Google Voice vs The Fax

This just struck me as funny.....

One of the slick features of Google Voice is that you can set it up to e-mail or text you a machine transcription of your incoming voice mail messages. Its not perfect, far from it.  But its usually good enough to see who the caller was and the gist of what they were calling about. 

This past weekend when I was running around doing some errands, I got a call.  Since I didn't recognize the phone number, I punched it into voice mail. Turns out it was someone trying to send a fax and they had punched in the wrong fax number and instead had entered my phone number. 

But GoogleVoice did its things with the recorded voice mail message.  Took me a few seconds to figure out what was going on.  Then had to chuckle. 

Posted via email from greg-c - on the go....

Awesome Screenshot is..... awesome

Tip of the hat to Simon Mackie at Web Worker Daily this week for passing on the Chrome extension Awesome Screenshot.  

With a name like "Awesome Screenshot", it had better be pretty good.  I think it is, in that its awesomely simple.  This is a screenshot utility that grabs what is in the browser window.  Find something you want to save as an image, activate the extension and you are given an option of either grabbing the whole page or the part of the page that is visible on the screen.  

Once you have grabbed the screen, you can then crop a portion image, and annotate the image with rectangles, circles, lines and text. When you're done, right-click on the result and save the image to your local drive or send it off to Twitter, Facebook, Buzz or e-mail it using GMail, Yahoo Mail or Hotmail.  The e-mail option is particularly useful to send the image to another web based storage site, such as Picasaweb, Flickr, or Evernote. 

All of this probably takes less time to do than it does to read it here.  There are other screenshot tools and extensions that do more and have more features.  Both Picnik and Aviary have extensions that will capture the screen and let you edit it in the web based image editors.  For me, that's overkill most of the time.  

You can get the extension at the Google Chrome Extension page here. 

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Quote of the day.... Defense of Liberty

Quote of the day...

There are four boxes to use in defense of Liberty:  SOAP, BALLOT, JURY AND AMMO. Please use in that order.

Pass it on.

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Financial Reform....

Well,

Obama and the Senate Democrats (and I include Snow, Collins and Brown in that label) yesterday wiped their collective asses with the Constitution.

From the NY Times:

It creates a council of federal regulators, led by the Treasury secretary, to coordinate the detection of risks to the financial system, and it provides new powers to constrain and even dismantle troubled companies.

Where does the government get any authority to dismantle a troubled company?  It sure as hell isn't in the Constitution.

Who decides when a company is "troubled"? (Answer: the guy who can't figure out TurboTax)

This country and our economy is so screwed with this bunch.

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@RandyBrogdon or @MaryFalin ?

I think its pretty clear that Oklahoma will have a Republican governor come November.  The question is going to be who.

Straw polls to the contrary, Mary Falin may be the favorite.  I've thought she has done a passable job as a representative although there were a couple of votes I thought she was wrong on, including the TARP bill and the recent bill on the path for Puerto Rican statehood. Both of these are a couple of bone headed moves that really made me question her decision making skill and whether she is a leader or just a "rubber stamp Republican" candidate.  I just don't see the leadership skills - she's a two term representative among about 450 other representatives and doesn't really stand out.  Sarah Palin has endorsed her - Sorry Sarah, I think you got this one wrong.  She also has the endorsement of Arizona's Governor Jan Brewer - but it seems only after she switched her position on the Arizona immigration law from saying it was a federal matter to supporting the Arizona law.

Randy Brogdon is a state senator from Owasso. He calls himself a constitutional conservative and I have to say, I think his record supports that.  He was against the TARP bailout and voted against the state budget that took that money - not exactly a popular position at the time, considering the economy.  He has led the charge on state sovereignty and drafted legislation for a ballot initiative that would allow Oklahoma to opt-out of the Obama Healthcare bamboozle.  He is strong on 2nd Amendment issues.  He has proposed an interesting plan on reducing - maybe even eliminating - the state income tax on both individuals and corporations, thus attracting more jobs to the state and doing this in a way that is financially responsible.  This doesn't seem to just be rhetoric - there's substance to this.

But there is one other overriding thing that has separated him from Falin for me. Falin seems to be a lifelong politician.  Her resume is state representative, Lt Governor and then US Representative.  She started that in 1990, almost 20 years ago.  I couldn't find anything on her website or at congress.org that said what she did before that.  Brogdon's resume shows that before he became a state senator, he was mayor of Owasso, OK (population 18,502) and ran an air conditioner business.  That did it for me.  This guy is not a career politician - he has run a business most of his life.  He's paid bills, met payrolls, worked to satisfy customers and dealt with the same laws and regulations the rest of us have.  As he said last night - "I've signed the front of the check".  His legislative resume is just yummy icing on the cake. 

I'm going with Brogdon.

Posted via email from greg-c - on the go....

Google adds rich text sigs to GMail

Google has finally added two of the features I have really been waiting for - Rich Text Signatures and unique signatures for different e-mail addresses.  See Official GMail Blog. 

Rich text signatures let you create a .sig for your e-mail account using different fonts, colors, links, images, etc. Make it as fancy as you want or keep it simple. Add a company logo, highlight your phone number, whatever. 

The other feature was to allow you to have different signatures for each e-mail address you are sending mail from in that account.  I use my Google Apps account as my central e-mail point.  Mail from several accounts end up there and I send out messages from those accounts from there.  In the past, if I let GMail add a signature, it was the same for each of the different accounts.  Now I can set up a different signatures for my personal mail and my work mail. Or no sig file for the account that I use to post to Posterous with. 

Much of this could be done using browser plug-ins or extensions, but this is a clean implementation that works really well.  I've been using Wisestamp to do this.  Wisestamp works in both Chrome and Foxpro, but had the limitation of only giving you two signatures - say one for business and one personal - but did let you embed your twitter, facebook and other social networking stuff in a really slick way.  

Oh... this works with both GMail and Google Apps mail accounts. 

Thanks Google. 

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MSNBC AZ Immigration Poll

Wow!

I realize that Internet polls are anything but scientific, but that fact that there were over 2 million presses of the "YES" button indicates that there must be some support for Arizona's immigration law. And for this to show up on MSNBC is even more interesting.  Maybe President BO ought to pay attention to the news - even the news on his news station. 

Tip of the hat to Randy's Place. 

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Happy Independence Day

Happy 4th of July and thank you to everyone past and present that made this great country possible. 

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