Got Wills

Well, I got an invite to GrandCentral a few weeks ago and finally found time to set it up. There were no Holbrook phone numbers available. In fact, as far as I can tell, there were no numbers in the local Frontier calling area (Show Low, Snowflake, Heber, Pinetop, Lakeside, etc…). So I went with a Winslow number. The features on this service sound really great, so far (would have been better if I’d have found a Holbrook number). I can get any calls sent to any of my phones that I choose. I can even have them sent to a hotel phone if I choose. Also, I can listen to my voicemail online and choose to have all calls go to voicemail.

If you use the link on the right hand side of my blog, you can call me for free. It will call your phone, then mine. No charge for the connection at all. You can use it to record calls (both parties are notified when you turn the feature on) and you can use it to keep a call log. All in all, it sounds like a great tool. Maybe I’ll even start giving out this phone number to my students, since it’ll be easier to check the messages. Then I can have it go to my office phone only when I’m in the office.

You can also send emails to my phone number at grandcentral.com and they will come to me. Of course, I will not be giving out my number on this blog, but if you would like to know my number and have a good reason to know it, please use the button to leave me a voicemail.

I don’t know how this will work in the RSS, but here’s a call link in the post.

Web Worker Daily posted a nice rebuttal to PC Magazine’s article which stated that Gmail is falling behind the other major Web email clients (mostly because of it’s lack of drag and drop sorting). I find it takes far less time to archive after you read (or don’t read) a message than it does to try to decide which folder it should go in. The labels (aka tags) can provide you with any sorting that a folder could do and more. I can put more than one label on a message, but can only store it in a single folder with the other services.

On another note, Gmail provides free pop / smtp access (MSN will allow access through Outlook or Outlook Express) so if I wanted my email access to feel more like a desktop app, I would simply set it as such. I also find the little signature ads to be extremely annoying, not to mention the ad banners on the actual client page. I have simply stopped clicking on banner ads. If I find something in a banner ad interesting, I’ll Google it and access the page through a resulting text ad or the search results. I’ve decided that I, for one, am going to stop supporting and encouraging the annoying, real estate hogging, banner ads that litter, not only MySpace page, but also Yahoo! mail and MSN LiveMail.