VOIP!
Since I almost never post about the good (or at least interesting) parts of my job....
I just got to spend the morning playing with Skype. For those of you who don't know, it's a voice over IP (VOIP) application that basically lets you make phone calls over the internet. If you're calling someone else who has skype, it's free, if you're calling a landline or cell, it costs. But I'd never actually sat down to work with it before, and it's kind of interesting.
See, one of our professors is collaborating with some folks in Australia. Between long-distance charges and the fees OIT (the University-wide IT group) charge for teleconference equipment, she'd spent about $1,000 in the last year or so. So someone mentioned Skype to her, and she wanted to try it. It's pretty neat... and, of course, in order to test it on her computer, she had to have a computer to call, so I set it up on my computer as well. I'm not sure whether I'll leave it installed, but I might. It'll depend a lot on who else that I know has it. For instance, if I can use it to call my sister, it'd be much more worth having.
So, in any case, it looks like it'll probably work for the prof. in question, so I've probably just saved her quite a bit of money. Also, she might be able to start doing videoconferencing with the group in Australia, which is something she hadn't had the option to do before. So, I at least accomplished something useful today.
I just got to spend the morning playing with Skype. For those of you who don't know, it's a voice over IP (VOIP) application that basically lets you make phone calls over the internet. If you're calling someone else who has skype, it's free, if you're calling a landline or cell, it costs. But I'd never actually sat down to work with it before, and it's kind of interesting.
See, one of our professors is collaborating with some folks in Australia. Between long-distance charges and the fees OIT (the University-wide IT group) charge for teleconference equipment, she'd spent about $1,000 in the last year or so. So someone mentioned Skype to her, and she wanted to try it. It's pretty neat... and, of course, in order to test it on her computer, she had to have a computer to call, so I set it up on my computer as well. I'm not sure whether I'll leave it installed, but I might. It'll depend a lot on who else that I know has it. For instance, if I can use it to call my sister, it'd be much more worth having.
So, in any case, it looks like it'll probably work for the prof. in question, so I've probably just saved her quite a bit of money. Also, she might be able to start doing videoconferencing with the group in Australia, which is something she hadn't had the option to do before. So, I at least accomplished something useful today.