This page contains the most up-to-date online information on how to contact Barbara or Craig Burley, as well as news about changes to their contact information.
Barbara prefers to be contacted via telephone or email, not via FAX.
Craig prefers to be contacted via email or telephone, not via FAX.
The Burley household presently has two land lines, aka "normal" telephone lines, available for incoming calls. One of these is an unlisted number; the other is Barbara's home-office number. Barb and Craig also have a mobile (cell) phone each.
Barb has a home-office FAX machine, which Craig uses on occasion.
Barb and Craig each have at least one email address for incoming mail.
Barb and Craig can each be sent a short message via the Internet to their respective mobile phones.
"Classic" technology, in the form of mail and in-person visits, are still supported by the Burley household.
Broadband provider changed to comcast.net from attbi.com,
so one of my email addresses changed with it.
Provided additional email addresses for Barb and Craig. Moved notes about massaging required by addresses from bottom of section to top.
Added info on how to contact us via the email interface to the digital-text-message service.
We finally dropped one of our household land-lines, (xxx xxx-6087), long used by Craig mainly for Internet access via modem, consulting-related phone calls, and also for our household answering machine.
Craig's Internet access is now primarily via Broadband, his consulting-related work via his mobile (cell) phone, and the answering machine has been switched to the private, unlisted land line.
Barb and Craig have also enabled restrictions on incoming calls on their two remaining land lines, to further reduce telemarketing calls and junk FAXes. (Telemarketers often interrupted Craig on the now-dropped line.)
Callers from private, unlisted phones wishing to call Barb or Craig on one of their land lines must therefore use the appropriate prefix (usually "*82") in front of the phone number, to enable transmission of the calling number and name via Caller ID.
Barb prefers to be contacted via phone or email, which are the easiest.
Documents sent via FAX are best sent to her via her home-office machine, except when they need to reach her while she's at work.
For initial inquires relating to his consulting work, Craig prefers to be contacted via email.
For ongoing consulting-related discussions, Craig prefers to use email or his mobile phone.
For other matters, email and household land line 1 are fine, with the mobile phone used in appropriate situations (emergencies, in-transit contact, etc.).
FAXes to Craig are best reserved for situations in which he needs a copy of a document and is aware that it's coming, or has arrived, so he knows to check Barb's home-office FAX machine.
Barb and Craig have two land lines in their home plus one mobile (cell) phone each. Barb also has an at-work voice number and an at-work FAX machine. These are set up as follows:
Private, unlisted number, with household answering machine.
This line normally blocks incoming calls with no Caller ID, such as calls from unlisted numbers. Prefixing such calls appropriately (usually "*82") allows the calls, as well as the correct Caller ID information, to get through.
Though this line also supports "Call Waiting", meaning the user can hear of an incoming call while on the phone with someone else, Barb sometimes uses this line for modem access to her employer's computing facility.
Since her use of the modem can go on for hours at a time, and includes the temporary disabling of "Call Waiting", this line can be busy for long periods.
Barb's home-office number, with her answering machine and FAX.
This line normally blocks incoming calls with no Caller ID, such as calls from unlisted numbers. Prefixing such calls appropriately (usually "*82") allows the calls, as well as the correct Caller ID information, to get through.
Throughout most of the house, this line cannot be heard ringing, so Craig is not interrupted (while working at home) by calls to Barb's answering machine and FAX, and Craig does not regularly check either machine in Barb's office (which is two floors above his own home office).
Therefore, while it can be used to send Craig a FAX, it's best to notify him of the arrival of the FAX by some other means.
Craig's cell phone, with answering service and digital text messaging.
Barb's cell phone, with answering service and digital text messaging.
Barb's at-work phone has a full-featured voice-mail system. Even when her mobile phone is out of range of a working system, she can usually check her at-work voice-mail for messages.
Barb and her co-workers share an at-work FAX machine accessed via a land line.
For details (such as the actual phone numbers, which are omitted here to keep telemarketers at bay), contact Barb or Craig.
If you have a document to FAX to Barb, use either her at-work FAX number or her home-office FAX number.
Craig does not have his own FAX machine, so to send him a document, either use email or use Barb's home-office FAX number and notify him of the transmission via some other means.
Note: Do not simply use copy-and-paste of the following email addresses. You'll end up with "one" (1) digits where lowercase "L"'s should be. That's to foil email-address harvesters (computer programs that scan web pages looking for email addresses, for use by spammers). Either edit them after pasting, or type them in by hand.
In all cases, replace the "at-sign" and surrounding spaces with the ubiquitous "@" itself. (Another technique to foil address harvesters.)
Craig's main email addresses are:
Relating to his software consulting business:
bur1ey at-sign jcb-sc.com
General personal address:
craig at-sign thebur1eys.net
Please avoid sending Craig documents in proprietary formats, such as those produced MS Word and MS Excel. Ideally, use plain-text email. (Craig doesn't have MS Word or other MS office-related products available on his computers.)
Barb's email addresses are:
Relating to her job:
bur1eyb at-sign csps.com
General personal address:
barbara at-sign thebur1eys.net
Alternate email addresses, which might come in handy when Barb and Craig can't access their usual email in-boxes but can access these others, include:
Comcast Broadband address:
cbbur1ey at-sign comcast.netCraig's official DNS Administrative Contact address:
bur1ey at-sign world.std.com
Both Barb's and Craig's mobile phones support receiving text messages sent via the following web sites:
As of this writing, 2002-07-04, both of these URLs seem to access the very same facility.
Note that clicking the "Update Status" button is a handy way to check on the status of a message you've sent. Until the status reads "Message delivered to handset", it hasn't reached the mobile phone you've specified, even if it has been "accepted by network".
For example, when Barb was in Vermont recently, Craig tried sending her a digital text message. The status read "accepted by network" until the next day when she traveled, returning home, far enough to come within the digital-coverage area. At that point, the message was received by her phone and the status of the message resolved to "delivered to handset".
(I think each message we receive costs $.02, but I'm not sure. For short messages, it's got to be one of the most convenient mechanisms available, compared to checking email via a cumbersome computer, dialing in to a voicemail service, etc. So a couple of pennies per important message is fine by us.)
You can also email the digital-text-message service.
Use the email address phone-number@vtext.com,
substituting for phone-number the pertinent phone
number without spaces, parentheses, or other punctuation
(e.g. 8885551212@vtext.com).
Based on a few tests I've conducted, the email interface uses communications pathways that I believe aren't used by the web interface. These pathways can introduce various delays to the email propagating through the system. When trying out the email interface, I've seen nearly-instantaneous response, but also many-minutes-later response on occasion.
The web interface seems to consistently deliver instantaneous response, assuming the recipient (their mobile phone) is in the coverage area of course. I assume this means the web interface connects directly to the subsystem that actually submits the message to the messaging network, while the portion of the email interface that connects to that subsystem is, at best, the SMTP receiver of email. Possibly the SMTP receiver actually uses the mechanism used by the web page.
Either way, that means there can exist delays when emailing due to "hops" needed to get the message through to the SMTP interface in the first place.
(It's possible the web interface simply sends an email message a la the email interface described above, which could imply that the email interface is always at least as fast as the web interface. I think that's unlikely, since the web interface offers the ability to track the progress of a message, once sent -- features that do not seem to be available via the email interface. I'd be very surprised if the only direct connection to the back end of the messaging system from the web site was for tracking, leaving the actual message submission to use the email interface!)
Barb and Craig's household address is:
97 Arrowhead Circle
Ashland, MA 01721
Copyright (C) 2002 James Craig Burley
Last modified on 2007-06-29.