Jonathan’s Universe

Archive for the ‘Opinion / Editorial’ Category

Well, not exactly a glance. I’ve had it a few weeks now and think it’s great.

When I got my invited it was, of course, almost midnight and I was literally about to sign off. I actually set up a temporary filter on my GMail account to forward emails that contain “Google Voice” from Google to my cell phone. This way no matter where I was, I’d know instantly when I got accepted and would make haste to get to a computer. Well luckily, I was about 10 feet away from one when my cell phone went off. It goes without saying that I did stay up all night playing with it and getting it all set up and customized.

Actually, the first hour I was debating between different phone numbers, As I displayed earlier, you can pick your own number as long as the number is within the block of the million-or-so numbers Google bought from Level3. You can also search for either a combination of numbers or a combination of letters. I was trying different things to find a REALLY epic vanity phone number. I narrowed it down to three numbers.. to be honest, at this point I can’t remember what the other two were. I think one had  JFK-NIPP in it. The one i decided on was mostly chosen because it’s “more local” area-code wise than the other two candidates. The one I landed on combined my first name (shortened) and an abbreviation of my last name. It works great.

Here’s an issue I have though that’s not at all GV’s fault. I’m trying to get my old contacts to call me at my new number. Some of them have been good at adopting it, but others like my parents for some reason don’t get the idea that the new number is my “main number.” For some reason, it’s a hard concept for them to grasp, as they call and I pick up, expecting to hear “Do you want to accept a call from Mom?” and i just hear silence and I go “Hello..?” and it’s my mom. Ugh.

You can choose to have incoming GV calls display as either the caller’s number (this is good for things like fave five) or as YOUR google voice number. Several have recommended adding your GV number as a fave five contact, and switching the connection number as the GV number, that way all calls through GV don’t consume minutes. But I have a feeling that this violates some T-Mobile rule.

I think the coolest feature is the voicemail transcription. If someone calls me and I don’t answer, they can leave a voicemail. Within minutes (depending on length of voicemail, etc) I get a text message that has the text version of the person’s voice. At this point, it’s still a little off on the translating, but remember that GMail’s spam protection was nothing special when it first came out — this is because it’s a community learning that relies on spam reporting and such. I’m not sure how it’s going to work with the voicemail transcription, but I have a feeling that it is also “learning.” 90% of the voicemails I’ve gotten I was able to get the gist of what was being said just by reading the text. Others I had to either listen to it on the dashboard or call in. Also, very rarely the scribe will give up completely and not even bother to try translating. This is usually if the person is speaking gibberish, extremely (unintelligibly) loudly or there’s a lot of loud background ambiance.

This feature is cool for many reasons. I can read text faster than I can login to my voicemail, go through all the prompts (You have 3 unread and 10 saved voice messages. First message saved on..) and then actually listen to the voicemail. It results in me being more efficient as I can get things done quickly. Also, let’s say I’m in a meeting and can’t listen to the voicemail, but I can quickly glance at my phone to see something like “I’m going to be like 5 minutes late. See you soon!” Or even more likely, let’s say I’m in an area where signal reception is bad. It’s good enough to occasionally have my phone collect/sync new text messages, but not maintain a phone call for more than 10 seconds. It’s very useful, and just flat out neat.

Also, caller grouping. I can set people in groups and apply settings to those groups. So I can add my parents and grand parents to “family” and have “family” only ring my personal phone (though, that’s all I have right now) and never my work phone.  Also, I can set specific voicemail greetings for this group. So instead of my professional formal greeting, I can just give a short relaxed and casual one. I can also select a voicemail greeting for each specific person too.

One of the main features of Google voice is something I can not yet take advantage of. You can set up multiple phones to your Google Voice account. When someone calls your GV number, it will ring all the phones in your account until one of them answers (or a certain time passes). The logic behind this is that at any given time you’re very likely around at least one of your phones, let it be your work landline, your personal cell, your work cell, or personal landline. Unfortunately at this time, GV doesn’t support adding extensions to phones, so I cannot add my work desk phone to my GV account.

