I had no idea how inexpensive it was to call abroad. Honestly I thought it would be like dollars per minute. But you can call Ecuador for 3.9 cents per minute, Bermuda for 2.1 cents a minute, and a lot of places it’s unlimited! I guess that means that the call costs a one-time fee, and you can then talk forever without being charged anything more.

“How can I get these great rates,” you ask? Prepaid international calling cards! GetMeCallingCards.com specializes in the calling card industry, and says there’s a current “boom” in sales. Why not? International calling cards save a lot of hassle when figuring out how to place an international call and how much it will cost. And if you make calls to one specific country more often than the rest, say from the USA to India, then you just get one of the india phone cards.

GetMeCallingCards can get you in touch with people in over 150 countries with their vast array of world wide calling options. So pick up the phone, dial the old way, and shout, “Get Me Calling Cards!” Then hang up the phone and surf over to GetMeCallingCards.com.

Sometimes when you don’t have any coinage, the next best method for making a call is to use a phone card. In fact, some phone cards will actually give you a better rate than using plain old metal money.

PhoneCardsAvenue.com is a business specializing in cheap phone cards. They’ve been doing what they do on an international level for a while now. Yep, you guessed it. If you wanted to get an international phone card through PhoneCardsAvenue, you could. And there’s a bonus.

Recently, PhoneCardsAvenue began a cash rebate program. So for every calling card or phone card purchase you make with them, you’ll be entitled to getting 3% back. So if you spent One Hundred Billion Dollars, you’d get 3 Billion Dollars back. Can you imagine what you could buy with 3 Billion Dollars? Like, the world! Totally!

PhoneCardsAvenue.com can provide you with a means to an end, the end being a phone call from one nation to another (perhaps from overseas to your home in the good ol’ US of A for some happy holiday moments), and the means being inexpensive and convenient.

Today I had the idea that you could walk into a room and your friends, who were watching TV, were now on the other side of the screen. That would mean that the TV screen is really a portal to another location. Or, it could be a monitor with a feed from a camera somewhere.

It got me thinking: What if in the future, technology is so advanced that it allows us to get complacent, lazy even? Say you want to go see a friend. As it used to be, you'd give him a call. Before phones, you could write a letter or go in person. Now, we can instant message each other. In the future, what if we take things one step further?

Imagine a room in your house in which the walls act as both cameras and televisions. So you enter the room, and say, "Let me see Jenny." Your house calls her house, or apartment, or wherever she is. How does it know where to find her? Maybe she's got a chip in her head. Let's not worry about that. Ok, so the network finds her, and a CGI operator comes on the screen wherever she is, saying, "Your friend Jimmy would like to speak with you. Is that OK?" She says sure, and BAM — you're having a two-way visual meeting, live.

Sounds cool, right? You don't have to do anything when you're in that room except issue voice commands. Now here's where things get scary (unless the chip-in-the-head thing already got to you). Jenny's out and about, right? Maybe at an art museum? Now imagine she's at her house. You're at your house. Everybody is at their own home. Nobody goes anywhere, because they can all link up virtually.

But I don't think that will really happen. I'll bet the technology will reach and surpass that level, sure, but I think we'll have plenty of reasons to keep active.

We'll have to fight the robots!