Google Voice and mobile phones.. am I missing something?
Google Voice
So everyone is a twitter about Google Voice and using the service for all sorts of things. Having it call you and call a contact to make a “free” call. I’m an AT&T wireless customer and do not have a home land line, I don’t see how I can benefit from using google voice to make calls for me. Let me explain:
My AT&T plan gives me X minutes of talk time per month and “unlimited” talk time after a certain time and weekends. When I call a friend using google voice it calls me then calls them and we can talk. By doing so it’s eating up minutes on my phone since AT&T doesn’t provide free incoming calls (unless something changed I don’t know about). Lets say I use the GV method and call a fellow AT&T customer, now I’m really screwing myself since we both have AT&T and we’re not using our unlimited mobile to mobile talk time.
The only benefit I see here is that if you’re calling someone from a land line and want your GV number to show up on caller ID then you’ll be able to do so for free. Outside of that your paying for hiding behind your google voice caller id?
Am I missing something? Let me know in the comments please.
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Project: Overheard at Disneyland
My Wife Jen ( @jentucker ) and I ( @jasontucker ) were standing in line for Indian Jones at Disneyland one day and overheard some people talking about the various “paths” that they have rode on the ride. The misconception that there are more than one path in the ride is quite common and I’d imagine this has spread by the phenomenon known as “Overheard at Disneyland”. So while Jen and were overhearing this I thought what if we were to come up with a way using mobile technology to capture these “overheards” and present them to the public to laugh or shake their heads along with us.
Twitter in all of its simplistic glory was the way to make this happen. So while waiting in line for an ice cream about 20 minutes later I created @OHatDL account and bought the http://www.ohatdl.com domain… all over my iphone 
I also went and setup the mechanism using a 3rd party to facilitate accepting twitter direct messages to @OHatDL to be tweeted on the persons behalf. After that I sent out the first tweet to the account:
Now we’re cooking with gas: Twitter, GroupTweet, and ohatdl.com. The rest of the day was spent listening to people say goofy stuff and tweeting about it. Since it was almost time for us to go home we only got a few more gems posted.
So next time your at Disneyland and you overhear something funny, silly, odd, or just plain weird send a tweet over to @ohatdl and we’ll share it with the world on your behalf
Not on Twitter? Really? I’ve heard of people like you Head over to http://twitter.com and sign up OR txt message 40404 and you can setup an account via text message.
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Tips to make the most of your Disneyland Annual Pass
My wife Jen and I bought Disneyland Annual passes yesterday (3/20/09) and we’ve been working on ways to make technology help us on our trips to The Park. Before we bought our passes (and went to Disneyland) yesterday I started looking on the iPhone to find some apps related to Disneyland and found these two:
- Disneyland California Mini Guide [iTunes, $0.99]
Not the most in depth look at Disneyland by any means but it does not require internet access for the app to work. It displays a map ala google maps of the Disneyland park that can be scrolled around. It includes POI links to various attractions and where the bathrooms are (great since I have a 3 year old going into potty training). Also, the map can find you via GPS if your using an iPhone.
- Disneyland Resort Time Guide [iTunes, $0.99]
This app does one thing and that one thing quite well display times for various events happening at the Disneyland Resort. The data is updated via an internet connection so if your have an iPod Touch you can just update via WiFi before hitting the park. On the iPhone you can update whenever since your internet connected via your data plan. This app is great because it shows all the things you need to know to get the most from your visit: Disneyland Park (DL) Park Hours, Magic Morning Hours, Parade Event, Fireworks, Billy Hill & the Hillbillies, Fantasmic, Flag Retreat Ceremony, Closed for Refurbishment and etc. It also includes times for Disney’s California Adventure (DCA) and times for Downtown Disney (including who is playing at House of Blues that night).
