Chefelf.com Night Life: mrRobinson - Viewing Profile

Just curious if anyone uses Voip as their primary home line?
If so which? Vonage, skype, comcast, and there are many others offering such a service.

I use vonage, I'm glad I switched and will never go back. In fact, I'm probably going to setup an asterisk server at my house to enable some nice call managment typically only seen in corporations.

Generally though just curious if anyone uses voip and if they are happy with it or if you don't are you considering it and if not why?

Ever since Norton 2004 ( which got really bloated and sucked down system resources like it owned my computer ), I've jumped ship and started trying out what was offered for free "home" use. After much reading and research I settled on AVG antivirus from Grisoft. I was happy with it initially but never was too thrilled with its interface. After a bit it wouldn't reliably auto update and would at times hang downloading virus defs. So I read a bit more and am now trying Avast! antivirus. This interface I like much much better and I like the feature they have called VRDB which is a great way to restore files mucked with by a virus.

So I'm curious what experiences anyone else has with antivirus software. It doesn't have to be free, I'm just looking for something that does its job without killing your computer, have a nice simple interface, and some good features. Others I've looked into but never tried: Kapersky, Panda, the Zonealarm one (since I use their firewall), F-Prot, Anti-vir.

Since there isn't a Chefelf Cafe yet this forum should fit. Just wondering how people brew their coffee. What "technology" or system do you use and why?

I have an old wooden hand grinder for beans that I buy that I'd like to try. Typically I reserve this for exotic, rare, or relatively expensive type coffee. Like a bag of whole bean jamaican blue mountain or the kopi luwak I'm still waiting on from Raven's Brew. Once I hand grind them I would brew these in my cona D vacuum brewer as shown here. This can be quite a little process so it isn't how I obtain my main intake of coffee. For that I use a much more efficient system. I use a brewer from keurig. I had the pleasure to beta test their home model brewer for a little over a year before it was released and now own and use it frequently throughout the day. You can go to their page to see the system and why it is so conveinient. There is a lot of technology in these automatic coffee makers. Getting the water to the right temp, pushing the water/air through the pod and ending up with a good amount of brown foam on top, etc. I've even used something as fancy as the Miele CVA-610 and could still write a page of bullet points on how it could be better. So I'm always looking forward to seeing new machines coming out. The keurig is even a slightly more expensive one. There is one from senseo that has the same premise.

My Nespresso pod espresso maker has broken so I'm in the market for a new espresso machine. I've been eyeing up this one a whole lot. It would look great on my kitchen counter but I think at first I'd put it next to my bed so I could stare at it and use it first thing in the morning. I've been missing my shot in the dark.

anyway, what do you guys do for coffee? favorite brand/flavors/machines?

I saw the commander keen topic and it made me think of an old game I used to play on my x85 with the 5.25" floppy. willy the worm. This game was fun. I found a screen shot of it here.
I never beat that game, I'm looking for a copy now so I can beat it finally after a 20 year lapse