Sunday, 12 February 2006

Yesterday morning the IP phones I'd ordered turned up, so that wrote off a few hours of the day.

I ordered a Grandstream GS-102 and a Sipura SPA-841. They've both got their pluses and minuses, but I think overall, the Sipura comes out on top.

Grandstream GS-102

The good

• Backlit screen
• Passthrough Ethernet port (built-in single port hub)
• Does remote syslogging

The bad

• Pocket-calculator style screen
• Doesn't seem able to work behind a NAT without hardcoding the address of the gateway
• Won't sync with my NTP server
• Central configuration seems to be a paid-for extra

Sipura SPA-841

The good

• Extremely comprehensive web-based configuration
• 2 line support
• Oooh, does remote syslogging as well

The bad

• No screen backlighting
• Out of the box, DTMF didn't work with my Australian phone banking, so I don't know if it's generally not right (but it was fixable, the default tone length was too short it seemed)
• XML central configuration file format documentation seems to cost extra

Overall, if I'd just bought a Grandstream, I think I'd be quite unhappy with my purchase. If the Sipura just did backlighting, I'd be totally happy with it. A passthrough Ethernet port would be a bonus.

Given that next weekend is a long weekend on account of President's Day, we've decided to go visit our friends Craig and Sarah in Phoenix. My manager has kindly allowed me to work from Phoenix for the remainder of the week, so we'll head back again on the following weekend.

I just fed all the relevant data into Google Earth, to get a bit of a perspective on how long and how big the trip is going to be (and it looks big). I've never used Earth for routing before, and it's really cool to "play" the trip's route and have it zoom into each turn.

So from home to Craig and Sarah's place is 727 miles (1169 kilometres), but we're going to meet up in the desert, which is only 575 miles (925 kilometres), and then we'll do the remaining 216 miles (347 kilometres) on Sunday night after we've stayed with them in their enormous caravan (or trailer as I guess they call it over here) and fool around in their dune buggy.

Here's the direct route from home to Craig and Sarah's place in Phoenix, for perspective. The desert stopover (marked) is a little bit south of this route:

We're planning on stopping over in Los Angeles (Hollywood to be precise) on the way back so we can briefly check it out.