serve chilled and sloppy (which is to say, with no ice cubes)

a variation to the flophouse is the slum lord which is the same thing without the daiquiri mix…

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the good

there’s a few things that voice does that are completely awesome.  even when the voice recognition software flubs some words (and admittedly, they censor the four-letter variety), it’s still nice to  read your message when you don’t want to call into your voice mail.  just being able to check your messages in a browser without picking up the phone at all is pretty awesome, and, i imagine, would be especially useful for someone working in an office that doesn’t allow personal calls.

also, though i haven’t played with it myself, the ability to add multiple phone numbers to your google voice number is pretty sweet.  you can have your business and personal called forwarded to the same phone, multiple family members getting ringed at the same time (as in the aforementioned family plan option) or both your cell and your landline go to your google phone number, so you can be sure to get the call whether your out or not, and not cause the person trying to get in touch with you the hassle of having to call your cell if your land line gets an RNA (that’s telco-speak for “ring, no answer”).

also bonus is the ability to create groups and import contacts and then customize the greeting they get when they hit your voice mail depending on what group they are in.  you can have everyone in your contacts get one message and everyone else another message.  or your friends and family get one message while your clients and work acquaintances get a more professional greeting.  i keep meaning to set this one up.

free texting is cool also, as is the ability to send a text message from your computer.  typing on a real keyboard is a lot easier than using a numpad or qwerty keyboard.  now, with this, certain restrictions apply — such as a text messaging plan with your provider.  because while you sending texts through google voice is free, that doesn’t mean that incoming texts are also free — at least, not if you don’t have free text messaging as part of your carrier plan.  because, while i can tell google voice not to text me when i get a voice message (see this revisited later), i can’t tell it to not text me when i get a text message (and why would i? seems kind of pointless, really).

also, with the google chrome extension for voice, when i highlight a telephone number on the screen, it bring up a little box that allows me to call that number through google voice.

since google voice is an added layer on top of your existing service, you can make a call through google voice one of 3 ways.  1 — you can use the chrome extension (if there isn’t a firefox equivalent, i’d be surprised).  in this case you select the phone you want it to ring (in my case, just my cell phone), and then google voice will connect your call like an old-fashioned operator, calling you and the party you are trying to connect to automatically.  2 — you can do the same operation through the google voice page.  again, just tell it what number you want to call and they call you and connect you to where you’re trying to go.  3 — you can call google voice (your own number) log in with your pin, and then select the option from the voice prompt to make a call.  the in-browser support with the chrome extension is really the only one that’s not clunky as all hell.

you can also use google voice’s built-in call screening system, forcing all callers who aren’t in your contact list to announce who they are and you have the choice to accept or deny the call.  if you deny the call, they get routed to voice mail.  not the most personable situation, but i suppose it would work well for people who get slammed by telemarketers (i solve this problem by just not answering calls from numbers i don’t recognize).

the bad

so, what should be pretty obvious at this point is that the way this would work 100xs better is if there was no added layer — google voice 100% integrated into your phone as your actual provider rather than piggybacking on top of what you’ve already got.  as it stands, the system feels a little jury-rigged, especially with the caller id situation (outgoing calls from your phone? your existing phone number on caller id.  outgoing calls from the google voice system?  your voice phone number.  text messaging?  either or, depending on a setting you can modify.  incoming caller ids — from what i’ve seen — just come from Google Voice.  text messages come from Google Voice but have the benefit of showing the texter’s name at the beginning of the message (or, presumably, their phone number if they aren’t in your contacts — i haven’t gotten a text from someone not in my contacts)).

the whole thing just begs to have google take over every damn thing, and you know that has to be on their minds as well.

also: i mentioned before that you can have voice text you when you get a voice message.  that’s the thing — that’s the only notification you get on your phone.  a text message.  other than the missed call and an assumption (which is what i’m going off of these days).  for those of us who pay per text message and don’t want to rack up $0.10 just for a note saying you got voicemail, you’ll have to actually use your brain as opposed to having a little icon on your phone that tells you you have a message waiting.

i imagine someone with a smartphone and a google voice app would probably experience something a lot smoother.  a blackberry or an iphone or an android or nexus one phone probably has a voice interface integrated (and if not, i’m sure it’s on the way) so the experience can be a lot more sophisticated and seamless.  the system lends itself well to data plans because of the text messaging thing (i know i’m in the dark ages on that one), the email notifications and the fact that google voice is a web-based application.  while it’s not smartphone-exclusive, it’s pretty close; us that use flip phones with no data plan are kind of in the lurch.

the ugly

let me say one thing about the google voice extension for chrome: just because some text i highlighted might have some numerical characters in it, DOESN’T MEAN IT’S A PHONE NUMBER I WANT TO CALL.  seriously, this is one of the most obnoxious things i’ve seen.  i’ve had pretty much anything with more than 6 digits (including long alphanumeric strings like serial numbers, API keys, or other registration-type keys) bring a google voice pop-up.  the idea is similar to that of the skype plugin for firefox, where every phone number becomes a way you can call someone straight from the web page, but the chrome extension for voice is much less discriminating in what it decides a phone number qualifies as.  that said, it is pretty handy when it actually is a phone number i do want to call, but obnoxious the 99 other times in 100 that i don’t and it’s not.

