY

To use a specific dns server:
$dig @ns.google.com www.google.com

To find the MX records of a domain:
$dig google.com MX

Mac help:
Accessing a windows shared drive from a mac

Online tools:

• CHMOD Calculator
• (I will be adding to this list overtime….)

Offline tools:

• (I will be adding to this list overtime….)

Software tools:

• Webmin: A web-based interface for system administration for Unix and Linux.
• (I will be adding to this list overtime….)