I have a confession to make. There are two things that make my eyes glaze over. If I have something equivalent to Superman’s kryptonite (just watched Superman Returns on cable), its the phone menu. When I dial a company and get a phone menu with more than 2 options, I’m just toast.

Now, I may not be the smartest person in the world, but I have a few degrees, I’ve been published, I’ve worked in intelligence and not to toot my own horn, I’ve done some fairly complicated stuff. But I hear a phone menu option and its like I have developed a case of telephony claustrophobia. The thing is I’m not really fearful of phone menus, just instantly lost, like fish hit with sonic waves by a dolphin or a whale.

As a small business owner, establishing my own pbx system however has been something I have been holding off on for quite a while. Its something that I have probably needed for about a year now, but I just can’t quite see putting other people through a phone menu sonic attack.

The time is coming though. I will be walking through my VOIP decisions and we’ll see where things shake out. I’m going to put together a phone system, a pbx system, a virtual assistant, the whole nine yards.

Now, I have looked at the consumer related services like Skype and Vonage, but I think I’m going to need something a little more than that. So tonight I was looking at Packet8’s small business phone systems. I like the pricing plans for their virtual assistant services and their conference bridge service as well.

I’m not looking for a large system or package, just some of the basics that enable me to organize things at a simple level and enable group work over long distances. I’ll keep you posted on how things develop. If you have VOIP or PBX system stories or recommendations, I’d like to here them and would be happy to reference your thoughts from our site.

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I’m running into some very buggy issues with WindowsLiveWriter Beta 2, but fortunately Beta 3 just came out. The only issue is that I am working on one of those projects on my computer that covers a few dozen different pages on 10 different programs. Its actually easier not to restart the program and just keep working until the projects are done.

The problem is that this is preventing me from running the install on the new program. But the bugs are getting worse!

So I have to basically set up a project to track the picture state of everything running on my computer right at this point in time. Every program, every file.

As I deal with it, I keep thinking that there ought to be a program to perform this type of snapshot functionality somehow . . .

Anyone ever find such a windows based program?

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