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I am the kind of person who sticks to what I know works, and resists the urge to change. And I don't usually study up on the new stuff until they have taken over the market and change when I have to. I used my dot matrix printer until Office Depot stopped stocking fan fold papers. I never switched credit card companies, no matter how much incentive other companies offered. I used MCI as my long distance phone service provider through their purchase by WorldCom, the renaming, the scandals and the renaming back. And before I bought the iPod Shuffle 585 days ago, my personal music device was a Sony Walkman.

In other words, ads don't work on me. However, I have made several changes recently that surprised even myself. The ideas all come from people I know:

• I dropped my AT&T phone service and signed on with my ISP's VoIP service, a move I never would have made had I not heard Rob Martin talk about how satisfied he is with the quality of VoIP service from his ISP. It took a month and a visit from the ISP's service provider to the house to work on the phone box outside the house to do the switch. The quality of the service is acceptable. The last bill I paid AT&T was $75 for local service. Now I pay half of that to my ISP. They provide free long distance services in the US and to 22 foreign countries, including China.
• One of Eric Burke's blog entries talked about energy saving bulbs. I read the article he linked to on Fast Company, and the energy saving potential prompt me to look at those strange twisty light bulbs at Lowe's. They are selling them at $9.98 per six-pack. That's low enough a price for me to buy a pack to try them out. I twisted off a 60 watt bulb from my desk lamp and twisted on a 13 watt mini-twist CFL. Aside from the perceptible half a second delay, it worked just like a regular light bulb. I can't tell the difference between the CFL and a regular bulb without looking directly at the bulb.
• Brian Coyner, the man behind OpenTradingSolutions.org, walked in my cube last week and asked me if I have upgraded to IntelliJ IDEA 6.0. I have not upgraded at the time, but I did buy an upgrade personal license the next day. I started using IntelliJ IDEA at 2.x and have been very happy with the IDE. I'm keeping up with it because the benefit it offers me far offsets the $150 I'm paying every, what, eighteen months. They made some changes to the way projects and modules are configured. I think the changes made a lot of sense. But it took me a few minutes to find my way around the new dialog box: I'm also interested in the new GWT support and code coverage integration in IDEA 6.0.