by Michael Sheehan on December 22, 2006
in General
Today I going to quickly touch on a great web-app that is really much more than that…it’s a service that allows you to choose a single local phone number and then have that phone number be your phone phone number for life. Sounds great. Basically what you get is a single number that people can call to get ahold of you. In the configuration pages, you designate all of the phone numbers that you want to have “attached” to this single number. Then you give that number out to your friends, coworkers, clients and family. The site is called GrandCentral.com.
What happens when they call that number? Well, based on the rules that you configure, ALL of the numbers configured ring simultaneously. That is, you cell, your work, your home, etc. all start ringing. You then just have to answer one of them, whichever one you are closest to. Or, you can let it just go to voicemail. You can access your voicemails over the web or through one of your registered phones.
There are some other really nice features. Have you ever been called by someone who was a talker? Let’s say that they called your GrandCentral number and you answered it on your cell phone. Then they talked and talked and talked so long that you made it to your home (where your cell phone coverage is just bad). Well, with a certain key press on your cell phone, you can make another one of your registered phones ring and you can just transfer the call over seamlessly.
Right now they have unlimited incoming calls and a bunch of other nice features like different ringtones for callers, the ability to listen in to people recording voicemails for you (like screening your calls) and then answer the call, you can block calls, customize greetings for certain callers, and many other things.
I definitely recommend getting a number just to have it. It works pretty well…I had a few issues initially but I think the service is a really nice idea. There are a few feature that I would really like them to fix thought like the ability for two GrandCentral numbers to share a configured number. It will come, I have been told.
And I want to see if I can post my writing to the BlogAPI. This is just a test.
Updated…didn’t seem to work. I need to do some digging around to figure this out. Drupal looks pretty good though. I was able to Syndicate this blog and then push over the blog posts to the main page. My Drupal site is here…
Next in line is a piece of software for all of the Mac users out there. I’m sure that you take good care of your mac from a maintenance perspective (you do, right?)…you install the Apple Software Updates, periodically run the Disk Repair utility, repair your permissions, and generally don’t abuse your system. There are lots of tools that you can buy and/or download for free that can also help you maintain a smooth running and happy mac. I have used Cocktail, Diskwarrior and Onyx fairly regularly.
Those tools are great, provided you can boot your computer or you have an external drive that has them and the OSX operating system on them to run Disk Repair or even a start-up CD available. Well, here is a great application for those users who don’t mind booting in Single User mode (it’s a bit scary, I’ll admit) to run their checks and repairs. It’s called AppleJack (located here) and is an open-source application.
Here are some of the things that AppleJack can do for you:
- Repair disks
- Repair your permissions
- Clean up your cache files
- Validate your preference files
- Remove swap files
In fact, here is what the “command line” menu shows (this is what you will see when you run AppleJack from Single User Mode):
[click to continue…]
One of the blogs that I frequent has a nice repost of another blog. Being a father of 3 lovely girls, we do lots of traveling by car. While the DVD player that we have is great (I don’t know how I survived as a kid…kids these days are soooo lucky), there is something to be said about good ol’ fashion word games to create a nice dialog. Of course, the older your kid gets, the more likely they are to slip away into an iPod daze…but it is worth a shot while you still have their attention (somewhat).
Blogger Gretchen Rubin has a great post on some easy word games that you can use while traveling or waiting in line (e.g., to see Santa…yeah right, like kids have enough of an attention span during the holidays). I will definitely try these out the next time I have a chance. It’s really good to engage the brain before it goes too mushy during the holiday vacation!
Here are the first three examples:
This or That: would you rather eat a hotdog or a hamburger? would you rather be able to fly or breathe underwater?
Imaginary Bedroom: ask your child to imagine the perfect bedroom, complete with magical features.
[click to continue…]
