Two:Thirty AM

This weeks photopost comes to you thanks to a new software package that I have fallen in love with! The software comes from Nik Software. They make these plugins for both Aperture and LightRoom. I personally use Aperture and love it! The particular plugin I used for this image was SilverEfexPro. A fantastic little plugin, and at the $199 price point you would hope so! The good news is that Nik offers a “Complete Collection” for $299 that includes five of their plugins that separately would come to a grand total of $750! So needless to say, go for the $299 Complete Collection. I can’t wait to work with all the plugins more!

This photo was taken during the Worldwide Photo Walk on July 18, 2009 in San Jose, CA.

This past saturday was the Second Annual Worldwide Photowalk! I had an absolute blast going out with the group of 50 people and taking amazing photos. My photowalk location was San Jose, CA. A great time was had by all. I shot around 300 or so photos and exported around 150 out of Aperture and uploaded to my SmugMug in the following gallery 2009 Worldwide Photowalk – San Jose, CA.

Along with this photowalk there is a contest that goes along with it. Each walker can upload 2 of their photos to the pool, and from the pool they will pick one grand prize winner and 10 runner-up prizes, and I must say the prize packages are amazing!

There are my two photos that I picked for submission. Fingers crossed! :)

I will absolutely be going to the photowalk next year, and highly recommend you do the same. Oh and it’s free, so you really have no excuse not to go! :)

I have been using Google Voice for a couple days, and I think it is time to step it up! I have been looking into ways to more tightly integrate my new Google Voice service in with my phone. There are a couple of key areas to focus on when trying to seamlessly integrate Google Voice with your cell phone. Phone calls, Voicemails, and Text messages. As you of course know, I use an iPhone; more specifically an iPhone 3G (at time of writing), so I will be working to integrate with that. In time I suspect an Android phone will integrate with Google Voice seamlessly. Hell, they might even just give you a Google Voice phone number when you buy a Google Android Phone.

Stage I – Voicemail
I really like the voicemail in Google Voice, with its ease of use, ability to listen anywhere, and the transcribing features. Before today, if someone were to call my iPhone and I didn’t answer, they would get my AT&T Voicemail. Now don’t get me wrong, Visual Voicemail on the iPhone is great, but nowhere near as powerful as Google Voicemail. Now you may ask why not just give everyone my Google Voice number and problem solved right? Well, yes and no. It is going to take a while to get my new number circulated to everyone, and in the meantime it would be nice if I could start receiving all my voicemail in one place. There is also the problem of relaying text messages between my cell phone and Google Voice, but there will be more on that in blog posts to come. Anyway, back to the matter at hand: voicemail. I needed my iPhone number to go to my Google Voicemail when I don’t answer, and that is precisely what I have done. Here is how I did it.

Some of you iPhone users may know about things like Field Mode Testing which is a diagnostic tool that you can get to by typing *3001#12345#* on the dial pad in the phone app followed by pressing the call button. Nothing too special there, but a similar method to this is used to change where callers are sent when you do not answer your iPhone. Now, if you type *#61# followed by the call button, you will see a screen like the screenshot below, which shows you where your phone is currently forwarded to for voicemail. This is an AT&T central receiving center for AT&T voicemail from what I can tell. In case the regular number isn’t the same for everyone it would probably be a good idea to write this number down, just in case you need to revert back for some reason. The next step is for making the switch. Go ahead and fireup your dial pad again and enter the following:

*61*1<your google voice number>*11*<voicemail delay in seconds>#

If your Google Voice number was 555-555-1212 and you wanted your phone to ring for 20 seconds before going to voicemail it would look like the following:

*61*15555551212*11*20#

That’s it! Your iPhone will now fwd to your Google Voice number and subsequently your Google Voicemail when you don’t answer your iPhone.

Hope this helps you. Check back for additions to integrate the rest of the services more tightly.

As always leave comments, questions, and feedback in the comments below or send me an email twothirtyam@me.com

Today was the day I was finally invited to Google Voice! This might have had something to do with my constant badgering on Twitter (@googlevoice), or I was just lucky. So far it is a fantastic service I must say, even though I have only been using it for half a day. That said, I can already tell this is going to be HUGE, definitely the way to manage all your phone communications in the future. When signing up, one of the first steps is picking a phone number. They let you pick a number according to area code of course, but they also let you type in letters and words and then attempt to find you a number that corresponds to those letters or word. This is an awesome way to personalize your number since it will be your single number to give out. I was fortunate to get XXX-XXX-BURK! Really excited about that for sure. After the initial setup I started looking at features. Some of the features that stick out right away are the ability to route calls according to groups and the SPAM feature which lets you mark incoming calls as spam which I believe in affect will block that person (bot) from calling you anymore. One thing I had to do since I do not use the entire Google workflow is sync my contacts with Google so I can setup the groups and routing, but no big deal, Apple’s Address Book has a check box to sync with Google. So, for now that is my mini review. I am sure I will have MUCH more to say as I use the service going forward, but already I can tell this is going to be my command center for all phone traffic going forward.