I haven’t blogged about VoIP recently. If you look back through my blog, you’ll see that I started dabbling with voice over IP (VoIP) technology at the end of December 2004 and bit the bullet and started using my Unlimitel number as my main phone number in May 2005. I’m happy to report that the savings I wrote about realizing in an entry I wrote at the end of the first year of the experiment continue to be realized. I still have a Bell Canada phone line, primarily as a backup in the event of an emergency. Though my Unlimitel service does include 9-1-1 access, I haven’t had occasion (thank goodness!) to test it out. If there’s a prolonged power or ‘net outage I know that I can still call 9-1-1 if I need to. (Of course, I have a cell phone that I can call 9-1-1 from, too.)

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The SAS Global Forum 2008 that is.

I spent much of this morning in the Coders’ Corner sessions, which were short sessions with tips for programmers and users alike.  Ten minutes in length, I found these sessions quite useful.

I also attended another session on OLAP data cubes and one that discussed a factor analysis of a health care provider survey.  The latter was of interest to me because it used a technique that I’d like to use at work.

Papers from each of the streams were judged and the best were recognized during the closing ceremony.  I was unexpectedly asked to grade one of the sessions I was in this morning, which was kind of neat.

The closing ceremonies also had some pretty cool door prizes ranging from clothing donated by the various sponsors to a pair of airline travel vouchers to a pre-paid registration to SAS Global Forum 2009.  A ripple of "oohs" washed through the audience when they announced that prize.  Unfortunately, my name wasn’t drawn for that one or any of the other prizes.

After things wrapped up, I walked back to the hotel with a colleague who was staying here.  Along the way, we stopped to do a couple of geocaches before heading off to do our own things this afternoon.  I continued geocaching and ended up logging 5 caches in total today: 3 traditional caches, a virtual cache and a webcam cache.  My friend Rob helped out with the webcam cache by making a screen capture of me standing in front of a webcam that’s pointed at the Alamo.

I hopped in the pool for a few minutes upon my return to the hotel before I headed out to find somewhere to eat.  I ended up having dinner at Boudro’s on the Riverwalk where I was lucky and only had to wait about 5 minutes for a table.  Other people were being given wait times of an hour or more.  (It would have been worth waiting that long.)

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