Come On!!!

There are times that I want to talk politics and foist my personal beliefs upon others. I try not to do that publicly, and I don't think this is an effective forum for that. I do have a strong wish, however, that the leaders of our country have a basic understanding of science, and the they appreciate some of the fundamental laws of nature that govern our existence. I do not understand why issues surrounding evolution and global warming are being debated, for example. So my draw jaw just dropped when I read this tweet from @minutephysics.

So... Mitt Romney thinks we should be able to open the windows on a commercial airplane. #PresidentsShouldKnowScience blogher.com/why-we-cant-op…
— minutephysics (@minutephysics) September 25, 2012

It's a reference to an LA Times article that quotes the Presidential candidate.

In case you are wondering, here's why we can't open the windows:

Perpetual Child

So I discovered today that my young daughter calls bananas "nah-ma-nahs."

I haven't stopped smiling since. Now before you think that I am some sap who melts every time his daughter does something cute ...

I'm smiling because I haven't been able to get that song out of my head all day. This may be my favorite ear-worm of all time. How can you not bop your head all day with this stuck between your ears?

TIL ... How Google Voice Actually Works

I am clearly immersed in the Google Universe, totally willing to serve up my personal information in order to receive the “free” products that come from Mountain View. It makes sense, therefore, that I am a Google Voice user. In fact, I’ve been using the service for over two years. The integration with my Android devices, often humorous voicemail transcriptions, the ability to receive voicemails and SMS on my desktop, the ability to seamlessly text from my laptop ... these features have been, and are, great. The one hangup that has been bothering me, however, has been the call forwarding. One of the killer features of GV is the ability to give out a phone number and control what device actually rings when someone dials that number. The setup and interface are simple enough, but it never really worked the way that I envisioned.

Let me digress a little by giving some background about why this service appeals to me. I teach at a boarding school in New England. My life is made infinitely easier if students and parents can communicate with me easily. However, I am reluctant to hand out my home phone number or, even worse, my cell phone number to an adolescent. I am just as hesitant to hand this information to the parents of an adolescent. These are not populations that have great track records of recognizing and respecting boundaries. The answer for me has come from GV.

The school where I work does not provide phone lines for individual faculty members. With GV's call forwarding feature, I can publish my GV number and choose what happens when somebody calls me.  If I am home, I can make myself available to parents and students by forwarding any calls made to my GV number to my home phone. If I am in the office or away from campus, GV can push calls to my cell phone. If I’m on vacation or out to dinner with my wife, I can turn off call forwarding all together, and any calls to GV go straight to voicemail. All I need is a web browser and a few mouse clicks to change these setting. People who want to contact me only need a single phone number. An added bonus comes from the fact that any voicemails or texts that come into my GV number go to my cell phone, my tablet, my home computer, and my office computer. I’m ok being bombarded with asynchronous communication. I can control when I respond to those. It’s the live phone calls that I want to direct.

So here is the problem I ran into. When I was home, I would have GV forward calls to my home number. This worked great, unless people called my real cell number.  My cell phone would ring, but if I did not pick up or I silenced the call, GV would forward the call to my home number. This would happen even though the incoming call was not directed to my GV number.

Imagine trying to put your infant to sleep. You forget that your cell phone is in your pocket. There is a soft ringing and buzzing that suddenly enters the room. You nimbly switch the child into your other arm and in one fluid motion, you execute the perfect in-pocket thumb swipe, silencing your phone. Before your can even crack a self-congratulatory grin for barely disturbing the babe, the phone in the next room instantly begins to blare. Damn you Google Voice!

What this meant to my friends and family (the people who actually know my real cell number) is that when they tried to call me, my cell phone would ring four times. If I did not answer, GV would then forward my call to my home number, which would ring four times. If there was still no answer, then the call would go to voicemail. Who waits for eight rings before leaving a voice message?

Now if you go to the settings of Google Voice and choose to edit a forwarding number, you see a link title “Show advanced settings.” (Settings>Phones tab>Forwards calls to:>Edit>Show advanced settings) Under the Forwarding Options you are given two choices: “Ring my other phones before going to voicemail” or “Go straight to voicemail.”

Ah ha! Problem solved! Clearly I do not want my other phones ringed when somebody calls my cell phone directly, so all I have to do is set it to go directly to voicemail. Errr … maybe not. Because after I changed this setting, the issue persisted. So I combed the interwebs and found that I was not alone in my GV travails.

After some more hunting and clicking, I discovered that in the Groups & Circles tab of the GV settings, one can set the call forwarding options for individual contacts or groups of contacts. For some reason, when I looked into these groups, both my home number and my cell number were checked, meaning calls were being forwarded to both. Ah Ha, Again! If I uncheck my home number in the Groups tab within the GV settings … problem solved? (Settings>Groups & Circles>Edit)

Not so fast, my friend! (Sorry, it’s a Saturday, and College Gameday was on this morning.) Despite going through this whole rigamarole, and finding two solutions within the GV settings that seemingly addressed my issue, nothing changed. So back the the forums and complaint boards I went, and came across this post in the sub-cockles of the internets.

It appears that when you setup GV on a cell phone, it automatically enables call forwarding directly from your carrier to the GV number.  Whenever anybody calls your cell number, your cellular provider automatically forwards the call to your GV number. If you have call forwarding turned off within GV, or have calls set up to be forwarded to your cell, then everything works as expected. If however, you have call forwarding set to go to a different number (home, for example), then you run into the problem I had. Somebody calls your cell, your carrier forwards the call to GV, and GV then forwards it to the other number. Four rings for your cell, four rings at the forwarded number, then voicemail.

So I have taken my home number out of the loop. When I want GV to forward a call, I have it go to my cell. If I want some privacy, I turn GV off all together. Now my cell behaves normally when friends and family call it directly; students and parents can get a hold of me when they dial my GV number; I still get all of the other functionality of GV; and when my wife calls me from home using her cell phone, the phone next to her does not start ringing for no apparent reason. I don't have great cell service in my apartment, and I can no longer overcome that by having GV calls going to my land line. I still get the calls I should, and that's really the point of this exercise.