I got a letter in the mail the other day from my internet, phone and cable TV provider Mediacom. The letter stated that due to the higher costs of providing the service and the decreased demand, Mediacom would no longer be offering voice mail as part of my included service. That’s right, as a “triple play” subscriber, someone who is now paying well over $100/month with the company, they will no longer offer voice mail as a part of their voice package.

I’ve finally taken the plunge. I have purchased an iPhone.

I have to say, I love the thing. I had exchange rocking with this thing within 3 minutes of getting it home on the wifi network. I had a Sprint service for many many years and they were pretty good to me for the most part. But the fact that they didn’t have the iPhone and the fact that Apple released as SDK for the thing put me over the top.

The New MacBook from First and last name on Vimeo.

Ok, I like the fact that it is made from one piece of metal to form the body. There are a lot of advantages to that. Apple has also continued to make a very nice looking laptop. But do the users care about these things? I think that the business traveler will, but the home user sitting on the couch, I’m not so sure.

Mike Nash, one of the VPs in the Windows Product division at Microsoft had a recent blog post announcing the new name of the next generation Windows operating system. Looks like this will be one of the few times that the development code name will be the full release name.

Personally, I’m not sure why I have ever known the internal development name of a product from Microsoft. In reality, it should stay internal if you have good security measures in place as the only people that need to know the name are the developers and engineers working on the project.

In the face of an economy in crisis and a deeply unpopular president, some analysts believe the situation is ripe to give Democrats a shot at a 60-seat filibuster-proof majority in the Senate in November.

It’s “the perfect storm,” said Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report. “You’ve got Republican voters angry at Republicans, many Americans just petrified about the future…wanting change. And right now change appears to be coming in the form of Democrats.”