Obscure Mania

I’m all for throwing something on the grill, meat, vegetables, (hot) dogs, brats, fish, shrimp, it’s all good. But when all you have is a campfire you need something that will hold your meat and marshmallows.

Using the new Google Voice service is awesome. It’s great if someone still has more than one phone, like a seperate number for their cell phone and home phone numbers. Just using it for voicemail is incredible and it’s freakin’ free.

Google Voice uses your Gmail contacts. If someone in your contacts either individually or in a group calls, you can setup different options as to what happens. Send them straight to voice mail, send your friends and family to your home phone, work contacts to your work phone and you can have a custom voice mail for every group or every contact if you want.

I can set up a voice mail for my contact to say, “Hey Paul, I’m out leave a message and I’ll call you back.” While everyone still gets the boring, “Leave your number at the tone.” message.

It does NOT cut out your mobile minutes. But if you’re on a plan that has unlimited calling to a certain number, you can add your Google Voice number and use Google Voice as your outgoing calls also. Google Voice mails are transcribed (sometimes may not be perfect), sent to your email or you can play on the web, download or forward to someone else. You have the option to record incoming calls and those will be transcribed and kept on the web in your Voice account.

Want to really block a number? Have it blocked and they get a “number has been disconnected” message. Don’t want the phone to ring late at night? Set it up to send all calls straight to voice mail or allow friends through. The best part, you can have this number for the rest of your life if you want, no matter how many times your cell, home and work numbers change.

You can look at, listen even tag your voice mail just like in Gmail. Even tag annoying calls as spam and they go directly to voice mail from now on.

Conference, add an incoming call to your current conversation, incredible call screening that will allow you to pick up, send to voice mail, listen to the voice mail as it happens and even pick up the call during the voice mail.

When you receive your invite, it took mine and my wife’s about a month to get back, you choose your number, either by numbers or letters in any area code. Of course it’s not going to give you a number that’s already taken no matter how bad you want to be able to dial your name by letters or some other combination may be taken. If you really don’t like the number you’ve chosen, you can change it later for $10.

We just changed our phone numbers and let everyone know our new numbers, I may wait awhile and I’ll send out another and change it one last time. It’s hard to believe it’s free, enjoy it while you can, there’s got to be a catch in there somewhere or someday. What ever they charge, it will be worth it.

I wish I had invites to hand out, but they’re not doing it like that for Voice. And 25 free business cards with your Google Voice number FREE.

Check the short videos about the features here – http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html

In one day I’ve been sent or have seen on blogs I read, two separate videos about privacy and Google. One multi-part video from Big Honkin and another video from the Onion. The first is from the comedy film makers Big Honkin about what if Google moved in as a roommate? In three parts. The other is a “news” (satire) report from the Onion about what happens to the people that want to Opt-Out of Google.

These are funny, but as with all satire, there’s a little bit of truth. I use Gmail, Gcalendar, Gvoice, Gdocs, Goog411, there’s more but decided this list was long enough and now the Gphone. Of course all of my websites are in Google. Hopefully Google won’t turn out to be too evil and if they are I’m old enough I won’t have to put up with it for too long.

The information is out there already, it’s only a matter of who sees it and what they do with it. If it’s only a matter of selling you crap, that’s fine and no one really cares. But when it comes to health information and employers using information they find out on the web as a reason to not hire you whether it’s true or not, that’s when things become a problem and things like that are happening now, more and more.

You want to make sure the information about you that is online is factual and someone looking for you knows it’s you or not. If you have an uncommon name, it’s not that difficult to control. If you’re John Smith, you have to be unique in some other way. John Smith the Jazz Musician or John Smith the Plumber where someone looking for a musician name John Smith will be able to find you. You want your site to be found for friends, family, job contacts and other networking, but you still need to control your privacy like your address and phone number. It’s tough to control because everyone wants to know everything.

The Big Honkin Three Parts What if Google was Your Roommate.
Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Here’s the report from the Onion:

I finished watching the Ken Burns The Civil War and it’s incredible the numbers of men that were lost in various battles. What’s even more incredible is the number of Generals that were absolutely worthless. When the Civil War started, if you had any kind of education or some sort of politician, you were made an officer, sometimes even a general. Several grads from West Point were on both sides, but more were needed.

It’s truly amazing some of the ineptitude and bungling of generals on both sides. One stupid mistake by some idiot in charge could cost thousands of lives. After the surrender at Appomattox the northern troops shared their rations with the Southerners, in a sign of what should have been a great healing of the country.

Almost every General in the Civil war seems to have a Fort or something named after them. All of the battles and the National Cemeteries are still reminders of the events that shaped this country.

Over 3 million served, 620,000 died, 1 million injured, that sounds like reparations paid in blood of the Americans that fought and died in what may not have started out to be a war officialy about slavery, but everyone knew it was.

Just took and passed my two tests from CompTIA and now have an A+ certification. After going through the prep classes at the college here, it was about six months later that I took the tests. Only using the original textbook, the practice exams on the included CD, I did pretty good. Since CompTIA doesn’t show you what you missed, I don’t know exactly what I got wrong on my two tests.

I took 601 and 602. Essentials and IT Technician exams. There were some questions in common from the two, but since I wasn’t sure I got them right the first time, hopefully I got them right the second time. If you have to retake a test, the only guide of what you missed is a summary of the “areas” where you got one or more questions wrong.

I looked everywhere I could for practice test questions, but they are few and far between unless you want to pay. The practice questions that come with the book were good but there were a lot of repeats. Four tests for each section (601, 602, 603, 604) fifty questions each. Out of 200 possible questions, I don’t know how many were unique, but I would guess about half, maybe more were actually unique.