Text messaging is handled uniquely. You can text someone through the website dashboard. If they reply, it’ll forward that text to all of your SMS-enabled devices on your account and will appear online. However, the text will come from a 406 area code phone number. This is a little confusing, but I’ll try to explain it the best I can. Essentially, everyone on your contact list is assigned a number from the 406 area code.

The 406 area code number is an “alias.” This is done so that you can reply to texts from your cell phone and it will appear to them that you are texting from your GV number. This is because in reality, you are texting a number that google controls, so what happens is you text them, google receives it, sees it’s coming from a number on “this google voice account”, so “this alias being texted” for “this google voice account” is assigned to the real phone number 555-555-5555, sends a text to 555-555-5555.  If you call the alias phone number from any device on your google voice account, it’ll call that person from your google voice number. This is the only “convenient way” to call someone directly from your (non-smartphone) cell phone via your GV account. If you are good with memorizing numbers, you can also call their real number by calling your GV number, pressing 2, then dialing your person. At this time, the only way to get a person’s alias phone number is for them to text you. It’s not displayed anywhere else.

Another cool feature is “Call Presentation.” If someone calls and they aren’t added as a contact on my GV account or they have never called before, they are asked to say their name. It will then ring me and ask me to accept a call from [their recording]. If they already called, I’ll hear their recording from the first time. If they are added to my GV contact list, I’ll hear a Text-To-Speech version of their written name. Okay, after their name is presented to me, I can either do one of three things, Accept, Send to voicemail, or Send to voice mail with ListenIn. With ListenIn, I can hear the person as they are recording their message (old answering machine style!) and optionally press * and start talking to them. It’s pretty cool.

There’s call recording too. However, you can only initiate call recording if the person calls you. Outgoing calls don’t work for recording. Probably for legal issues. When you start the recording, you’ll hear a nice lady saying “Call recording on!” and when you turn it off, you’ll hear “Call recording off.” You can listen to the recording on your Google Voice Dashboard.

If you have a smart phone (save for iPhone) you can get an application (most likely) for you device. This application will likely take control of your CallController and TextController so that it routes all your outgoing calls through GV. This way you can call any of your contacts directly through GV without dailing in, having their alias, or calling them through your GV Dashboard.

There are a few issues with GV that I have. The main one is that there is, at current, no support for MMS. If someone sends me a picture to my GV number, I’ll never know about it. And the sender will never know that their MMS message was never seen. I have a feeling that eventually Google will figure out a way to get this to work, but it’s understandable because we’re still in beta. However, if someone wants to send you a picture, they’d have to send it directly to your cell phone (or email). Giving out your “real” cell phone number would defeat much of the purpose of GV.

All in all, I think Google Voice is amazing. I love it and can’t wait until some of the wrinkles are ironed out. If you ever have a chance to join GV, take it! It’s wonderfuL!

You guys remember that unannounced fly-over New York City? You know, the one the Obama Administration decided to perform so they could update their publicity photos (oh, the irony) based on the Air Force One flying around national landmarks? Yeah, the one that caused public on the ground to fear the worst and run for their lives fearing another 9/11 attack.

Turns out, hey, we won’t even be seeing the photos. Obama’s administration (possibly Obama himself) has ordered that the “photos taken” to not be released to public view.

It’s kind of funny. This president has no problem revealing photos of the “abuse” of known terrorists, closing down Gitmo bay and making previous presidents’ dirty laundry be known… but what about his own? Not a shot.

So not only did they not tell anyone (not even the mayor!), they spent almost $329,000 on this operation. That’s OUR tax money, on OUR plane, flying over OUR city. Does anyone else find something fishy about this? A supposed super secret operation to get new press pictures of the president’s plane over national landmarks, but the pictures aren’t being revealed. Also, the plane was being escorted by a fighter jet… since when are fighter jets mounted with high-resolution, high-quality cameras? Something really fishy. By all means, I am NOT a conspiracy theorist, at all.. but stuff isn’t adding up here.

