Hey, Jimmy
I’m done with that confirmation.
February 28, 2011
July 20, 2009
I finally got my Google Voice invite
Last week, I finally got the email I waited months to get:
You are invited to open a free Google Voice account.
If you know about Google Voice, you’ll understand my excitement. If you don’t, read on.
Google Voice is a free service that uses Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) technology to allow management of phone communication, including voice, text messages and voicemail.
Here’s a quick overview:
The service has been described simply as “one number to rule them all.” Users can choose a number in most U.S. area codes. Vanity numbers are even available. The Google Voice number then becomes the user’s central contact number. A simple web interface allows the user to link that number to existing lines — work, mobile, home, etc.
Call Routing
Calls to the Google Voice number can be routed in any number of ways, even down to the level of individual callers. For example, I can configure the service so that if my wife calls, all my phones (home, work and mobile) will ring simultaneously. When I answer, the call is routed to the correct phone through Google’s network. Unknown callers can be sent directly to voicemail or blocked outright.
Routing rules can also be enforced on a group basis. This means that I can restrict work contacts from calling me at home, or send family calls to all my phones.
In-Call Management
Google Voice offers several features during a call. Press “star” while on a call, and your other phones will ring, allowing you to transfer the call to another phone. Press 4, and Google Voice will record the call and make it available to listen or download from the Google Voice site. If another call comes in while the user is on a call, he can merge the calls into a conference call. The process can be repeated, allowing four callers to confer simultaneously.
Voicemail
This is where Google Voice really shines. Users can configure different outgoing messages for different classes of callers — informal for friends and family, or strictly business for work contact. Greetings can even be customized to individual callers.
Voicemail messages are stored online and can be retrieved by phone or via the web. When a caller leaves a voicemail message, a Google algorithm transcribes the audio into text and notifies the user via email or text message. In practice, the quality of the voicemail transcription is poor. Transcription is by far the weakest link in the Google Voice system, but it’s improving.
Mobile access
Google has created Google Voice applications for the Android and Blackberry platforms, allowing users to access the full spread of features from their mobile devices. Users of other mobile devices can access a limited feature set via a mobile website.
Looking ahead
The biggest drawback to Google Voice — the one thing that will keep people from using it — is the high switching costs. It’s just a big hassle to change phone numbers, inform all your contacts, update business cards and the like. I’ve had the same phone number for more than five years, and I’m pretty tied to it. But Google plans to allow users to port their existing number to Google Voice. If Google can pull this off, the results would be huge. Users could transition seamlessly and switching costs would fall to almost zero. It remains to be seen whether mobile carriers will cooperate, however.
Are you excited yet? Go get an invite.
For more information:
November 15, 2006
Animated favicons? Ooh.
Hey, this is pretty cool.
You can have animated favicons in Firefox! The icons for each site on the Firefox tabs are animated and when you bookmark them, the bookmark icon is animated too. A quick peek at the HTML of a page with animated favicons shows they simply have a 16×16 animated gif and point the page to that as their favicon with this:
link xhref=â€images/favico.gif†TYPE=â€image/gif†REL=â€iconâ€
That can be pretty slick, if it’s done well. I’ll have to add one. Need to add transparency, too.
Matt Bramanti | November 15, 2006 at 2:11 am
Posted to Blogging,Design,Tech,Uncategorized
7 comments
Posted to Blogging,Design,Tech,Uncategorized
7 comments
September 10, 2006
Cut off from the world, a liveblog
My cell phone died yesterday. Well, it didn’t really die, but it’s critically ill and in a coma. The screen flashes on and off, I can’t receive calls, and it’s totally unresponsive.
So now I’m on the phone with “Alicia,” my helpful and friendly Indian customer-service representative. I’m telling her about my problem, and how it is entirely due to a manufacturing defect by Motorola, since the phone has not suffered any physical damage.
Now she’s putting me on hold for the moment, and the hold music is some haunting sitar stuff with a cool beat. Someone at Verizon has a sense of humor, anyway.