This book is huge, over 1000 pages. After looking at reviews and other books on Amazon, I believe this is one of the best. I was looking for a smaller “cramming” book, but other book are just as big and it’s a little hard to cram for this test other than reading, doing the chapter questions and practice tests, start two weeks before you are scheduled to take the tests. I would love an audio version so I could listen while driving, but can’t find many technical books on audio, even though studies show you have better retention listening than reading.

It’s a nice start since this certification is one of the requirements on most computer jobs.  Not only do I get college credit for taking the classes, but the college gives a half price discount for the tests.

CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide, Sixth Edition

On one of my other sites, I mentioned one of the companies I recently worked for. My goal was to take over the number one position in Google with my site instead of their own. They have absolutely no on-site or any off-site SEO for this company name / keyword, the only thing I have to overcome is age and the company name in the URL. Pretty easy. It’s not even a fair fight, but why should it be? If you have the company name in your URL, why go for anything else? If your website is only a brochure and your business doesn’t come from your website don’t bother doing anything else. But if you’re website is a recruiting tool or is your way of getting new customers, you have to make more of an effort of getting your “brochures” out in front of your customers.

This isn’t much of an exercise or even much work. This is more of a personal project. I need to find a keyword with competition like this that will make money, but that’s the goal for all of us.

I have a couple of trucking sites that have a ton of authority, age, PR, content etc… Just linking to the new site has helped it a lot. After a few weeks here’s where I’m at.

Search Engine Update

My little search engine experiment is going pretty well. Three of my sites are on the front page for just a straight clark transfer search in google. Why aren’t they number one? Age has a lot of authority in Google so it takes some work to actually knock someone out of number one that’s been there for awhile, they have their name in their URL and besides, I’ve just started. Click the screen shots to enlarge.

But if you’re searching for driving for clark transfer in Google, as of this writing my sites are 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6. While clarktransfer.com is number 7. How does one site take up two positions? The short answer is that Google believes both pages have enough authority to be listed.

I got my last paycheck fine so why do this? For one, I hate companies that treat drivers like crap. I realize I could make a career doing this, but I know this one from first hand experience and it was really easy.

What about AOL, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines? Google gets 80% of the searches on the internet, everyone else splits the remaining 20%. AOL uses Google so they don’t even count. One of the reasons why Google is number one is they are constantly looking and indexing new content. Yahoo is good if you’re looking for old information. Yahoo doesn’t seem to send out its bots or search engine spiders very often or they don’t do as much work as Google. If you look for something that happened today, Google will probably have something indexed if it’s there today. Yahoo will show sites that have been there a long time with no recent information.

MSN (who?) has the same problem as Yahoo. They don’t have enough resources to keep up with the fast changing internet. Their listings are old and most aren’t relevant to what you’re looking for.

I listened to the unabridged version (full text read) from audible.com. My first impression – Great book. The first half was great, great situations and good action scenes. A little on the technical side, but not that much. The main detective character is computer and computer game illiterate so all of the technical details are explained.

The second half of the book, a little slow and as the technology gets more advanced, it gets a little unbelievable. You can see the ending coming from a few chapters away and the actual ending, doesn’t actually end. The book ends setup for another book.

Is it just me or I’d like to read a book that actually ends and I don’t have to wait a year for the next installment of the story, then it still doesn’t end. I listened to Stephan King’s Dark Tower, that was 6 books and the ending sucked, but it couldn’t really end in any other way. I read Eragon and the next book, but now I’ve heard that the third book in the trilogy isn’t the end and the plot was stretched so far it slowed down to make a third book.

Authors should finish a story and go on with the next one instead of trying to stretch the same story into another book or a long series of books.

And if I have it, how do I get rid of the Conficker virus? Stand up, run around your chair three times, sit back down, don’t buy all kinds of anti-spyware and anti-virus tools, don’t sign up for free scans or pay for someone to check for you. Don’t download some program that you know nothing about, making claims to clean your PC, speed it up and cure your cold.

This is what you must do, right now – R-E-L-A-X.

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If you don’t know the story of the two border agents being jailed you’ve been under a rock, but just in case a quick synopsis is one night on the Texas border two border agents were chasing someone that jumped out of a van full of marijuana and started running toward the border. One agent struggled with the suspect on the ground while his partner was coming up from behind.

The suspected drug dealer escaped from the agent and was running toward the border again as the two agents met, the suspected drug smuggler “turned with something shiny that appeared like a gun” according to the agents and the agents fired at the drug smuggler.

Thinking they missed, because the drug smuggler escaped across the border. Other agents and a supervisor arrived at the scene. What seemed like just another non-incident on the border, they did their oral report to their supervisor and picked up their empty brass, then went on with their patrol.

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What if Thomas Paine, the writer of Common Sense was alive today? That’s the premise of this video. I agree with most except for:

Term Limits: There probably should be term limits, but two may be too few for the House, that’s only four years. How about an age limit? Especially some of these old farts in the Senate, how much work do they do nowadays anyway?

Abolish the Electoral College? The electoral college allows the rest of the country to participate in the Presidential election instead of the two population centers of NYC and LA. You want the most liberal areas or the country to have control of the President? When it works, there’s nothing wrong with the electoral college

Required Service: Maybe. I don’t want the draft for the military. The military is the best in the world because it’s all volunteer. Draft people for the Peace Corps. You can’t force people to be grateful.

Don’t know who Thomas Paine is? Or his pamphlet Common Sense? Went to public school in the last 15 years? Thanks goodness for the Internet. Here’s a good place to start: Thomas Paine’s Common Sense