I’ve sent in a Freedom of Information Act to obtain more information. These photos are not “classified, but being kept from public view.” Well, since they aren’t classified, I’m invoking the FoIA. Here is my request:

“Please disclose any documents relating to the Air Force One “landmark fly-over photo-op” on the day April 27, 2009, including but not limited to, photographs (color) taken, flight manifest, fighter escort aircraft camera specifications, operational directives and all correspondence with the FAA & Flight Traffic Control before and during this operation in regards to all operational notification, planning and commission.”

It’s short and sweet, but to the point. We’ll see how much executive cooperation I receive.

So much for the transparency we were promised.

Thanks to Insignifcant Thoughts and New York Post

CC is definitely liquidating. Going bye bye. Seeya later [not really] alligator!

Circuit City executives were unable to find a satisfactory buyer and were not able to refinance.

Here’s a bad part: All sales are going poof. Sad I am that I did not jump on CoD: World at War for $19.99. All prices are very much likely to restore to MSRP or higher. Even if they do liquidation sales, those prices are often actually marked up (sneaky liquidators!) from MSRP and even the store’s normal sale price.

All remaining locations of Circuit City will be liquidating – every single one of them. I’m kind of sad, because there is a CC very close to my house. It’s where I got my first iPod. It’s also where I almost bought my laptop to replace the old one I aptly named Beatrice. Best Buy made that sale.

Anyway, while the road has been tough for CC – they’ve made some pretty rookie mistakes. For example firing all of their experienced staff and replacing them with new hires and newer still-unexperienced employees that were naive to technology. You tried. You failed, but you still tried. For that, I salute you. [via AP]

I was doing my daily blog browsing and I saw that fellow blogger Vincent from InsignificantThoughts.com had a very interesting entry, that caught me by surprise.

Apparently North Carolina is considering adding a “road-use tax.” I mean, I hate to respond like a third grader but, “come on.. SERIOUSLY!? Really!?” This is honestly absolute ludicris. I thought the tolls were the usage taxes, I guess the state will do anything to get a quick buck from their cits. How it work, is every year the state government would measure your odometer (I’m guessing having the Motor Vehicle Inspection Authorities report the data) and they calculate the difference from the year previous… or even have GPS technologies measure usage (have premium rates downtown areas,  perhaps?) This is absolutely ridiculous.

Like Vincent quoted, states already tax for just about everything,

Isn’t this another multiple-multiple tax? They have a sales tax on the purchase of the vehicle, they tax the gasoline, they tax the tires, they tax the upkeep-repairs-service of your vehicle, they have a licensing-registration tax, they have an emissions check tax, they have a vehicle property tax, and now they want to tax the usage. Oh yeah, don’t forget about toll roads too.

What’s next? Oh, I know! Taxing us based on the amount of oxygen we breathe, because it’s consuming resources from plants that the state owns and maintains! Everyone would have to get mandatory surgery to get breathometers installed in their lungs. Give me a break.

While we are on the topic of taxes, Vincent had another interesting post. The governor of New York is trying/proposing/politicking to have tax hikes on a lot of things. Do you take the taxi to get places (It’s New York, after all!)? Well, if he gets his way, it’ll be about 4% more you’d have to pay in addition to your fare. iTunes/media downloads? 4%! Oh, non diet soft drinks? A whopping 18%.

Check out (and subscribe!) to Vincent’s blog, to check out the picture of the newspaper frontpage.

Let me note that not only is taxing like this extremely lame, they could not have picked a worse time. Everyone these days is living paycheck-to-paycheck, and the government wants to continue to sap even more money out of our precious wallets? What is this?

I like to call myself a very patriotic person. I’m also very supportive of our military. But something happened fairly recently, that’s just not acceptable. At all.

Here’s the story: A US soldier whom had been stop-lossed (enlistment term involuntarily extended) found a little tiny puppy.  Through the help with SPCA’s Baghdad Pups she raised this poor scrawny lil guy to a docile dog. This dog, to my knowledge, has no conditions (fleas, rabies, aggression issues, etc). This dog looks really friendly and honestly quite adorable.