also ugly?  picking your phone number.  because you can keep your current number (with a more limited feature set that does not include the voice-to-text voicemail inbox), or you can pick a number; you cannot (at the time of this writing) say “give me a number.”  if you want a new number,  you are forced to pick one.  think 987-0BSG is kind of lame?  you try thinking of something more interesting — but, before you start, i’ll tell you that geek, g33k, leet, l33t, and l337 are already taken.  and, unfortunately, your phone number can’t be STARBUCK.  nor was anything like DESIGN, ARCANE, PALETTE, or anything else available.  still think you can do better than BSG?  9870 isn’t looking so bad anymore, is it?  the fact that you can’t give up and say “just give me a random number” is ridiculous.  i get that the numbers that are available are limited and that new area codes are being created all the time to accommodate all the new phone numbers (to which google voice is only adding to the problem), but come on, just pick a damn number for me, okay?

when you call your number to check for messages, you don’t get an alert that says “you have no new messages.”  the system only tells you when you have new messages, and, as far as i could tell through it’s badly designed prompts, you can’t listen to old messages, either.  this means that if someone called you, you read the badly translated text, and called in to hear the recording, you would a) not know there was a message waiting and b) good luck finding the thing at all.  sure you can stream the recording from the web app, but, again, those of us not on smartphones might find that inconvenient.  if you do have an unread message you get the “you have one new message” prompt, so why not the standard “you have no new messages”?  i mean, seriously, wtf?

we know where this is going

there’s a pretty obvious conclusion to google voice.  like everything else, it’s still in beta, and fairly early beta based on the limited invites and functionality.  even so, with the development going into the chrome os, the new nexus one and google’s overall emergence into the mobile market with android, it’s pretty obvious where this is going — google is going to jump into the mobile market.  how that’s going to work, i have no idea.  right now, it’s obvious they’re offering up google voice as another free thing to join the ranks of all their other free things, but if they become a carrier, things will no longer be free.  what that means, exactly, i have no idea.  will a google voice carrier be a voice-over-IP-based system?  will they lease access from a larger carrier, say,  t-mobile or verizon?  and if so, how will that affect the consumer costs, since it’s obvious that a lot of the google appeal is in their “free shit is cool” factor (which may go completely out the door when chrome os-powered devices start hitting the market next year)?

and what about integration?  when does gtalk, wave, google apps, and google voice merge into an all-in-one teleconferencing/communications platform that can be marketed to individuals, small businesses, and large corporations?  because you know that has to be coming as well, but, as yet, nothing has been released yet that adequately integrates any of these standalone apps, let alone all of them.  it’s what everyone wants, and it will be the one thing that will add the most value to all of their products as pieces of a whole, and as part of a suite of applications.  when google finally does merge and natively integrate all of their flagship products, they will be in the best possible position to take on the corporate market.  which is exactly where they want to be.

don’t be evil my pale buttocks.

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buy the album and get all the source files in one download, or just download everything for free from the bandcamp site.  really happy to have this out there for people to enjoy as a full album as opposed to individual tracks.

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Wired mag article on the benefits of not having tens of thousands of followers on Twitter.  It’s interesting to see these articles, posts, and reviews cropping up now.  This time last year, it was all about amassing the biggest following on Twitter that you could, but now, we’re beginning to see the error of that call, and the effects of having a huge following.  what it does to an individual and what it does to your sense of community…

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i’ve decided to call the gwozdziec album done.  it’s been almost a year since i first started the project, and it hasn’t moved an inch for several months.  my goal was to produce 10-12 tracks for the album, but rather than trying to drag out a project i sort of lost interest in, i’m quitting while i’m ahead.  i listened to the tracks this morning and i actually quite like them.  i’m not the sort of person who would do an album like chinese democracy and go over and over and over it for 10 years, i’m pretty much the sort to record it, mix it, and be done with it as soon as possible.  and i’m taking the lack of momentum on gwozdziec as a sign that the album is done.

so, i’m gonna get my shite together and upload tracks to the bandcamp site and get the same sort of package deal that s3quence has with the bonus content, except that, this time, everything is free.  it came from free, creative commons sources, and it goes back out into the world with a free, creative commons license.  much like my old band the loafmen, anyone can become a member of gwozdziec by taking the material and doing something with it.  i only ask that if you did want to remix it, to leave the gwozdziec name attached to it, just so there’s a breadcrumb trail left behind to follow.

look for stuff in the coming days — i’d like to get it out before february when my musical thoughts should be focussed on RPM 2010.

