Category: Office Tech

A long time ago we had a special clock with four time zones.  We correspond a lot with clients in China.  And we often need to keep track of when it will be midnight at the USPTO or at WIPO.  The four-zone clock helped us keep track of these things.

But the special clock was noisy.  It clicked as the second hand advanced, and somehow the clicks really carried through the office.  Not only that, but all four of the clock faces clicked and the clicks were never quite simultaneous across the four faces.  So there were 240 clicks per minute.  We eventually scrapped that clock.

Now we have a new four-zone clock as you can see in the photograph.  The clocks are silent.  And the clocks synchronize their time with WWV.

Two of the clocks (the two in the middle) automatically update themselves for Daylight Saving Time.  The one on the right will require manual adjustment four times per year (see blog article).

I imagine some readers of this blog use an authentication app as part of a two-factor authentication process for various services.  For a long time I have been using Google Authenticator (right) with some systems.  I’d like to ask readers to please post a comment below if you use an authentication app, mentioning some of the services that you use it with. Continue reading “Seeking comments on authenticator apps”

We know the many reasons why it is good for a web site to be SSL protected (see the padlock in the purple oval at right).  Reasons include:

• an eavesdropper cannot see the information flowing back and forth
• Search engines such as Google give higher page rankings

(I have blogged about the importance of SSL protection here and here and here.)  Why doesn’t everyone secure every web site with SSL?  One reason might be cost.  To secure a web site with SSL, it is necessary to obtain an SSL certificate from a Certificate Authority.  The company we have traditionally used for obtaining SSL certificates charges $56 per year for a basic SSL certificate.

I was astonished, however, to learn recently that there is a free-of-charge Certificate Authority!  Our firm operates quite a few web sites, and I am delighted that we will save some money in recurring costs by using the free-of-charge CA. Continue reading “SSL web site protection free of charge”

Many readers may have followed with interest the news of a recently discovered triceratops fossil.  I note that the dinosaur was found about seven miles east of the Westminster, Colorado office of Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC.

So far as I am aware there is no connection between these places other than mere geographic proximity.

We are all accustomed to using “ping” as a way to test Internet connectivity and to measure the latency of an Internet connection. This post talks about a similar function for telephones, a function that can be very helpful in testing the configuration of a VOIP (voice over IP) telephone. Continue reading ““Ping” for telephones”

Let’s suppose you have made a plan to migrate your office telephone system from analog phone lines to VOIP trunks.  Maybe you are doing this to reduce your monthly telephone bill to 85¢ as I blogged recently.  But regardless of why you are migrating, clearly you will want to carry out the migration in a way that minimizes the risk of disruption of incoming or outgoing telephone service.  In this article I describe a migration path that worked well for our firm, and along the way I explain a little bit more about SIP trunking and how it works. Continue reading “Seamless migration from analog phone lines to SIP trunks?”

In a previous blog post I discussed two companies that you probably never heard of that make telephone calls possible — Neustar and iconectiv.  These companies administer the NPAC database, which is a database that gets consulted each and every time that any one dials a telephone call to a US (non-toll-free) telephone number.  A million times per day, a telephone call gets placed to a US telephone number, and a million times a day, a lookup happens to this NPAC database, without which the phone call would not be able to reach its destination.  And if you are like me, you never heard of either company.

In this blog post I will discuss another group of companies that you probably also never heard of, that are responsible for a super important part of the way that telephone calls take place.  This category of companies does not, so far as I know, have a name.  I will call them “VOIP wholesalers”.  Some of these companies are called Onvoy, Bandwidth, Paetec, Peerless, Level 3 Communications, XO Communications, and Aerialink.  I had heard of Level 3 before, but I only knew them as an Internet company.  The other three companies I had never heard of at all until very recently.  What do VOIP wholesalers do, and why should you care? Continue reading “Companies that you never heard of that make telephone calls possible – part 2”

Whenever you dial a telephone number that is located in the US, somehow your telephone company needs to be able to figure out which telephone company will complete the call.  So for example suppose your cellular carrier is AT&T and you pick up your cell phone and dial a phone number.  One of the first things that AT&T must do is somehow to figure out which telephone company is responsible for that phone number.  Maybe that phone number is handled by Verizon.  If so, then somehow AT&T needs to know to send your call to Verizon which will complete the telephone call.

How does your telephone company come to learn which telephone company is responsible for that phone number?  Keep in mind that the person you are calling might “port” their cell phone number tomorrow from Verizon to T-Mobile.  If so, then if you were to dial the same telephone number the day after tomorrow, your telephone company would need to know to send your call to T-Mobile instead of sending it to Verizon.

How does this work?  And how does this relate to “number portability”?   Continue reading “Companies that you never heard of that make telephone calls possible – part 1”