Back to Alicia. She’s telling me my options:
- Remove the battery and put it back in
- Call Verizon
- Take it in to a service center
- Send it in to Motorola to get fixed under warranty
Okay, thank you, Alicia. Bye-bye.
Here are the problems with those options:
- Did not work.
- Verizon’s reps are friendly, but not very empowered to help the customer with problems.
- I think they’re gonna charge me an arm and a leg.
- It’ll take two weeks, during which time I’ll either be without a phone, or using an old one which I’ll have to activate.
Damn.
Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez
I’m watching “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” I always get a kick out of the scene where Tuco is about to be hanged, and the executioner is reading his convictions. His rap sheet is so long, diverse and over the top that you just have to laugh:
…wanted in fourteen counties of this state, the condemned is found guilty of crimes of murder, armed robbery of citizens, state banks and post offices;Â the theft of sacred objects, arson in a state prison, perjury, bigamy, deserting his wife and children, inciting prostitution, kidnapping, extortion, receiving stolen goods, selling stolen goods, passing counterfeit money and contrary to the laws of this state the condemned is guilty of using marked cards and loaded dice
Heh. Soon after escaping, he finds himself in the same pickle, but with an even more colorful rap sheet:
wanted in fifteen counties of this state, the condemned standing before us…sitting before us…Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez has been found guilty by the third district circuit court of the following crimes: Â Â Murder, assaulting a justice of the peace, raping a virgin of the white race, statuatory rape of a minor of the black race…derailing a train in order to rob the passengers, bank robbery, highway robbery, robbing an unknown number of Post Offices, breaking out of the state prison, using marked cards and loaded dice, promoting prostitution, blackmail, intention of selling fugitive slaves, and counterfeiting. Â Crimes against places of high authority include burning down the courthouse and sheriff’s office in Sonora. The accused is also guilty of cattle rustling, horse thievery, supplying Indians with firearms…misrepresenting himself as a Mexican General, unlawfully drawing salarly and living allowances from the Union Army
He’s the Audie Murphy of banditos.
Here’s a very rough transcript of the movie.
August 14, 2006
Testing Windows Live Writer
I read about Windows Live Writer on Lifehacker this morning:
Windows only: Microsoft has just released Windows Live Writer to write to multiple blogs, insert photos, play with maps, and more goodies.
Less than 24 hours old, this product is still in beta, so there are sure to be some bugs; plus, you’ve got to download the .NET framework to even get to it.
We’ll see how well this works. It’s kind of cool, in that it shows my post in live preview, just how Mattsapundit displays it (red links, blockquote style, all that stuff).
Categories are in random order, though, unlike the alphabetical list I’m used to.
Let’s see what happens with an image.
Hmm. I don’t really care for how it handles images. It doesn’t let me center them.
I probably won’t be using this again. It was worth a shot, though.
June 7, 2006
Die, spammers!
Regular readers of Mattsapundit will notice that this blog is devoid of comment spam. No Viagra from Canada, no midget porn, no 1% mortgages, none of that crap.
But scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page, and you’ll see that I’ve had more than 1,300 attempted spam attacks, all of them rebuffed without incident. This is because I use Spam Karma 2, an excellent anti-spam program.
The way it works is this: as comments come in, they’re automatically put through a series of filters, each of which can be configured for strictness. Each filter looks for a specific trait common to automatically-generated comments. One looks for comments generated too rapidly, one checks comments against an IP blacklist of known spammers, another checks for an unusually high number of links, while yet another checks for comments on older posts. There are 10 filters in total.
Each filter assigns the comment a karma value based on its performance. This value is cumulative as the comment makes its way through the chain. Suspicious comments tend to have more than one spam-like attribute, so the negative karma builds up. At a certain point, determined by a very high negative karma value, the comment is obviously spam and it’s automagically discarded. Buh-bye, scumbags.
Conversely, real, human-generated comments get good karma. They might have one or two suspicious attributes (originating from a browser that doesn’t support JavaScript, for instance), but they’ll pass the other filters and get posted without a hitch.
