VoIP increasingly is becoming accepted as a mainstream alternative to traditional telephony. With the quality and reliability issues solved, businesses, as well as state and federal government agencies, are drawn to its low cost and advanced functions — such as unified communications and collaborative conferencing.

+ The US Department of Defense has contracted Nortel Networks to the tidy tune of $20 million, to help migrate to a private VoIP based telephone system. -don’t kid yourself that VoIP is a passing fad.

+ I needed a new copy of HoverSnap and found a bunch of other freeware offered by HoverDesk:

HoverSnap v0.8 :

HoverSnap is a a free handy snapshot tool with jpg, png, bmp and gif support.HoverSnap can take snapshots of the full screen, active window or a selected area. It can even capture layered windows (alphablended ones under 2K / XP). You can even FTP upload your screenshots !

You can set up the capture folder / filename and format.
You can reduce the capture size.
Auto-generate filename option will add the time stamp (date/time) to your filename in order to be able to take several captures without having to change the filename.
Optional sound when capture is done.

RegSeeker 1.35:

RegSeeker is a perfect companion for your Windows registry !
RegSeeker includes a powerful registry cleaner and can display various informations like your startup entries, several histories (even index.dat files), installed applications and much more ! With RegSeeker you can search for any item inside your registry, export/delete the results, open them in the registry. RegSeeker also includes a tweaks panel to optimize your OS ! Now RegSeeker includes a file tool to search for duplicate files, bad shortcuts and more !

HoverIP v1.0 beta :

HoverIP is a powerful set of IP utilities, all inside a single box !

With HoverIP you can display your IP configuration (on all network cards), perform different tasks like NSLOOKUP, PING, TRACEROUTE, SCAN PORTS or network, and manage your ROUTES in a very convenient way !

HoverMatch :

HoverMatch is a FREEWARE utility designed to allow desktop customizers to modify exiting themes and skins to their tastes by altering an images Hue, Saturation and Brightness values and saving the results. This utility makes it possible for users to modify themes and skins without requiring an image editor program like Photoshop.

Features:

Skin colorizing preserves the transparency “key color”. This can be “Cmagic pink” (255,0,255) or any user specified color.
Lock Filter to re-apply the same filter for each new loaded image.
Zoom with optional lock for appplying the same zoom valye for every image loaded (zoom is only for preview)
Target color panel an easy way to select the hue/sat/brightness values to match a selected target.
A moveable preview image (to place it near the target color for example).
2 Color pickers included: 1 for the color to exclude (bitmap color picker) / 1 for the target color (desktop color picker).
Bitmap / Icon (size from 16×16 up to 128×128) / Jpeg recolorizing support (changed save to bitmap files).
Icon to Bitmap conversion: Icon files (.ICO) can be saved into Bitmaps in a very easy way.
Sophisticated image browsing: - a small thumbnail preview in the image list with different text colors to identify the image types.
Details View: image size / bpp / date display.

+ Going to panel discussions alone kinda sucks, but if I have to, I’ll go alone to Vancouverism: A Distinct Architectural Culture. It’s 10 bucks, on April 7th. William Gibson and ex-Mayor and ex-Premier Mike Harcourt will be taking part in the panel. I read about it in the Vancouver Courier.

Our city is not only a model for modern urban planning around the world, it’s an architectural phenomenon.

“Vancouver has very high residential density in its downtown core, as well as public amenities like parks, the arts, and a high level of services,” said Trevor Boddy, a local urban architectural critic and writer. “That model is now so associated with our city it’s become known as ‘Vancouverism.’”

+ Soon we may see, as part of the global anti-terrorism campaign, headlines such as NORTH KOREA CREATES LARGE ARSENAL OF T.REX DINOSAURS. SOUTH KOREA REQUESTS US PROTECTION! Countries that are sanctioned from nuclear weapons manufacture, or which cannot afford to create one, will no doubt be very interested in the latest scientific discovery that may soon lead to test-tube dinosaurs.

Conventional wisdom among paleontologists states that when dinosaurs died and became fossilized, soft tissues didn’t preserve – the bones were essentially transformed into “rocks” through a gradual replacement of all organic material by minerals. New research by a North Carolina State University paleontologist, however, could literally turn that theory inside out.
Dr. Mary Schweitzer, assistant professor of paleontology with a joint appointment at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, has succeeded in isolating soft tissue from the femur of a 68-million-year-old dinosaur. Not only is the tissue largely intact, it’s still transparent and pliable, and microscopic interior structures resembling blood vessels and even cells are still present.

+ There’$ a whole lot of oil in northern Canada. An oil re$erve $econd only to $audi Arabia’$. And there’$ a $truggle for and again$t it, as well as hint$ of a $truggle over who will con$ume it.

+ Looks like sometime this spring will mark the beginning of the end of filesharing copyrighted material in Canada. A new law will be voted on this spring to make illegal the circumvention and sharing of copyrighted material on the internet. –get your copyrighted material as quick as you can!!

+ My eyes kind of bugged out as I read this, and I kept thinking ‘really?’, ‘oh, yah?, ‘hmm..’

One of the founders of Greenpeace says the world environmentalist movement today has lost its way and is demanding policies that are a greater threat to the environment and civilization than the ills it seeks to prevent.

Dr. Patrick Moore, a self-described “born-again ecologist,” says the movement’s drive against technological advances, including genetic engineering, is based on bad or non-existent science and that today’s environmentalist radicals are being used by a variety of corporate and political interests.

–saying humans have not been proven responsible for CO2 in the ozone sounds fishy, as does praising the US for not signing the Kyoto accord because at least they’re honest about it not being in their best interest.
–other than that he seems to make some good points.

+ I’ve been finding Google News stories less and less relevant lately. Until the recent addition of page customization. Now you can add as many story sections as you want, with up to 9 stories in each. I’ve deleted the Business (too general), Sports (?? what’s that..), Entertainment (too much gossip) and Health (too many general medical topics) sections, and created quite a few new ones. Now I’m finding I can hardly read all the interesting stories I’m finding.

Still on Google, they recently sent a cease and desist order to British programmer Julian Bond because he wrote a PHP script that displayed customized Google News feed on his website. Google is very possessive about their product, and does not allow third party sites to display their headlines………..but….. you can install his PHP script, gnews2rss, to create any number of customized Google News feeds to use in your RSS news aggregator!! Just don’t display them on your site

+ I was a little hesitant to post this, but then again I’ve been hesitant to post a lot of things.–of this I am aware.

Can knowing the chemical make-up of love demystify it and therefore make one less suseptible to it’s many forms. Not likely. Love easily kicks ass over intellect. That’s obvious from seeing what goes on all the time. What scientists need to discover is the secret of that moment in time when two people meet who are receptive to each other. That would be something. But, in lieu of that, we get these studies of the chemical make-up of ‘ lust, romantic love and long-term attachment.’ Highly digestible.

Love Connection - The science of love
understanding the neurochemical pathways that regulate social attachments may help to deal with defects in people’s ability to form relationships. All relationships, whether they are those of parents with their children, spouses with their partners, or workers with their colleagues, rely on an ability to create and maintain social ties. Defects can be disabling, and become apparent as disorders such as autism and schizophrenia–and, indeed, as the serious depression that can result from rejection in love. Research is also shedding light on some of the more extreme forms of sexual behaviour. And, controversially, some utopian fringe groups see such work as the doorway to a future where love is guaranteed because it will be provided chemically, or even genetically engineered from conception.