Random notes. I’m trying to lower the stacks on my desk.

Working with our distributed videoconferencing exercise program this morning, our instructor and camera crew are at the video studio…I’m in my home office logged into the studio multi-point control unit to monitor all the connections with our patients in their homes, (we’ve got 7 connected today), and our chief engineer is logged in from the Bahahmas. All staff, CE, studio and myself are logged into an instant messenger. The CE is supposed to be on vacation, but always takes pride in demonstrating “conspicuous connectivity.” Last time I was in the studio, he showed me his car, located in the parking lot a quarter mile away, on a GPS screen on his computer.

Occasionally, I have to just step back in amazement that all this stuff works.

From Kim Kommando’s newspaper column: There is a free add-on to eliminate spam for OutLook Express located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/spambayes. Once I found this, I downloaded it from a mirror server in St. Petersburg.

A commercial spam eliminating progam is available from Symantec.
Cost is about $40.00 retail (you can pay, download, and install it in about a half hour.) Tried this to mitigate a bad case of inbound spam that didn’t seem to respond to tweaking at the server end. Further recommendations for anti-spam programs are in the current issue of Consumer Reports and on their web site.

The July issue of VON (Voice over the Network Magazine) has an interview with Henning Schulzrinne of Columbia University. Schulzrinne and his colaborators are authors of major papers for and the inventor of SIP, the Session Initiation Protocol. . SIP is a major building block for making telephone connections over the internet.