Cute, right? Uncle Sam didn’t agree. The commanding officers of the soldier seen above seized the animal (named Ratchet) en route to the airport to go home with the soldier’s family.. a place where he was  guarenteed love and safety.

“It is against military regulations for active duty troops to befriend animals”

I kind of find that to be a little bit of a stretch. There is no provision or clause in the UCMJ that mentions anything about animals with the exception of the prohibition of animal abuse (this is important, keep note of it). However, in a document dated in late 2000 (ie, before the war), the following is listed as a prohibited activity per General Order 1A:

“Adopting as pets or mascots, caring for, or feeding any type of domestic or wild animal.”

That being said, these are different times. These soldiers don’t have many friends out there. Yet these animals can offer unconditional love and care for them. Also, note, it’s the SPCA that is handling the transportation and such of these animals. They are not being transported with tax payers money.

According to a press release by the SPCA:

“It is against military regulations for active duty troops to befriend animals – Soldiers can face immediate court-marshal and some even see their animals brutally murdered by a direct gunshot to the head from commanding officers who will not bend the rules.”

I sincerely hope the SPCA is embelishing that. Because if the military is killing animals, especially when it’s not a misery kill (animal is mortally wounded, rabies, no chance of survival, etc), that is definitely animal abuse, which the military claims to take very seriously. Also, not only would that be cruel and unusual punishment to the animal, it is also cruel and unusual punishment for the soldier. That’s just not acceptable.

Personally, I suggest everyone start talking to their state congressmen.

So, I just stumbled across a Facebook group that made me lol a little bit. It’s a group simply called ‘FUCK THE POLICE’ yup. That’s right. All capital letters. According the group profile, they are a “political organization.” One more LOL.

Here’s the description of the group they provided.

In the United States, us as American citizens have the right to express our opinion in many ways, however some ways are illegal more than others, we do have one thing they cannot take away from us and that is the 5th admendment, it is our right as U.S. citizens to express our opinion by freedom of speech, anything you read or write in this group is OPINION not fact, an example is (in my opinion all cops are possible child molestors) this group is to state your opinion, share bullshit stories, and to join together as a nation against the cops that are dumb fucks, dont get me wrong though not all cops are some are actually pretty cool if you get to know them, this group is for the police that think they are hardasses because the have a gun and a badge

In the United States, us as American citizens have the right to express our opinion in many ways, however some ways are illegal more than others

we do have one thing they cannot take away from us and that is the 5th admendment, it is our right as U.S. citizens to express our opinion by freedom of speech

So uh.. you do know that the fifth admendment refers to protections against self-incrimination,  establishment of Miranda rights, establishment of Eminent Domain and definition of double jeopardy. Now you just sound uneducated. I think he is referring to the first amendment… but I thought everyone knew that. Guess not. But I digress..

anything you read or write in this group is OPINION not fact, an example is (in my opinion all cops are possible child molestors)

Well golly gee, that first half sounds somewhat intellgient. However that second half there, yeah.. that’s just baseless and in bad taste. Stereotype much? The average Joe Shmoe has more of a chance of being a predator.. police officers have to go through detailed background checks.

To me, this very laughable. It looks like a bunch of future anarchist kids being resentful to those with authority simply because they have authority. Don’t get me wrong: Cops can be jerks. Some are abusive. Some definitely fit the in category of police brutality. But come on, ‘I think all cops might be child molesters.’ I’m calling Whiskey Tango Foxtrot on that one..

I do find it noteworthy (and very LOL-worthy) that the creator of the group has a profile picture of him chugging something. Probably beer. Oh yeah, his network… it’s a high school. We must have some big law abiding citizens here. Thanks for the laughs though, kids.

Ah, yes. The Facebook redesign. it’s been out for quite some time now. Up until Friday I’ve had the option to still use the old Facebook, but my account has been since locked to the new Facebook. This is Facebooks attempt to push the new design so they no longer have to support and maintain the old design.

The feedback and response has been mixed but generally negative. Most people don’t like the new design. I’ll tell you why. Change. Yes, it’s something new. Humans are a creature of habit and routine. If this routine changes, their feeling of structure collapses. Also, another thing people don’t like is because it’s very buggy.