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it’s easy.  the fairly standard, traditional formula for fondue consists of three cheeses:

appenzeller
emmentaler
gruyere

you take roughly equal parts of each, grate them into a fondue pot, add some wine, and voila, fondue. the proportions really depend on how much you want to make.  probably a half pound of each would suit two people.  the thing about fondue, though, is that the fun part is making it your own, or using variations, or making it to taste.  for example, appenzeller is one of those really foot-stinky cheeses; a hard swiss cheese you probably wouldn’t want to eat by itself.  for a milder flavor, you could substitute raclette or jarlsberg and still be pretty authentic.

this time of year is also raclette season, and i remember distinctly not being able to keep raclette in stock between thanksgiving and sundance (which is right about now-ish) when i worked the cheese department in park city.  i’ve never had raclette, as in, served as raclette — a specific swiss dish — but my understanding of it is that it’s traditionally a sort of peasant food (although now it’s all gourmet), where you take a specific type of frying pan (well, specific for the 20th century gourmet version, that is — probably originally it was whatever was lying around) and melt the raclette in it.  the idea is that it’s supposed to cooked until brown.  like fondue, you dip bread and assorted meats in it.

fondue is a great way to warm up the cold months and everyone loves fondue, making it a hit a both sports- and non-sports related holiday and/or family and/or other festivities.  i particularly like fondue as a romantic valentines day thing.

the only problem with fondue, of course, is that most of us are, in some way, lactose intolerant, meaning that much cheese is bound to wreak havoc on our intestines later.  for those of you concerned about that, i’d like to direct your attention to cypress grove creamery or any number of spanish cheeses (manchego, mahon, drunken goat, murcia curado (aka “naked goat”), etc).  both cypress grove and various spanish cheeses have both aged and not-so-aged varieties, so you could probably concoct a fairly decent lactose-free fondue (because sheep and goat’s milk do not contain lactose — rather, they contain lactase , a related enzyme that is more closely related to what our stomachs produce naturally, meaning it doesn’t cause the same problems).  some combination with midnight moon and lamb chopper sounds yummy to me…

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anyone who’s a musician, this is something you should check out.  RPM is less of a competition and more of a affirmation.  it’s not about winning anything, it’s about proving to yourself that you can get it done or die trying, and it’s cool to hang out and network with other musicians and see what they’re up to, as well.

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i’m not convinced.  are you? here’s the link to the post: http://bit.ly/7brCik

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…given the most visible use of retweets on Twitter is links, with aggregators like Tweetmemetracking which stories get retweeted the most, it’s a big move for Facebook that makes its service even more Twitter-like

maybe it’s just me, but is there any good at all in making facebook more twitter-like?  if facebook is trying to be twitter, doesn’t that sort of mean twitter won?

Facebook’s Version of the Retweet Has Arrived.

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while the bulk and auto-unfollowing services provided me with a headache in having to manually go through and unfollow people, i take full responsibility for having been dumb enough to follow people i wasn’t really planning on listening, engaging, or interacting with in the first place.  in general, an automated service to unfollow someone solely because they stopped following you is the online equivalent of what my kids do in the back seat of our car when they’re arguing for the sake of arguing with no real point.  ”YES!” “NO!” “YES!’ “NO!!” “YEEEESSSSS!!!” “NOOOOOOO!!!“ etc.  it’s like saying “well, i never liked you anyway” to someone’s back as they walk away.

the fact is that just because someone isn’t following you anymore, doesn’t mean they might not still provide value or interesting links that you’d like.  i follow @slashdot, but i don’t expect them to care about what i have to tweet about.  similarly, i don’t really expect @wilw, @feliciaday, or @neilhimself to care what i’m doing at any given moment either.  there are certain people for whom it’s been accepted that we won’t receive a reciprocal follow, like say, @britneyspears and yet we somehow hold the rest of the twitterverse to a higher standard?

as i read SocialToo’s announcement, i was struck by the stubbornness of it — they obviously were removing the feature reluctantly at the direct request of twitter.  in particular:

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause – we are as disappointed as you are. We are still firmly set on our original goals of automating your streams while enabling you to clean them up at the same time and focus on real relationships.

why are we disappointed?  people who auto-unfollow, or use any other kind of automation, most frequently aren’t using twitter.  if you’re an automaton, and not actually tweeting for yourself, then what use is twitter to you aside from pushing your message into the face of as many people as possible?

i say this as a bit of a hypocrite; it’s true that my secondary twitter account, @teh_s3quence — which i’ve left active even when i shut all my other former genesis rocket-powered accounts down — is totally automated.  in my defense, i keep that around because i actually find some interesting links being tweeted by the robot version of myself, so i’ve just stopped pretending that it is anything other than what it is: a robot pumping links from a bunch of different places that i like.  if twitter decides someday to kill the account, i’ll be sad for like 5 minutes and then go back to my rss feeds.  so yes, there are some uses for automation, but the only reason why  you’d need to auto- or bulk unfollow anyone is because you’ve hit your following max for the number of followers you have and you need to dump people so you can get more followers.  and the only reason you would do this is because you’re trying to spam your message across twitter.

the truth is that it’s not possible to both “automate your streams” and “focus on real relationships.”  if part of automating your streams involves unfollowing people just because they unfollowed you, you obviously don’t care about relationships anyway.  you’re just writing that person off without context.  when you turn off the radio, is it because you never want to listen to the radio again?

it seems to me like twitter is going through its ranks again and pruning some of the stray branches that don’t really fit with the what the service is ideally intended to promote: microblogging, communication, interaction, and sharing.  for my part, i say: bravo.

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