PhillipBlanton.com

While waiting in the Denver airport, for an 11:10 AM flight to nashville, tennessee, I am sitting at a Quizno's in terminal A, that happens to be next door to a bar. The bar seems to be loosely associated with the Quizno's, because the barmaid keeps hawking Quizno's sandwiches and salads to the bar patrons. Many bar patrons are drinking beer, whisky and gin drinks at 9:00 AM. This would be totally unacceptable behavior outside of an airport setting. Apparently since airport patrons have been or will be traveling. The time zone excuse makes for a drinky drinkin' good time! The barmaid seems to be in her late thirties, and is enjoying the heck out of offering a "hot weenie" to every person who stops by. Apparently the Quizno's here ... [More]

I have had a Skype In number for a few years. When I first bought it, it cost me about $20 per year. I thought that was a good price for having a real number that people could use to call me on Skype. That and the ability to have Skype forward all calls to my cell phone when I wasn't at the computer, made my SkypeIn number very useful. Last year, when I went to extend the number for another year, the cost had gone up to $35 I think. I moaned, and paid it. It was still a good value. This year, I went to extend my Skype In number and see that it has increased again to $60 per year, plus they have changed Skype Out to a subscription-based service that they want $2.95 per month for. Skype Out used to be a service that came with... [More]

I am a software developer. I write software that targets the Microsoft .NET framework. I have switched to a Mac for all of my development work. You can too. About a year ago, I bought a 15" Macbook pro for my 16 year-old daughter, for her birthday. I was on a business trip to Oak RIdge, Tennessee and took her new laptop with me before i gave it to her. While on the trip, I fell in love with the operating system. For the past eight years or so, I have done all my work on a VMWare virtual machine. I haven't installed a development environment on my host operating system in as long. Therefore, the switch to Mac was seamless. I purchased VWare Fusion (for mac), ~$70, and just copied my virtual machines over to the new mac without a hitch. V... [More]