I wrote a while back that I was looking for a replacement for my T-Mobile @Home service. Even though I was very happy with it, I was moving my cell phone service to Republic Wireless (which I highly recommend) so I needed to get a new home phone service or drop it all together.

I tried MagicJack and the quality was so bad that it didn’t last a day.

Next in line was NetTalk. That seem to work well, so I ported my number smoothly, only to find out that the service didn’t really work as well as I first thought. Incoming calls were pretty poor voice quality and outgoing calls were unusable. Then, when I upgraded my router, the box just started to disconnect from the network for no reason and had to be restarted almost daily

It’s been almost a year and I was just going to let my service expire and my old home number just go away. I decided to give it one more try.  I searched Ebay and discovered the OBi100. I ordered one for $40 and was glad I ordered early because I wanted to try it before porting my number again. It got a little lost in shipping, but arrived 9 or 10 days late.

This box uses Google Voice to make calls, but can be used with many different VOIP service providers, so even though I choose Google Voice because it’s great and FREE, if they ever change or go away I have other options.

I plugged it in and only had limited service. It didn’t really work. I immediately thought “Oh Crap, not again”, but then realized I had plugged it in to my network switch. I moved some network wires around, plugged it directly into my router and it worked perfectly. I changed a few settings at Google Voice and this time did extensive testing. It couldn’t have worked better.

My next challenge was to port my home phone number to Google Voice was a bit more complicated. Google Voice is a wonderful service, if you haven’t tried it I would say absolutely do. There is a one time $20 charge to port your phone number, but otherwise it’s completely free. My problem was that Google doesn’t port landlines, only mobile numbers.

My solution? I went to my local Target store, bought a prepaid flip phone on sale for $5 and a card for $10 worth of minutes. I went to their website and ported my phone number into that, waited about a week for that to happen. Once my number ported, I activated my phone and used my $10 minutes card to make and receive a few calls to be sure everything with the port was hunky dory and it was. At this point Google voice gladly accepted my phone number, so it cost me $35 to port instead of $20, but still quite the bargain in my book.

I know Google Voice has been incorporated into their Hangouts app in my phone and maybe their service may change in the future, but I’m not locked in by the OBi100. So if the service does change in the future I can always switch providers, but for now I’m lovin’ it. Google Voice has some wonderful features. I can ring any or all of my phones with it or I can have it send me an email or text when I get a voicemail, with the message transcribed and many other features.

I’m going to highly recommend the OBi100 for quality, service and value.

MS Awareness Week this year is March 11-17, 2013

My wife Nancy is on the Board of the Local Pittsburgh chapter of the National MS Society. She is also a person living with this disease.
We’re asking everyone to put on a little orange color, to help spread the word this week.

If you would like to do a little more the MS Society website has some great ideas.

http://www.nationalmssociety.org/chapters/pax/take-action/ms-awareness-week/index.aspx
http://www.nationalmssociety.org/chapters/pax/take-action/ms-awareness-week/msaw-events/index.aspx

We’re also walking in the Walk MS 2013, on Sunday, April 21, 2013 starting at Point Park
Team Dancing Nancies
http://main.nationalmssociety.org/site/TR?team_id=320472&fr_id=19833&pg=team

My client wanted to have extra forms on their user registration page on their WordPress site so they could capture more information about the visitors who signed up for their website.

In the past I had used a plugin called Register Plus Redux, but unfortunately it’s not supported any more. Because of the popularity of WordPress there’s usually a similar plugin available. That was true and easily found with a quick search called Cimy User Extra Fields.

The next problem that I had was that my client was not happy at all with the look of the standard WordPress registration form. It’s pretty easy to change the look of the standard registration page, but there are many people who want it to have the same look and feel as the rest of their pages and posts. A custom registration page for WordPress, not an unreasonable request.

Unfortunately this was no easy chore, but after many hours of searching I came across a plugin called Theme My Login. What a find! It is simple to install and worked great. It’s very simple and can be used in it’s default format, but is also highly customizable.

I can see where I’m going to use this for many clients.

