Relying on a soft client running on Windows as my sole resource for making important calls has been a recipe for disaster. Plain old telephone service may be old fashioned, but you know what? With POTS, 99% of the time the phone just works. The same can’t be said for my current voice over IP setup, which I am relying on in my new office.

I am in my third week of a pilot VoIP project. My setup now includes a Plantronics cordless headset in conjunction with Siemens "soft phone" client software on my laptop.

One issue is call quality. It’s either great or it just plain sucks.

Oh, hi! Here’s Tuesday’s IT Blogwatch: in which Microsoft reveals more details about Silverlight (née WPF/E). Not to mention baby diaper tracking graphs…

Eric Lai reports:

Microsoft Corp. kicked off its Mix07 Web development conference today by announcing that a full portable version of its flagship .Net programming environment will be fused to the next version of its Silverlight ‘Flash-killer’ rich media technology … can allow multimedia developers to juice their Silverlight apps with .Net — even on non-Windows machines.
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[Microsoft chief software architect, Ray] Ozzie also said that Web and graphic designers and developers will have free use of Microsoft’s Windows Live Platform, a Web storage service, to store, run and show off their Silverlight applications and videos. Microsoft also released the alpha of its Silverlight Streaming service, with which developers will be able to store up to 4GB of high-definition video and stream it out to Silverlight users.
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The beta of Silverlight 1.0, which was known as Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere until two weeks ago, was released today. The final version is due sometime this summer.