Neal Waterstreet

VoIP with OBi100

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We decided to cut the cord a while back and overall that has worked out fine. One of the things I found that I missed was having a phone at the house. Its also convienient to have a home phone number instead of using a mobile one. Using a VoIP service seemed like a good solution, but there were always some issues with it.

I read about the ObiHai ATAs and selected the OBI100. It was inexpensive, but the deciding factor was that the ObiHai devices all work with Google Voice. I think ObiHai has a VoIP service you can use, but the flexibility of having another Google Voice number was too much to pass up.

You can read about the setup here, and it was very simple. It took just a few minutes to get installed and configured.

I am really happy with it so far. It seems like a good solution for those of us that no longer use analog phones.

Issue installing PowerPivot (again)

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I have run into this problem a few times and it always takes me a while to remember the solution.

Installing PowerPivot on Excel 2010 appears to be successful, but the tabs do not appear. When I tried to add it directly in the Add-Ins section it still gives an error message “Not loaded. A runtime error occurred during the loading of the COM Add-in.”. The solution for me has been to install VSTO 4.0 Runtime.

See this thread on MSDN for the details

Try the statement later.

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I got an error message I’d never seen before while altering a database.

Database is in transition. Try the statement later. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 952)

Try the statement later? What does that mean?

I altered a column in a test database and immediately tried to take it offline. That is when I got the error. After searching for the message I found this:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sqlgetstarted/thread/e779230a-87bc-4cee-b223-98a029097dc1

One of the solutions was to search sys.dm_exec_requests for an alter process on that database. Sure enough it was suspended. I killed the SPID and the database was back online pretty quickly.

New theme for the blog

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I have finally changed the theme on the blog. I still have not figured out all the details and completed the customization, mostly due to the new theme having many more options.

Now for some content…