Neal Waterstreet

VoIP with OBi100

by Leave a Comment

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.

Sling TV trial

by Leave a Comment

I signed up for Sling TV as soon as it was announced. I was still looking to replace Aereo, but couldn’t find anything. Sling TV is a lot better, but it doesn’t really have a DVR. I finally got my invite yesterday.

Sling TV seems to provide what I really wanted – ESPN/ESPN2 and CNN. Those were really the only channels I missed that were not provided OTA. There is a pretty good set of channels inluded and for an extra fee you can purchase more channels. The sports channels package includes all the ESPN channels and I may add that in the fall. For now I think I am going with some channels for the kids.

At first glance, the picture quality is very good streaming on my Roku. I was able to install phone it on my phone and tablet and the quality was good there too. One problem is see is that it looks like only one stream can be used at a time. When I turned on the tablet the television paused. This could be a problem but we’ll have to wait and see.

No picture quality problems with college basketball on ESPN and the other channels look great too. I just wish I would’ve had this during the college bowl season…

Update: AMC is now included in the base package – Better Call Saul/The Walking Dead/Mad Men.

Atlanta Microsoft BI April meeting notes

by Leave a Comment

This month’s meeting was sponsored by Pyramid Analytics. Remote demo but a reminder about following up with questions in person at SQL Saturday Atlanta.

The topic this month was Power BI by Brian Jackson of Microsoft. Much more technicial detail in this presentation than the one’s I’d seen previously. Sounds like Power Query is here to stay. Lots of good demos and useful information as always from Brian.

Quick raffle for some shirts and we’re done. Lots of discussion afterwards about the upcoming SQL Saturday in Atlanta. I didn’t get an exact count, but looked like a good turnout.

Atlanta Microsoft BI March meeting notes

by Leave a Comment

This month’s meeting was sponsored by X-IO. Good demo of an interesting product that delivers very high performance. It would be good to see a full presentation in the future.

The speaker for this month was Aneel Ismaily presenting “Building a Custom ETL Framework with SSIS 2012”. A quick poll showed a surprisingly high number of people in the audience are still running 2008 versus 2012. Good overview of 2012 logging features and comparison with 2008. Lots of links to samples in the slides and some detail about specific tables. The presentation was well done and included some good comments and questions afterwards from the audience.

A quick raffle for the vendor giveaways following the presentation and we’re done. Like most meetings, it seems like there is more networking/discussion after the meeting than before. Good turnout for the meeting, especially considering many people are out of town for spring break.