My wife bought me a $25 gift card from McDonalds for Christmas.
When I tried to use it the day after Christmas for a coffee they told me it had a $0 balance.
When I looked it up online, it activated on Dec 20th with $5 & was used up on the 23rd (My wife bought the card on the 24th)

I called their corporate office and the woman there just kept apologizing over and over and saying that since we didn’t keep the receipt there was nothing she could do. I probably was meaner then I should have been to the woman, but I asked her several times to stop apologizing, it was just making me mad, but she kept on and on. When I asked for a supervisor she told me that it was the corporate headquarters and there was no one above her (like they would let a supervisor answer the phone first). I was so mad I hung up and called back a couple of days later after I calmed down and found the credit card receipt. They promised they would speak to the store owner and get right back to me. Still haven’t heard anything.

Couldn’t they contact the store and see if the register was over $25 that day? or something? anything? How else could I have spent exactly $25 that day? Was there an Arch card issued at that time? I called the local store, twice and was told that the Arch Cards were handled by corporate, but at least she told me that she would try and check into it. I haven’t heard back from them either. We do have a credit card statement and we’ll see if they can help, but all I wanted was for McDonalds to look into it and get back to me.

This has been very disappointing and I’m sure my lack of business won’t mean much to McDonalds going forward, but comon, get your act together. This is 2013, you guys are tracking everything and negative social media can be a monster.

I did hear something from them today when I used the #McDStories hashtag on Twitter. Something that’s been called a huge marketing fail, but it may do some good for me, along with this post (or maybe not).

Update 1-18 – Spoke to Kim Musgrave with customer satisfaction. She apologized for taking so long to get to the bottom of this and said a new card is on the way. They saw where someone had tried to reload the card three times and it failed. I’m glad it seems to be settled, was just an error and not something nefarious, but I agree with Kim that this took way too long

Update 2-1 – Arch cards arrived along with a couple of extra freebees. Thanks to Kim, but still a long and very annoying process. I may give away the cards, not sure yet if I’m going back.

My wife Nancy is on the board of the National MS Society WPa chapter. She is also someone who lives with this disease.

As the holiday season approaches, the local MS chapter is kicking-off their Annual Holiday Gift Program!

Each year the NMSS coordinates this program to provide gifts to people living with MS who reside in long term care facilities.
Knowing that nursing homes and personal care homes can sometimes be lonely places, they strive to put smiles on the faces of these individuals and let them know that the National MS Society is thinking of them.

If you would like to help or just know more, please visit the site

Thanks for listening and Happy Holidays to all.
–
Cheers,
Jim Lillicotch

I wrote a while back about trying the NetTalk device for my home phone. At first I thought it was working well and wrote a good review, but more and more people that I spoke to were telling me that they had a hard time hearing me. I discovered WiFi didn’t work well in either direction, so I plugged it into my router. Then incoming calls seemed to work better. Later I found out with outgoing calls the other person could had to struggle to understand what I was saying.

Things seem to have gotten worse and outgoing calls are pretty much unusable. At this point I’m not sure if I’m going to try another VOIP box. I was very happy with T-Mobile’s @Home service, but I may just dump the home phone altogether and send my number to Google Voice.

Either way, forget what I said earlier and stay away from from NetTalk.

Well I finally joined Pinterest. Not sure yet how much I’ll use it, but I’ll let you know. Any suggestions?

I’m usually not the kind of alarmist that tells you there is this horrible new malware out there that will eat your children if you open this attachment, but….

I am reading more and more about folks finding flash drives, plugging them in and getting bad stuff in their machines from them. Sometimes it’s done on purpose, others it’s folks with computer viruses just losing their memory card. Either way it can be bad for you.

This is not something new. I wrote about it back in 2006. The real problem is that Windows machines come with autorun turned on by default and anything that you plug in, just runs automatically. Exactly the opposite of good security. If your computer does that you should consider turning it off (XP) right away.

People ask me all the time what the best way to “Optimize” their website. To be found by the search engines.

When I think of the word “optimize”, I don’t think of the search engines, I think of my human visitors.
What’s the best and easiest way for them to get what they want.

This is a great way to think about it
Website Optimization Basics on search engine watch

Last week I spent another great week in the Outer Banks.

Just love the OBX, Cape Hatteras and Avon, NC in particular.

Here are some photos for this year. (older pics)