Paul Hinks' Blog

So at 10:00 am this morning all internet news services seemed to seize up on the weight of people trying to get a glimpse of the new Apple iPad. Pretty much all the live data feeds suffered outages from the pure volume of requests they were getting. And as Apple’s own slide proclaimed, “the last time a tablet was this anticipated it had commandments on it.” But I will say that after watching the intermittent updates coming out of the Yerba Buena centre I was a little disappointed. I’m not sure what they could have announced that would have come close o living up to they hype, but the super-sized iPhone they demoed certainly didn’t. But looking again at the demos and videos (especially this one on apple.com) makes me thing that maybe I misjudged it. It will certainly make a better e-reader than Stanza on the iPhone. I almost want one. If I’m honest I think I’m almost certainly going to get one. I just can’t help thinking that I’m getting a little ripped off.

I’ve been using Google Voice for a while now and I’m pretty pleased with it. There are a few limitations that I’d like to see improved on but in general it’s a great service. And I’ve got a solution for people who want to port their number to Google Voice, which isn’t officially supported, at least yet.
First the limitations. I don’t think my use case is the typical one that the service was designed for. I want to manage the entire household’s calls, directing different callers to different household members, whereas I think the service was designed primarily for a single person with multiple phone numbers. So I end up with lots of groups of callers, some of which call one set of phones and some of which call others. The restrictions on redirecting to another Google voice number really starts to rankle here because it would simplify some of these rules quite dramatically.
One change that would make my life a lot easier would be to forward groups of numbers rather than individual numbers. For example, all unknown or 800 numbers to voicemail. Or to selectively enable do not disturb – allowing calls from certain groups or registered numbers to go through and blocking all others, for example.
I had one instance of apparent system failure, where all incoming calls rang all registered numbers indiscriminately rather than following the routing rules, but otherwise the system seems to work pretty well.
As for number porting, I have found a simple solution. I ported my phone number to callcentric, on their pay-per-call plan, and set up a forward to my Google voice number. I then set up another account (configured to display the caller id of my original number) for making outgoing calls. Since the original number never has calls made on it, it is essentially parked for free at Callcentric, and the new number I actually make calls on (also with Callcentric, but I’m always on the lookout for better deals) is masquerading as that number as well. It’s working very well so far, I’ll give further reports in the near future.