More Things We Like

It's been one of those love-hate weeks.  I got a Droid Incredible telephone.  I love it.  It's busy doing all sorts of wonderful things for me, including monitoring my servers and waking me up in the middle of the night if anything goes wrong :-).  Okay, that's part of the love-hate.

But in general I love the phone.  Everything works.  I've not found it difficult to deal with.  And after a fury of downloading apps, I've finally settled down and started to actually use it.

Here comes another hate part.  My home office is in a very rural area in a horseshoe-shaped valley.  Cell phone coverage was always sparse with AT&T, but with Verizon it has been the pits.  It's okay if I leave the house.  It's great in our driveway.  But in my office it's dropped-call-city. 

Verizon sells a small femtocell system for just this purpose.  We have great broadband coverage here (fiber to my house - in the middle of the country) but as I said, cell phone coverage is spotty.  This little puppy plugs in to my router and becomes a little cell phone tower right in my house.  Covers the house and a fair amount of the outside really well.  And is just about completely transparent when set up.  So I've gone from no bars to 4 bars of reception in my office, and my clients no longer have to put up with being bounced to Google Voice almost all the time. 

Happy Steve.

Speaking of which -- I'm in the process of setting up a couple conferences, and I've been thinking that it would be way cool if I could take credit cards for admission.  But there are always issues with phone lines, etc.  SO I happened to remember that I'd recently seen something about Square  -- a service that gives you a little card swiper that plugs into the audio jack on your cell phone, and lets you read cards and take money from them.  I've signed up, and am anxiously awaiting the arrival of my little card reader -- along with, apparently, everyone else in the world.  More when the thing actually arrives.  In the meantime -