A good friends who is in China right now lost her blog a while back. I had some posts in my RSS reader, so I sent her the text from her older posts. A good reminder to keep a backup, and at the very least, subscribe to your own blog’s rss feed.
Here’s her new Wordpress blog to replace the old Blogger blog.
O
k, I could tell you all the myriad reasons why you should (or might want to) use Google Voice. But, a friend of mine basically said, “make me care.” So I’m going to tell you a couple real life scenarios where Google Voice just about saved my buttocks. If you don’t know what Google Voice is, you can start by reading this article and decide if you want to come back and let me convince you to use it.
Use case #1 – Telephone overload. My wife and I acquired a free baby grand piano. It’s sweet. But we already had an 1863 upright grand that has seen better days. We originally got the first piano on Craigslist under the free section. I thought, let’s give it back to the community for free, too, so someone else can have a starter piano (it’s not in the best shape, but would be a great candidate for restoring). Little did I know that 4 seconds after I added the posting to Craigslist, my phone would start ringing off the hook. (Sure, I could have said for people to email me, but let’s face it, when you want to arrange something to be picked up, email is not the best option). I received 47 calls about the piano within the first 24 hours. You do the math, that’s a lot of phone calls every couple minutes.
Solution: “Do Not Disturb.” By enabling the do not disturb mode of Google Voice, I was able to have the calls routed straight to voicemail and still transcribed and sent to me as a text. Getting a text once in a while is not nearly as bad as your phone ringing off the hook. (Especially when you have
some parents or others around who can’t stand that some people actually ignore incoming phone calls, grab your phone, and bring it to you in the backyard where you’re busy weeding the garden).
Use #2: Texting. I text with some people alot. As in, we have the same amount of conversations over text as others would normally have over Instant Messaging. Here’s the deal: I have an iPhone, so I already sync my contacts with my gmail account, so getting all my contacts into Google Voice was a snap. Sending an SMS from Google Voice is simple: you start typing the name or number and it auto completes. 
And, since I work from the computer a few hours each day, I’m always around one. If I’m upstairs in my office, I can send a text. If I’m on the back patio where my laptop likes to hangout on nice days, I can send a text. In fact, it’s faster to open the laptop, fire up Google Voice and send a text than it is for me to find my cell phone (damn thing has a mind of its own), bring it down to where I’m working, and send a text over the phone. Are you a fast typer and do you hang out near a computer? If yes, get GV just to send some texts. Oh, and did I mention that your text messages and transcribed voicemail are kept in an inbox? Can you say searchable? Take a look at this screenshot, you can’t do this with your current voicemail, trust me. 
Now, I know what you’re saying: Turning on “Do not disturb” might make me miss an important phone call. Well, if something is so important that you can’t miss it, you should still give out your real phone number, not your Google Voice number. Google Voice doesn’t support porting yet, so you’ll have to managed 2 phone numbers or tell your contacts to change you number. Then they’ll get all confused when you forget and call them from the older number. Especially now that Apple has rejected the iPhone app for Google Voice, GV is not a viable alternative to your real phone.
It is, however, a very powerful tool to have in your arsenal. Just like you have a need for Firefox and sometimes perhaps Opera or Flock as web browsers, you should grab a Google Voice number and hang onto it.
Wow, missed this last month, but hey better late than never. Toggl timer is now available as a gmail gadget. Sweet, no need to load up the toggl page anymore.
Just installed Firebug – again – have known about it for years but only ever used Web Developer’s Toolbar in Firefox. Really enjoy the instantaneous preview tweaks of a website, especially with CSS. Then you just go and plug in your code fixes in your favorite coding tools. Also added, via Adobe Air, Seesmic Desktop to manage more than one Twitter account at the same time because finally it supports Facebook in the same window pane. I like me some Facebook updates. And, OmniGrowl, though “nagware” is pretty cool if you manage blogs. You can have growl notifications of blog comments. That was my morning round of installs and experiments.
Pretty happy with the way the Great Futures campaign is shaping up. Take the pledge here.
Running into issues when designing matching sites that are of different tax statuses. 501c4 can only link to 501c3’s home page, not any specific about / contacts / etc. Results in a lot of redundant data. The problem? Dunno if it’s the organization’s legislation and tax issue, or the regulatory body’s problem.