From a developer’s standpoint, I feel bad for the people on the product team. They have worked hard trying to excite and create a new Facebook for people to enjoy and in return they get ‘Anti-New Facebook Groups’ and really nasty feedback from spoiled brats. Take my word for it, a lot of work went into designing and programming this.

Now on the user standpoint. Aethestically, Facebook looks much better. Light colors, semi-transparency, rounded corners. It looks nice, but it’s like everything has changed location, so it will take some getting used to. But then again… remember the last Facebook changed? Yeah, everyone was doing the same thing with complaining. Now they are holding on so very dear to it.

The profile page. The most core component of Facebook. The wall, formerly a way of posting Comments between users, has been combined with the user’s news feed. This actually removes the clutter but also will cause confusion for people not used to the idea of combining the two components.  Profiles now have tabs which does remove the page-scrolling but increases the clicking. So it might be worse.

Remember some people who had like a thousand applications installed (I wish they wouldn’t)? Well, boxes generated by applications and such have been moved to the “boxes tab.” These tabs are kind of good. Let’s say you want to find someone’s screenname. Originally you’d have to scroll through all of their applications, wall posts, et cetera in order to get to it.  Now you just click “Info” and it’s quite easy to find

Facebook is a little buggy. The biggest one actually completely interferes with a task. On some profiles, I do not see a link to “View more pictures.” It simply isn’t there. It’s not that they don’t have any pictures, because they would If i were to be on the Facebook.. it’s just for some reason a link isn’t being rednered for them. I am sure Facebook will patch this and the other bugs and glitches soon.

A note to the New Facebook team. You’ve done a lot of work and a lot of people are ungrateful and unaccepting of the work you put out. It’ll just take some getting used to, that’s all. Keep up the good work.

This is a pretty amazing service. And it’s free!… To everyone!

Let’s say that I need to get a number of a pizza joint near here. I just call 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411), say my city and state. Then i can either say “Jano’s Pizza” or even just like “Pizza” and it’ll give me a list of relevant places. I can request more information about a returned item, like for example maybe “Goodfellla’s Pizza” came up, I just say “details.” I can also have the phone number, address and URL to the address on google maps texted to my phone. Except this doesn’t work for me. Probably because my phone number is ported from sprint to t-mobile. Apparently it’s a common problem with people who move carriers with their old number.

The voice recognition is pretty damn good. One time I said something pretty obscure (though i forgot what it was at this point) and it still got it. It’s actually creepy how good it knows what I am saying. I think out of the 10-20 times I’ve used it, it’s made one voice recognition error and that’s because it was really windy outside.

At no additional cost, Google 411 will automatically connect you to the returned business name, too.

This is an excellent service. And it’s free! Try it out. it’ll come in handy. Personally, i saved it to my phone as “411 Google” so it’s right there at the top of my list.

I have a question. You have a Facebook account. You submit your information to it. You know, your name, birthday, religion, likes, dislikes, addresses, phone numbers, etc. So do all your relatives and friends. Who owns everyone’s information? According to Facebook, not you.

Let’s say that you want to use another social network. MySpace.com, myYearBook.com, whatever. Should you have the ability to export your data from facebook and move it to whatever social network you want? So all/most of your profile information is transferred? According to Facebook, nope. The information, or at least the representation of the information is property of Facebook because you willingly submitted it to them.

Using an automated script to pull your data out and save it in a certain format to be imported to another service is a clear violation of the Terms of Service. It’s easily detectable. Unless you have a software package that adds a random delay between each page (to simulate “you reading it”), Facebook will detect that pages are being requested faster than a human could actually process the page information over a short period of time.

The same thing happened to Mr. Scoble. His account got disabled. I can see why Facebook does this from a proprietor standpoint, but why is everything always about the business and never about customer convenience?