- I also started looking for online resources to help us out one of which is having our Deluxe Passes blackout dates on our iPhones. To pull this off on our Mac’s in iCal we “subscribe” to google calendar that has all these times listed. You can do the same on a PC using Outlook, check out the icons below to inport the Deluxe Pass blackout dates:
- Official Disneyland Resort Podcast [iTunes Link]
What a great video podcast coming straight from the Disney company. - RideMax is a great service for planning out your Disney trip. For $29.99 a year you plan out your day in the most incredible way. Instead of me explaining how the service works you can read their PR speak:
RideMax is a computer software program guaranteed to help you save time waiting in line at Walt Disney World and Disneyland.RideMax allows you to specify the attractions you wish to ride during your visit, then uses a sophisticated scheduling algorithm to order your attractions so that the amount of time you spend in line is minimized.Using historical wait time statistics for each attraction as a foundation, RideMax analyzes millions of different ride sequences in order to create a minimum-wait-time itinerary. This schedule is tailored to the expected crowd patterns on the day of your visit, for the attractions you want to ride!
I know this is a partial list so if your an Annual Pass holder and have other tricks of the trade please let me know by leaving a comment and I’ll update the list above.
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Presentation – WordPress and 3rd Party Web Applications – OC Podcasters
At the March OC Podcasters meeting I did a presentation on how to get wordpress to interact with some popular 3rd party web applications such as Twitter & Facebook along with sharing posts on social networks. The day started out with me putting the final touches on my Keynote presentation I’d be showing at the event. If you were to ask my wife she would say I spent all day messing with it… and most of the day before too. Never again will I wait until the last minute to prep my presentation like I did this one. I’ve never used Keynote before and was very impressed with what I was able to do with very little effort. I did have a learning curve but that’s to be expected with a new app. After I learned the ends and outs I was able to make interactive slides that didnt require me to go slide by slide to make elements change on the screen. I also was able to get the Keynote Remote app to work on my iphone which is pretty damn cool.
Anyhow, back to the talk… I started out with a quick intro on wordpress themes (I should have included how a widget works in the slides but I did discuss that which you can see in the video) then later went into something new and fresh: Facebook Connect. This tech enables you to allow your readers to login to your wordpress site using their Facebook login info. The plugin I finally settled with was the one developed by sixjumps which took the basics of just authenticating with wordpress to a new level. With this you can leave a comment on the blog and allow the comment to be sent over to facebook. You can also share links from the site to facebook with ease and lastly be able to see who else is using the site from facebook. Pretty cool stuff to be totally honest.
Later I went into some plugins to connect wordpress with Twitter: TwitterTools by Alex King, TwitMe by Johnny Mast and Tweetbacks by Joost de Valk. I love Alex and Joost’s work and their plugins kick some serious ass. TwitMe and its dev are new to me but there are some great features he put into that plugin. Lastly I discussed sharing posts with friends using using Joost’s plugin Sociable and ShareThis.
One thing I learned with this is the power of the masses… If your doing a presentation on social media or new media, get your audience involved by asking them to get their friends involved. At the beginning of the demo I put a tinyurl link up on the screen and asked everyone to hop on twitter and send that link out to as a tweet so we can get some people in the chatroom. I also learned to have a videotape in the camera before using a sony camera as a videosource. Ends up that without a tape the camera goes into store demo mode and did all sorts of fun with the video demoing how you can do mosaic and sepia and other things. Next time I need to drag Jacob Morales out and have him record me with his kick ass setup.
Below are various ways to consume the content:
YouTube Video of me doing the presentations:
SlideShare of the Presentation:
PDF and KeyNote if you’d like to use these files for your own presentation.
Below is my Creative Commons info for this project.
WordPress 3rd party web service by Jason Tucker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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Halloween Birthday Rainbow
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On my way to work this morning I saw this amazing rainbow. I pulled out the jailbroken iPhone and recorded the video using cycorder. After doing so I gave my wife and call and told her to go outside so we could share this awesome view.
Happy Birthday Jen!
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SwitchEasy Cases for 3G iPhone
Today I received a shipment of cases to review from SwitchEasy. I thought I’d share the images of them and if you have any questions about the cases I can be sure to answer them in my reviews of each case.
- CapsuleRebel
- Colors
- CapsuleNeo
Leave a comment with your questions.
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About Me
Jason Tucker - Southern California native, Systems Administrator, Podcaster, Wordpress hacker and Social media guy.
