{"id":16190,"date":"2009-11-14T13:03:18","date_gmt":"2009-11-14T20:03:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/?p=16190"},"modified":"2009-11-14T13:03:18","modified_gmt":"2009-11-14T20:03:18","slug":"technology-marches-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2009\/11\/14\/technology-marches-on.html","title":{"rendered":"Technology marches on!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/div>\n

When we moved into the house, we had a variety of landlines in the place.\u00a0 We splurged and went for one early cordless phone for in the family room.\u00a0 That was about 1995.<\/p>\n

When we did the closets in the master bedroom in 2000, pre-Katherine, one of the tasks was to rerun the phone jack from the east wall (where we’d had the bed, and where the new closet was going) over to the west wall.\u00a0 No choice, really.\u00a0 We also ran one down into the garage, to set up a phone there for when we were doing yard work.\u00a0 (That latter one never got a handset installed — it drew too much additional power from the line.)<\/p>\n

When we redecorated in the family room in 2001 or so, we had to do more phone line jiggery pokery — add one over in the corner where Margie’s desk would be.<\/p>\n

And when we redid the office\/guest room upstairs, we ran some special conduit behind the drawers to let a phone line run from over where the jack is (under the printer) to where the office workspace would be (other end of the wall)<\/p>\n

During this time, we began to join the world of cordless phones<\/em>. Ooooooh. We had a first generation cordless, eventually, in the family room. Then around 2003 or so, we decided to be Frightfully Clever. We got a Uniden cordless phone (900 MHz) for the family room — that had a second charging station we could set up another handset (oooooh!) behind the couch, so we could answer the phone without getting up. What hath God wrought?<\/em><\/p>\n

Over time, we added to our piecemeal collection.\u00a0 Margie traded out her phone at her desk for a stand-alone cordless.\u00a0 We bought another pair of Unidens for the upstairs — same model, but different frequency — so that we could have a cordless in the bedroom (much easier for handing a call over in the middle of the night) and one in the office on the same circuit.\u00a0 Except, of course, that was too far away, so that extra handset went into the craft room, unnecessarily.<\/p>\n

We even had one of our older stand-alones in the basement for taking calls during games.<\/p>\n

Of course, these had limited interactivity.\u00a0 With the Uniden pairs, only one of the handsets could be active at a time.\u00a0 They all had fairly limited range.\u00a0 We actually tried a few years later some nice 2.4GHz phone — and promptly had to take them back because they frelled up the WiFi.<\/p>\n

So, 6 years later or so … annoyed by the kludges, and facing rechargable phones that are beginning to not go long between recharges — we broke down and bought a whole new freaking phone system for the house — a Panasonic KX-TG6440 system at Costco.\u00a0 It comes with five handsets (2-3 of which can be active at a time), it’s all the new spiffy Dect 6.0 wireless standard, it can share phone books between the handsets, it does everything but make the calls for you …<\/p>\n

And I realized, as I was installing it this morning, that this leaves us with a whole lot less need for phone jacks in the household,* since the one in the bedroom, the office**, and Margie’s desk will now be unused.\u00a0 When I think of the effort we’ve gone through on that …<\/p>\n

Kind of amazing, at least for this old codger.<\/p>\n

* Yes, I realize some people have gone all-wireless.\u00a0 We’re not “there” yet; I think we will always have our own land line, for a variety of reasons.\u00a0 Note that we’ll still have a dedicated non-cordless land line connection out of the kitchen, in case the power goes off and the cell batteries wear down.<\/small><\/p>\n

** The fax machine on the printer still gets hooked into that jack as needed.\u00a0 Though we have to unhook it because it has an unfortunate tendency to suddenly “pick up” in the middle of phone calls, even though we have sternly told it not to.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When we moved into the house, we had a variety of landlines in the place.\u00a0 We splurged and went for one early cordless phone for in the family room.\u00a0 That was about 1995. When we did the closets in the master bedroom in 2000, pre-Katherine, one of the tasks was to rerun the phone jack … Continue reading “Technology marches on!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-home-improvement","category-my-computer"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":10827,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/06\/21\/let_your_fingers_do_the_w.html","url_meta":{"origin":16190,"position":0},"title":"Let your fingers do the walking … away …","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 21-Jun-07 10:59am","format":false,"excerpt":"Phone books, which traditionally have grown steadily over the years ... are beginning to shrink.\u00a0 The reason?\u00a0 More people are using cell phones, primarily or as their only line, and...","rel":"","context":"In "Hi-Tech"","block_context":{"text":"Hi-Tech","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/hi-tech"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9531,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2006\/06\/13\/changing_times.html","url_meta":{"origin":16190,"position":1},"title":"Changing times","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 13-Jun-06 11:50am","format":false,"excerpt":"When I first entered college, there were clay tablets phones in the hallway throughout our dorm, one for each hallway segment, usually shared among five or six rooms. 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To go east, we...","rel":"","context":"In "Travel"","block_context":{"text":"Travel","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/travel"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6815,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2004\/12\/27\/a_fine_way_to_s.html","url_meta":{"origin":16190,"position":5},"title":"A fine way to start the work week","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 27-Dec-04 9:36am","format":false,"excerpt":"In the course of 15 minutes, I discovered: I'd spilled coffee on my beige slacks in the car. I'd left my cell phone home. Not only was the IT manager...","rel":"","context":"In "Job Jollies"","block_context":{"text":"Job Jollies","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/job-jollies"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16190\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}