The software works almost perfectly. No spam gets through. I haven’t had a single spam comment since I’ve been using Spam Karma 2. That’s pretty impressive, considering I’m just using the default settings. Even better, it’s given no false positives to date. Every once in a while, the software isn’t quite sure whether a comment is spam, and it holds it in moderation for me to approve or deny manually, but that’s only happened maybe three times.
All in all, it’s a nearly perfect anti-spam measure. If you use WordPress, check it out.
Matt Bramanti | June 7, 2006 at 12:29 pm
Posted to Blogging,Reviews,Scumbags,Tech,Uncategorized
No comments yet
Posted to Blogging,Reviews,Scumbags,Tech,Uncategorized
No comments yet
October 25, 2005
Sensitivity, Metro-style
I’m still shaking my head at this one.
WSJ: Hollywood awful on race, sex equality
Well, look who’s not practicing what they preach:
In a town full of dirty little secrets, the composition of writers in Hollywood rises to the level of scandal. Though Tinsel Town pays lip service to liberalism and equality, women and minority film and television writers get work and get paid with a disparity that is striking.The 2005 Hollywood Writers Report found that among film writers, women represented just 18% of employment while minorities combined stood at 6%. The median earnings gap between men and women, and minorities and white men in film work widened from $12,500 to $19,000 since the WGA’s last report was released in 1998.
In television, women accounted for 27% of writers and minorities represented just under 10%. And both are more likely to hold the lower-status title of “staff writer.” About 10% of all shows in the 2004-05 season had no women writers on staff, unchanged from the WGA’s comparative assessment of the 1999-2000 season. Pay for TV writing was an average of $12,000 more for men than women. Minority TV writers in 1998 earned on average $8,500 less than white men; this gap jumped to nearly $18,000 in the 2005 report.
Read the whole column; it’s by Bridget Johnson, whose blog is called GOPVixen. Rawrrr!
[Hat-tip: Don, LST tipster extraordinaire]
October 24, 2005
“When the lights go on again…”
Power’s been restored, and Mattsapundit Central Command is back in business. Sweet.
Scientists achieve adult stem cell breakthrough
In a development likely to offer hope to countless LST bloggers, scientists have successfully repaired human livers using adult stem cells:
Until now, the only hope for persons with irreversible liver failure from such diseases as cirrhosis, which kills about 27,000 Americans yearly, was transplantation. This requires permanent use of immunosuppressive drugs which can lead to opportunistic infections and cancer. Most importantly, it requires a new liver. About a thousand Americans are now on a waiting listfor one and many will die there.But scientists from London’s Imperial College report in The New Scientist repaired patients’ own damaged livers by using bone marrow adult stem cells collected from their own blood. Five were injected with a drug that stimulated their marrow to produce extra stem cells that were then injected into a blood vessel leading directly to the liver.
It worked. Both liver function and overall health of three out of five treated patients improved significantly within only two months of treatment. The two patients whose health did not improve were left no worse off.
Meanwhile, embryonic stem cells offer the “promise of hope” for the embryo-massacring industry.
[Hat-tip: Byron Hood]
October 21, 2005
Nero would be proud of FEMA’s Brown
Remember Michael Brown, former director of FEMA? Take a look at his staff’s emails. This is what he was up to as New Orleans died.
Here’s some free advice to government officials:
During a crisis, the words “wait service from the restaurant staff”
SHOULD NEVER ENTER THE DAMN PICTURE.
N.C. State professor calls for genocide of whites
This is more than a bit troubling:
Dr. Kamau Kambon, who taught Africana Studies 241 in the Spring 2005 semester at North Carolina State University, also said this needs to be done “because white people want to kill us.â€Addressing a panel on “Hurricane Katrina Media Coverage,†broadcast in its entirety on C-SPAN, Kambon told the audience that white people “have retina scans, they have what they call racial profiling, DNA banks, and they’re monitoring our people to try to prevent the one person from coming up with the one idea. And the one idea is, how we are going to exterminate white people because that in my estimation is the only conclusion I have come to. We have to exterminate white people off the face of the planet to solve this problem.â€
Oooookay, psycho. He’s still on the list of faculty at the Africana Studies department, by the way. Why not drop department chair Dr. Craig C. Brookins a line and let him know what you think of his employee?
