It's been a while and lots has happened over the past five weeks. When I left for a week's vacation on the WiFi-depleted island of Cozumel immediately after US Thanksgiving I did not expect to be off the air so long. However, our previous hosting provider (whose identity is unknown to me) ran out of the resources required to scale up a growing Moveable Type weblog. It got to a point where we could not even post new entries.

Phil has worked to move all our archive data over to the new host and yesterday he linked up with Stuart to point skypejournal.com to the new hosting location. Bottom line: with the Christmas/New Year's holidays and associated family commitments it was only today that Phil and Stuart could link up to move the pointer.

But, first a brief tribute to my mother. A few days after I returned from Cozumel she had another heart attack and passed away three weeks ago. As our minister mentioned at the memorial service, he had never visited a senior who was so technically equipped in her new digs For the past seven or eight years she had used the Internet to communicate with her family (especially valuable when my sons completed their medical studies in California and eastern Ontario while my daughter taught ESL in Taiwan and my nephew spent six months in Malawi), to do most of her banking (she lived in a location that was about 30 minutes from the nearest bank) and to even research and locate her recently inhabited retirement home. Due to the space limitations of her new apartment she even had a new flat panel LCD TV. Not bad for a lady who spent the first eight years of her life in a home with no electricity (gas lighting), a central oil burning stove in the living room for heating and no telephone -- I was expecting to give her a Skype phone for Christmas. She was one of my best consumer test cases for simplicity in the use of technology.

Back to the IP Communications world: lots has been happening during December and I have been fortunate enough to be gaining experience with several new devices:

• making no-cost WiFi-enabled cell phone calls from a Nokia N80i via Truphone. The Friday before Christmas I had a half hour conversation with Andy at a cafe in Paris that had no cost to either of us. And the voice quality was as good as our mylo-to-mylo Skype-to-Skype call a couple of months ago. (The N80i was supplied via Nokia's Blogger program managed by Andy and his team.)
• using the Gennum nXZEN VoIP "extreme noise canceling wireless headset to listen to calls on my Blackberry 8700 - and still have to test it as a Skype device for my laptop. Bottom line: who should know better about how to build a Bluetooth headset than a long time manufacturer of hearing aid components. This headset has voice quality that approaches that of an excellent Skype-to-Skype call.
• building up use of my evaluation Blackberry 8700 - Google has it right for supporting mobile devices - they get the user interface issues for mobile platforms - running Google Search, Maps and News as applications. It's their secret weapon to gain dominance on mobile platforms. Also using Blackberry Maps - can be installed on an 8700 but is included in the Blackberry Pearl application suite.- with a GPS unit to get driving directions and current location. BTW, the Blackberry was a godsend during my mother's time in hospital - I had to access her medical records stored as a "Memo" on it several times and even found ways to use it as both a phone and email device in an environment that supposes cell phones should be banned anywhere in the building (more progressive healthcare facilities realize that wireless devices only need to be kept about 10 meters from any other medical equipment).
• and Rogers Cable is doing a Canadian preview run of Mark Cuban's HDNet - great for experiencing the full potential of both HD and the associated technologies such as surround sound.

And, of course, there have been changes at Skype. I hope to learn more about them and Skype's direction while attending CES in Las Vegas next week.

Enough for now - I will do more complete reviews of these and other devices over the next few weeks. In the meantime, accept my best wishes for a Happy New Year.

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