Gizmo5

Today we realized that google voice & video was eating my laptop cpu. It's great, but a bit piggy. By the time you load up resharper, visual stupido and a good sized app, fired up a webex session, and fired up your VPN you find there's not much CPU left to do things like run unit tests and pull updates from subversion.

I decided to move the a/v off of my work laptop and use my personal Ubuntu-powered laptop for that. We tried skype first (which worked great) and then gizmo5.

Gizmo is cute. It has hold music (I like the 70s bit) and "blasts" (sound effects you can drop in your conversation) and does a fine job of keeping the voice sounding clean on linux and windows.

It doesn't have video in the linux version, but I am not having a lot of luck in Linux with my webcam with any programs. WengoPhone can sometimes use it. I think that Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex just hates the Logitech quickcams. It worked great before the upgrade (when resume from being suspended didn't kill the wireless). Maybe I should go back to real Debian.

Otherwise, I think that skype or wengo or gizmo should be fine for remote pairing. Gizmo is just cuter than the others. Just for fun, I put the laptop with gizmo on the old network and the WebEx screen sharing and vpn on the other. It worked pretty well.

Didn't get so much work done today. Early in the week we were making some real progress, but every day later in the week seems to be filled with network troubles and tool issues or windows/browser trouble. My network was solid today, but laptop CPU was an issue.

Well, it's always something.