♫ Hello strange Marillion, it's been a while since I made the heads of this old music hdd spin. 5 hours 19 min ago
I don't really understand all the attention to today's news about not having to pick Google Voice number with Google Voice service.
There existed a number of solutions to achieve exactly the same. Sure one had to pick Google Voice number. But its usage could be completely transparent and actual Google Voice number would never show up anywhere.
One such solution, I covered in details on how to setup with GSM-based phone.
It's been a while since I gave some insight to tuning your voice mail with regular phone using GSM MMI codes. Very useful for people annoyed by voice mail, yet unable to afford losing it just yet.
One of the biggest updates is that GrandCentral is now called Google Voice. Although still closed for general registration, you can sign up for an invite, which you will get in about one or two weeks. I tried.
Another cool thing I learnt was that Android interface allows you to setup alternative voice mail without having to hack with MMI codes (Menu > Settings >Call Settings). See screenshot below:
Among other new things you can do with Google Voice is be ability to easily look for a number that translate into some phrase (Settings > Phones > Your Google Voice Number > Change), also called phone vanity phrase. Check screenshot below:
Just type your word and it'll search for available numbers for you, very cool. Existing Google Voice account holders will have to pay one time $10 fee to change the number. But I think it's worth it.
Worth mentioning that Google Voice now transcribes your voice mails. Supremely useful feature. You can glance at it and see if a voice mail is worthless and pointless, you can just delete it without having to listen to it. On the other side, people who have accent shouldn't expect their voice mail to be transcribed correctly at all. Or if you someone has a name that isn't common, most likely, that name won't be resolved correctly. For instance, my name — Vlad — usually resolves to Bob, Blob, or Void. 
Lastly, there's a fantastic native Google Voice App for Android that makes things very transparent. There is one that was released for iPhone, but was pulled from iTunes App Store shortly; but that is an issue to cover some other time.
And finally, some people told me that they'd never use Google Voice or Google Mail, or anything google for that matter for privacy reasons. Well to those I have one thing to say — You are mistaken if you think you will find privacy in Verizon Wireless or Comcast when it comes to your phone or email address. Privacy is like Santa Claus, people just _conveniently_ pretend that it exists when needed. Got something to hide? Barricade in your house and don't use anything. On a serious note however, if you're that paranoid, 
check youmail service as a parcial alternative to Google Voice.
Download free Google invoice (invoicef.ods). Read on for instructions how to import it into docs.google.com.
If you typed "Free google invoice" in google, you'd most likely end up on my Free Google Invoice page, where anyone could open public invoice template I made, clone it, and use it as they please.
That was something I created a while ago. Since, google has changed sharing options and so there appeared some complications where people did not have full rights to the document. I decided to give full access to anyone to do whatever they wanted. After all it was just an automonous spreadsheet document.
Free google invoice revision history snapshot.
As you can see from the revision history screenshot above, many people benefited this invoice template and often times even overwrote each other changes, when they should have just cloned the template. But that wasn't the worst. I recently got reports from people saying that spammers getting into this niche to promote their useless stuff. So I've now removed free google invoice, and, it's not available as a file:
invoicef.ods — this an .ods file. To add it to your google docs you have to (1) download this .ods file, (2) choose Upload option from main interface, (3) browse for the file and proceed with upload. Invoice document then will appear in the list of your documents.
Finally got my Google business cards: 
Google business cards.
Packaging is really cool. I wish they were a bit more customizable, but overall I think they're going to help geek those recipients of these who aren't geeked out yet. 
Another update (09/03/09): public access to google invoice template has been removed, click here to read more.
Update: for some reason editing permission to the world doesn't work anymore. If you need to use this invoice template, please find a way to request access in the menu, and I shall grant you full access.
For some reason I started getting access requests for my free google invoice. I thought first that people were bored and just did it for fun of it, but turns out that no, indeed access has been blocked for other users. I logged in with my other gmail account to check. I don't know what happened, maybe google changed permission system. I don't recall how this looked one year ago when I did it.
I have thus re-enabled "Share with the world" option. Keep enjoying free google invoice template.
When I moved to America, I discovered voice mail. At first cool, eventually [mostly] huge waste of time.
For instance: "hey this is me, bye", "why are you not answering your phone?", "call me!", "this me, I have nothing to do so I decided to call you", and so on. The only argument one can make here is that, yes, some of these short messages could be helpful if there is no "no missed calls" message on your phone or otherwise when a phone has been out of network, out of battery power, or simply turned off.
On the other hand, there definitely are meaningful voice mails; for example: "Hi, this is your insurance agent, we wanted to remind you to come to our office tonight to renew your policy".
So where exactly is time wasted? I will tell you. Time is wasted not only listening to meaningless voice mails, but also retrieving them, here is general rough scenario of retrieving one message:
Since a switch to iPhone 2.0 I was happy 100% minus one tiny issue. One of the most useful application I had on iPhone 1.1.4 is not working on 2.0. This application is NemusSync.
For now I figured another way to do this manually while NemusSync is not available for 2.0.
To sync your google calendar with iPhone caledar these are the steps:
Another update (09/03/09): public access to google invoice template has been removed, click here to read more.
Update: for some reason editing permission to the world doesn't work anymore. If you need to use this invoice template, please find a way to request access in the menu, and I shall grant you full access.
After inability to register a desired username at Gmail, I settled with an alternative. But in years passed I haven't stopped wondering why I can register this screen name with every service, but Gmail.
Recently, this has come up in a conversation with a couple of friends and it resulted in a number of experiments with Gmail registration system. Findings were quite interesting and were leaving more questions than answers. The following are the things that we found:
