I signed up to get a beta invite for Google Voice a couple of weeks ago. I got the invite today, and set up my account. In the setup process I was able to choose my area code and look for a mix of numbers and letters to be my phone. I ended up getting one that was a combination of my first name and birth year. Makes it easy for me to remember, anyway.

This one number can ring multiple phones at once. I was able to set up my office, cell, and home number. You can decide what rings when (weekends, nights, days, however.) While testing, Kathy immediately objected and told me to get google off our home phone.

Grant called me right away and tested it. The Google lady on the phone acts as an operator and screens the calls. She asked me if I wanted to take the call or not from “brothu Grant” which was what he said when she asked his name.

What is amazing is that someone can leave a voicemail message, and a text transcript of the voicemail message goes to youre e-mail and is text messaged to your cell phone. You can also see your voicemails over the web, like an e-mail box. In the attached snapshot you can see where Google Voice did a pretty good job of translating two messages. The little button above each message lets me listen to the original over the PC.

Look in the lower left corner. I’m accumulating credits that can be used for international long distance. I’ve already earned 10 cents.

This is extraordinary. I assume I will see and hear some ads along the way that funds all of this.

The four of us went down to Lenox Mall to ride the pink pig, go to the food court, and visit the Apple store. I had a Schatzki incident which caused some delay and landed me back in the car for about 30 minutes. I insisted the girls ride on the pink pig, but it closed as they walked up to it. So two strikes for me: no food and no pig.

Claire and I had a nice visit to the Apple store where I decided to buy the new operating system, Leopard, and the new version of iLife ’08 which includes iMovie. I figured this was a pretty cheap way to get a new computer (upgrade our older one) and that the girls would enjoy YouTubing movies even more.

Taken by iMac with Built In Camera

Alas, the new version of iMovie does not support the older iMac. Processing movies is the most computing intensive thing we do, and the latest version needs the faster processors. Strike 3.

So what does one do with 3 strikes? Get a new Macintosh, of course!

Claire and I were watching some of the new Apple TV ads over the internet. Computer Genius, Party Is Over, and Choose a Vista. We were watching them on my Dell laptop (PC.) They stopped playing correctly, and I had to restart my browser. I told her I thought this might be irony at work.

When I closed the browser, she saw my Lotus Notes mailbox and saw the number 6,562 next to my Inbox. “Six thousand five hundred and sixty two,” she said, “Wow!”

I explained that was the count of unread messages. She mused, “Unread messages… the most I ever have is two.”

I’m not sure which us was more amazed. Surely life is better if the you only have two unread messages.

(And no, that is not an accurate number, but I can’t really explain it here.)

Kelly and I were driving around shopping together, and we started talking about iPods. She is quite happy with her iPod nano and its protective green and pink iSkin. Kids at school like it how hers looks. (She was allowed to bring it to school in the last week of the semester.)

She does wish she had 4 gigabytes like Claire’s instead of just 1 Gigabyte. I pointed out that she made that choice when I offered to pay half of whatever she wanted. “Yeah… but I didn’t really understand a gigabyte… I have to spend more time moving music on and off my Nano.” But otherwise, she is quite happy with it.

I told her I was thinking about getting the 80 gigabyte iPod. She was impressed. “How many songs would that hold?” she asked. I explained that all of the music we have on our iMac adds up to 20 gigabytes. She immediately got that the extra space could be for videos and TV shows.

I did not think to tell her that our very first Mac with a hard drive only had 20 megabytes of hard disk space. That’s a mere 20% of her Nano.

The tech moral of the story: Always buy up on storage/memory space.

After watching AWStats start building for a day, I saw where “praying mantis” was one of the search phrases that brought someone to mac.fiveforks.com. That is a pretty common phrase, so I was surprised anyone would find there way here.

I noticed that Yahoo! had referred several people today, so I did a search on Yahoo but did not see mac.five. I then did a search on the Yahoo! Images search, and there was Mary Claire on the first results page looking at a praying mantis on a banana!

This comes from MCC’s Bug Page, which to Yahoo! is kind of famous.

Over the years, the documents folders of older Macs and PCs have been consolidated to a single, growing server hard disk. I was combing through “YodaDocs” and found these two antique digital photos that dated back to the first Apple QuickTake color camera I had access to.

I am now testing the new version of Hypercard’s color capabilities, using our photo CD, and the old color pict display XCMD. It is a very colorful day for the diary.

Kelly picked up one of Danny’s dominos off the floor. Holding it in one hand, she pressed one of the white dots with her thumb while aiming the domino at the television set.

I guess she thought it was a baby remote control, since she is not supposed to play with the adult one.