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.]
I’ve developed a new philosophy - I only dread one day at a time.
I tagged along with some folks to ride with Critical Mass. We raced from Vienna, Va., along the venerable Washington and Old Dominion Trail and the Martha Custis Memorial Trail to D.C., crossed the Potomac at the Francis Scott Key Bridge, weaved through traffic in Georgetown on our way to Dupont Circle, where the ride began.
First things first, I rode into circle a little concerned by any event that might further animosity between car drivers and cyclists. But actually doing the ride really doesn’t feel anything like civil disobedience or group scofflawism.
Some drivers are really pissed off and vocal at times, and riders respond by ringing their bells and calling out friendly greetings, which is the same response given to any awestruck spectators along the way. Ad hoc organizers responsibly make sure an intersection is secure before cyclists “blow through it” — as if the entire mass of bicyclists is one vehicle, so cars have to wait for it to clear. The irritation factor to motorists, I would estimate, is on the level with the guy in front of you who isn’t moving even though the light is green. (And some motorists do get really mad about that too.)
More often, the mass of cyclists just has a Beijing effect — taking over the street, sometimes capturing a Smartcar or Hybrid surrounded by the fleet. Most cars, police included, just idle and watch the parade.
But the ride is more fun than any kind of statement and I would consider trying it in other cities just for sight seeing. It helps that the streets of D.C. were designed with grand diagonals aligned with monumental architecture to impress us anyway, and the ride meanders through the city’s major neighborhoods — which scale thematically from local to national and back to local.
One of the rare treats of the ride is when the cyclists take over some of the high-speed streets that swoop underground. As cars are blocked off by the mass, the cyclists race down the tunnel — their cries echoing into a coalescence not unlike a rebel yell.
The seal depicts the Roman goddess Virtus wearing a blue tunic draped over one shoulder with her left breast exposed. But on the new lapel pins Cuccinelli recently handed out to his staff, her bosom is covered by an armored breastplate.
One of the things we really need to do is capitalize on the fact that our built environment was not built for the automobile. That’s a fact.
— Gabe Klein, DDOT director,
explaining why recent bicycle initiatives and D.C. in general aren’t anti-car but that the city itself wasn’t meant for so many automobiles. [Doesn’t that apply to all cities built before the 1950s?]
…that’s due to the fact that Americans are brought up believing that they can be the next president of the United States, and British people are told it won’t happen to you.
In general, if you design your infrastructure for a 60-year old woman with two bags of groceries, you can make cycling attractive to a huge range of the population, and that really will help address the ‘last mile’ problem.