[Hat-tip: Michelle Malkin]
UPDATE: Protein Wisdom has secured a (fictional, but funny) interview.
Matt Bramanti | October 21, 2005 at 11:48 am
Posted to Media,National,Uncategorized,Weather
No comments yet
Posted to Media,National,Uncategorized,Weather
No comments yet
October 3, 2005
Earle hits DeLay with new indictment after first flops
Via Fox News:
A Texas grand jury indicted Rep. Tom DeLay on a new charge of money laundering Monday, less than a week after another grand jury leveled a conspiracy charge that forced DeLay to temporarily step down as House majority leader.
I’ll get a PDF of the indictment up as soon as I can find one.
Oh no, there goes Tokyo! Go go Barbzilla!
You really do not want to click this link. You’ve been warned.
September 30, 2005
Judge bans probationer from having sex
Here’s something you don’t see everyday.
No sex. That’s part of a sentence imposed on a 17-year-old girl by Texas state district judge Lauri Blake.She’s ordered the young drug offender not have sex as long as she is living with her parents and attending school, as a condition of her probation.
It is one of several unorthodox rulings Judge Lauri Blake has imposed since she was elected 10 months ago in the district court that covers Fannin and Grayson counties.
She has also prohibited tattoos, body piercings, earrings and clothing “associated with the drug culture” for those on probation.
Good for the judge, though it’s unfortunate that she’s having to do things the parents should’ve done all along. Wait, there’s more:
Lawyers are also subject to her rulings. Blake has told female attorneys not to wear sleeveless shirts or show cleavage in her courtroom.
Forget everything I just said. This judge is a heartless monster whose warped perception of justice threatens the well-being of the state. She must be stopped.
September 29, 2005
This is why I love folks from New Orleans
While New Orleans residents worked to get the Big Easy back up and running, Reuters went to the coonass man on the street:
“If they don’t get these businesses going again, the city ain’t going to have any money,” said Art Depodesta, part owner of the restaurant and bar Cooter Brown’s. “I want to be the first to open in Uptown.”Workers busily scrubbed everything with bleach and Depodesta said he tossed away about $10,000 worth of rotten food.
“It was nasty. The oyster cooler, well, the dead bodies I saw got nothing on that oyster cooler,” he said. “The time for all the ‘woe, woe, woe is me’ business is over. It’s time to get going.”
New Orleans is going to be just fine.
Are they accepting new members?
LST reader and commenter Gregg sent this one along. These guys look like trouble. Fun trouble.
September 28, 2005
DeLay indicted, likely to face firing squad
In a clear sign that the nation’s evil KKKonservative “majority” will inevitably collapse within 24 hours, House Majority Leader and spawn of the devil Tom DeLay was indicted today.
The charges range from conspiracy to cannibalism, and progressive legal activists expect DeLay to be executed by week’s end, allowing the Democratic Party to reinstitute its wildly successful social programs and foreign policy efforts.
Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, a completely neutral and unbiased champion of justice, called the totally non-politically motivated indictment “a huge victory for MoveOn. I mean, for law and order.”
Your technicolor tax dollars at work
Uncle Sam is whipping out his paintbrush, adding more color to the nation’s currency in an attempt to foil high-tech counterfeiters. But there’s also another benefit, according to the Associated Press:
There will be the addition of subtle background colors on both sides of the note to go with the traditional green and black.Each denomination has its own color to make finding the right bill in your wallet easier. For the $20, the additional colors were blue, peach and a different shade of green while the $50 bill featured the added colors of blue and red.
Thank you, government! If it weren’t for you splashing ridiculous colors all over my money, how would I possibly know what denomination I’m carrying?
