This makes my life seem so much more exciting. To think that maybe my profile is being flagged by the FBI.
John Robbins writes a good recap on America’s supposed distaste for public transportation, in which he presents this interesting tidbit:
A third of all mass transit users in the entire United States use the New York City system…
Which says a lot about how crappy mass transit in America is, especially when he adds that New York ranks terribly against other world cities’ public transportation.
America’s car culture is like another “manifest destiny” phase:
The bias is built into our language. We speak of “investing” in highways and “investing” in freeways and parking spaces. But we “subsidize” trains and buses.
Do people ever say “socialized highways” with the same disdain they reserve for healthcare? Why not?
Google “Bike There” Maps are soooo awesome…wait. A freeway cloverleaf on my bicycle? Thanks for trying, but no thanks.
Me yesterday and the day before. It took me two days.
Another trick for using a dumbphone with Google Voice is text messages. If you receive a text from someone who texted your Google number, that sender’s real number isn’t rendered as the sender on your dumbphone — it’s aliased by some number belonging to Google. But don’t fret, if you call that Google number the text seems to come from, your call be forwarded to the sender of message automatically.
So, I keep at least one text from each person (the most recent) on my dumbphone so that I don’t have to go through those silly prompts to call from the Google Voice number. Just pull up their message and hit send. It’s not exactly speed dial, but it works to some degree.
Long-distance restrictions are for the birds, assuming your Google Voice number is local.
Where xxx-xxx-xxxx is your number, yyyy is your passcode, and zzz-zzz-zzzz is the number you want to send to:
(9) xxx xxx xxxx P * yyyy P 2 P zzz zzz zzzz #
Drop the 9 if you’re not office folk who need to nine out to the outside line. This also works on any phone that isn’t attached to your Google Voice account, so now make long-distance calls with other people’s phones. (If dialing manually or your fax machine doesn’t let you program pauses, then you pause the old fashioned way by manually dialing and waiting for the prompts.)
BTW, if you want to see how that works for a phone that you do have associated with your Google Voice account, it goes like this:
(9) xxx xxx xxxx P 2 P zzz zzz zzzz #
[This goes in the how-I-get-by-without-a-smartphone department.]
