I recently had the opportunity to talk to Kris Reyes and Tony The Cameraperson from CityTV about VoIP:

To add some detail:

• I’m not normal. I don’t have a landline or a mobile. Big Canadian Telco’s are clueless when it comes to pricing this stuff.
• I have Skype at ~$36/year to make unlimited calls across North America. Annoyingly, Skype can’t receive calls (“SkypeIn“) in Canada, although people have been asking for it since at least 2006.
• I use Gizmo5 at $20/3 months to receive calls, in Skype’s stead. That basically gives me a “real phone number” in Toronto’s 416 area code.
• I can receive live calls if I’m running Gizmo5′s desktop application (similar to Skype’s desktop app), but I rarely do, unless the call is scheduled ahead of time. Usually, calls and texts go straight to my voicemail, and those voicemails are immediately emailed to me as attachments. I like isolating things to my inbox.
• At one time, I played with DIDWW, which offers a “real phone number forwarded to Skype” service. Voicemail didn’t work, which was a dealbreaker.

This isn’t for everyone, but if all you want is a phone, voicemail, and you don’t mind “living in software”, it’s the cheapest option I’ve found.

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

It’s a longer episode, at just over 30 minutes, but trust me and watch the whole thing. He tastes some really weird stuff, like raw white pepper and um… rock:

Taking a page from here and here, I decided to refurb my nasty old white sneakers. Here’s the “before”:

To do the refurb, I employed nothing but the most cutting-edge tools:

For the price of the least-sexy toothbrush ever (sexier models here), a tube of toothpaste enriched with the magical properties of baking soda (from a company that does nothing but baking soda), and a pair of new laces, here’s the result:

Not bad! Plus I solved the mystery origin of Arm & Hammer’s logo: The Socialist Labor Party!