Kevin DeGraaf’s Blog

It was decided that our receptionists need to be able to monitor the idle/busy state of all of the phones in the company, and answer calls while walking around the office.

Solutions: one Linksys SPA962 phone, two Linksys SPA932 attendant consoles, and one Snom M3 cordless phone.  That Was Easy (TM).

With these additions, we have the following Asterisk-compatible telephony hardware:

I proposed to Lisa tonight, and we’re engaged! 

I finally convinced the management to scrap our hideously awful brain-dead phone system and replace it with a modern Voice-over-IP system.

We purchased one Redfone foneBRIDGE2-EC device, one Rackform iServ R107 server, twenty-eight Linksys SPA942 phones, two Polycom IP4000 conference phones, five Grandstream HT286 analog adapters, and one Grandstream BT101 phone (to connect to a paging amplifier). We also consolidated our jumbled mismash of phone services (analog lines, a BRI, and a set of DIDs) into one T1 PRI connection.

Unfortunately, the management wouldn’t spring for new Ethernet wiring, so we had to piggy-back off our existing infrastructure, making it infeasible to use Power-over-Ethernet and thus requiring a fleet of local power adapters.

That aside, I have been very pleased with our new equipment. I was able to set up centralized provisioning of the Linksys and Polycom phones (using MySQL, Perl, FTP, and TFTP) without much difficulty. The Grandstream units support provisioning as well, but since they are so simple and we have so few of them, I didn’t bother.

On the software side, we’re using Asterisk (of course). That was the first decision we made, and all of the other components were evaluated based on their Asterisk interoperability. I plan to provide, in a future post, more technical details of how the system is set up. Stay tuned.

I would like to solicit feedback from my audience about two policy questions that came up during the planning and implementation of the system.

First: whether to use an automated attendant (AA) to answer the incoming calls. Under the old system, every call was supposed to be answered by a human. This policy inevitably led to dropped, missed, and/or rushed calls. It also annoyed those of us who don’t like to speak to humans unless it’s necessary; transferring calls based on a dialed extension does not and should not require using a human operator.

After strenuous internal negotiations, we convinced the management to let us set up an AA system to handle calls. Unlike the AA systems used by major corporations, ours is extremely simple: “Thank you for calling Blah. To reach the operator, dial zero. If you know your party’s extension, please dial it now. Otherwise, for blah, dial blah; for blah, dial blah, etc.”

Readers: what do you think? Should an AA be used to ensure that (1) every call is answered promptly, (2) extensions can be reached without involving a human, and (3) the human operator is far less busy and can devote more attention to each call for which the caller actually dials zero? Or, should the policy remain “every call is answered by a human”, even though that’s infeasible, inflexible, and old-fashioned?

Interestingly enough, in our discussions, the response was split neatly along gender lines. The guys voted for the AA, and the women lobbied unsuccessfully for the old system which, theoretically, involves “human contact”.

Second: what do you think of individual paging? When I started at this company, I was shocked to discover that the phone system was set up to allow any user to individually page any other user! Specifically: (1) you’d be sitting there working, (2) your phone would beep and immediately enter into an unsolicited full-duplex (two-way) speaker-phone mode, and (3) the caller would start yammering at you. I was astonished: a company actually thinks that barging in on people’s privacy like this is a good idea? What if you’re busy? What if you’re concentrating on something? What if you’re having a private/confidential conversation? In general: WTF?

Asterisk and the SPA942 phones provide for this behavior (you just set a certain SIP header prior to executing the Dial() application), but I strongly lobbied against it. Unlike with the AA debate, however, my technician and I were the only people opposed to this “feature”. Everyone else either argued in favor of it, or took a “meh, no big deal” position. One person even had the gall to suggest that our opposition stemmed from a lack of desire to assist others (like that has any bearing on ringing-vs.-barging). In general: WTF?

Enough for now…

Mitt Romney is a douchebag.

Exhibit A: As a member of a religion so insane that Christianity looks somewhat rational by comparison, Mitt had to perform a careful tap dance two months ago on the subject of faith. Had he emphasized his Mormonism too strongly, or taken the alternate path of overly downplaying the importance of his religion, Romney would have alienated the slack-jawed mouth-breathers of the Religious Right (a crucial segment of the Republican electorate). Behold, the power of political pandering:

Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

How wonderfully generic. “Vote for me — I believe in a Big Sky Daddy (TM) just like you do! (Sort of…) We’re not so different, you and I, especially compared to those damn dirty atheists.”

As a decidedly non-religious person, I was surprised to learn that I oppose freedom. I must be a part of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy (TM) to overthrow democracy. Hmmmm.

Exhibit B: Good riddance — the crazy Moron Mormon is withdrawing his presidential bid. Rather than bowing out with the grace, style and decorum one might naively expect from a would-be leader of the free world, good ‘ol Mitt got off a particularly sanctimonious parting shot:

“Frankly, I’d be making it easier for Senator Clinton or Obama to win” if he stayed in the race, he said. “I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.”

Is this asshat actually implying that electing a Democratic president would be surrendering to terrorism? Unfortunately, the implication is quite unmistakable.

News flash, genius: damn near everybody (except for the stupidest one-fifth or so of the country, i.e. the uber-loyal Republican base that overlaps neatly with the aforementioned Religious Right) has figured out that the Republican occupation of Iraq was, to put it gently, a colossal clusterfuck that has ended up creating far more terrorists and anti-American sentiment than ever before.  The “vote for us or TEH TERRORISTS WILL 9/11 GET US!!!!!!!!!!! 9/11 OMGWTF9/11BBQ!!!!!” line of bull is wearing very, very thin.

The people rest their case.

A certain dangerous cult is currently being Google-bombed, and I am more than happy to help expose this dangerous cult by creating repeated links that say “dangerous cult” and point to a dangerous cult.

All religious belief is irrational, but Scientology is straight-up insane and evil.