Leasing Your Phone

I'm not talking about cell phones. Back in the old days of people leased (rented) the phones that they had in their house. AT&T would come into your house and hard wire the phones. There were no phone jacks. Even up into the 70's and 80's people were still leasing phones, although you had a jack on the wall by then. Leasing was popular because the technology was new and it was more affordable to pay a few bucks each month to lease your phone than to buy one. Also with new technology you are worried about the expense of repairing, replacing or upgrading the phone - all of which is solved by a lease.

Did you know that people in the US are still leasing their phones? According to this AP article there are still 750,000 people on the US still leasing phones. Can you believe this? I can. Because the phone companies are taking advantage of them... mainly older people. This article explains how an 82 year old lady in Ohio was paying $29.10 a month for two old black rotary phones from the 1960's. She apparently paid over $14,000 over the life of the lease for these two phones.

The phone companies say that they sent out letters in 1985 allowing people to get out of the lease. If you didn't opt-out then they keep charging you. I can see this for a few years, but it is now 21 years later and allowing people to pay this kind of monthly fee for a 1960 phone is pure abuse.

The FireFox Browser

I've always been an Internet Explorer user. I never had any problems with security or anything else with IE. I figured why change if IE is working for me. My new boss likes everyone to use FireFox and use IE only when necessary (Windows Update, etc). So, at work I've been using FireFox for the last several weeks, but continued to use IE at home. Well, this weekend I decided that FireFox had some nice features and I have switched to FireFox as my default browser at home. Yes, another browser convert! I especially like the login/password functionality in FF over IE. I have come to really like the tabbed browsing and I use a few handy plug-ins too.

If this old die hard IE user can switch to FF then just about anybody can. I say give it a try... you may like it. :)

Google is Listening

According to this article in The Register, Google is developing technology that would listen to sound in your room (from the mic on your computer) and feed you advertisements based on the sounds they hear. Is this cool or what? I'd love to see this in action, but I have to admit that I don't think I'd allow it to function in my home or workplace for anything more than experimenting with the service. I'm sure they would log this information along with all the search requests that they're logging now. This is cool yet scary.