Let’s say that you want to import all your friends’ email addresses and phone numbers to outlook or something of that nature. This is simply so you can easily contact your friends.  Let’s say that you use a laptop and you travel to a wireless network (work/school?) where facebook might be blocked. But you need Paul’s email address to email him something for class. Oh no. Facebook is blocked. Facebook, by way of policy prohibits you from assembling external lists like this. This will also get you banned, because you’d need a program to crawl all of your friends’ profiles and grab the information. Easily detectable. Unless your software package does the above… and even then, probably still slightly detectable.

I can also see why facebook prohibits this. This would be a drain on bandwidth, as well this would encourage companies to do spam marketing campaigns by harvesting emails found on profiles. I mean, you gotta look at both sides of the picture, but shouldn’t there be a happy medium, somehow?

So awhile back, I switched from Sprint to T-Mobile. It started out with me needing to get a new charger for my sprint phone because mine was lost and I couldn’t bring my mom’s charger with me when I went to South Carolina. I then walked out with a new plan on the T-Mobile network.. and a new phone. But I’ve had some grievances.

First, let me say the good thing. Their customer service for the most part is simply amazing. Their reps are always nice and do seem to care about you. One time I got an extra 300 minutes for the current pay period after talking to the representive. That was pretty cool. But again, they are really polite and ask you about your day. Friendliness is really important. Good job T-Mobile.

Now some caveats. The reception is horrid. I don’t get service in my house. Except on the arm of my couch I am sitting on now. And that’s sporadic. I also sporadically get service in my bed room on the first floor. As for the basement.. where the TV and comfortable couch is? Not a shot. Even places outside, I don’t get reception  on certain places of my porch and even the sidewalk outside my house. In my office, I barely get reception, I usually have to leave my office and go into the hallway to make or receive phone calls.

Second thing is their network infrastructure. I have a question, when you call someone and they don’t have service, what do you expect to hear? Their voicemail? A busy signal? With T-Mobile, if a subscriber unexpectedly leaves the network (ie, loss of signal, battery dies), any calls received don’t go to voicemail. At least not usually. More often than not, people get a busy signal. Only after an extended time of not having service does the network decide “oh, this person is unavailable, route callers to voicemail.”

You see, when you turn on your phone, your phone probably says “Registering with network” or something to that effect. This is your phone saying, “Hi, i’m a phone. I’m apart of your network. this is information about me.” The network keeps track of your “position” (which cell tower you’re on, etc) and the like. Now, if you shut of your phone (while you have service), your phone tells the network that it is leaving. Now people will be directed to voicemail immediately. If you lose service (or otherwise adbruptly leave the t-mobile network), the network still thinks you’re “there.” So when someone calls, it sends the caller to nothingness, hence the busy signal. It’s quite horrible. Especially when I’m in my house and my dad is trying to call me to find out what I want for dinner. Boo T-Mobile.

I have unlimited text messaging. I can text any US (maybe canadian?) numbers as many times I want (up to like 3,000 per month or some “acceptable fair use” amount). This is cool. I can’t dial short codes. These are the “send a text to #### for your vote” type services. This means I can’t a) request songs at my local radio station b) I can’t use twitter via my mobile device (the way it is intended to be used) c) i can’t use facebook via my mobile device. I try sending a text to one of the respective services, and I get a reply instantly back saying something to the effect, “This feature is not included in your service plan.” T-Mobile, come on, throw me a friggen bone here. So now I have to pay an extra $5.99 for “unlimited internet access” so I can use twitter and facebook via the web, instead of text messages. Kind of irritating. I’ll be starting that in my next pay period. Boo T-Mobile.

Okay, this problem probably effects many carriers. I don’t know. I want the ability to block certain numbers from calling/texting me. I mean really, I was getting texts from this.. person.. and I had no idea who they were. I called customer service and asked if I could prevent this person from texting me. Their suggestion? “We could change your number for $15.99 that has to be paid upfront.” Seriously. How hard is it to add that to the network structure? Simply a check to see if incoming data (whether it be SMS/MMS/phone call) is coming from a phone number that is on the intended recipient’s block list. Boo T-Mobile.. and probably most providers.

So I think in a year and half when my contract is over, I’ll be getting an iPhone. Maybe. The plans are a little expensive. We’ll see.