I love Google Voice. I feel that Google Voice is THE thing that will release us from the clutches of the “cell phone company contract”. With that being said here is a little tutorial showing you how to create custom voicemail messages with groups and Google Voice. Of course this tutorial assumes that you have Google Voice and that it is able to be used with your phone.

1. After logging in to Google Voice, click on Settings on the top right

2. In the Setting menu click on the Groups tab and on this tab at the bottom click on Manage Groups. This will take you to your Groups and Contacts list.

3. Click on the New Group button and name your new group. Then click OK. You can also use this group to handle only one contact as well, making the voicemail a personal one.

4. Next, click on your contact list and select as many contact as you want to receive the custom VM you are going to record. Remember, you can also set up just one contact in the group. After you have selected your contact go to the Groups button and under Add to… click the group you just set up.

5. Click on Settings in the top right, click on the Groups tab again and then click on the Edit button under your group.

6. This is where the magic happens (I know, lame, right?). Anyways under the heading, When people in this group go to voicemail click on the Record New link. You will be welcomed by a input box where you can put the name of your voicemail, I just put the name of the group that the voicemail is for.

7. After this you will be brought to yet another message box where you choose what phone Google Voice will call you at to record your message. So, choose your phone, click the Connect button, wait for Google Voice to call, answer, and follow the instructions given by the kind woman on the end of the line.

8. After you are done recording your special, custom message and are off the phone under the heading, When people in this group go to voicemail click on the drop down and select the VM that you just created. Finally hit the Save button at the bottom.

Now, any time the contacts in the group you set up call you and go to voicemail they will get the custom VM that you set up for them. Pretty nice! Works very well for special occasions and to just add some personality to your unanswered calls. Enjoy!

This in from Alley Insider, AOL announces that they are going to be using a new algorithm that finds what is “hot” on the net at the moment and then sends out article assignments to freelancers. After these freelancers complete a piece it will be edited by some of the 500 AOL editors and then posted to the main site. Talk about a terrible plan and catastrophe waiting to happen.

I personally do not like the idea of an algorithm telling the company what needs to be written about and what doesn’t. Isn’t this why we have REAL editorial teams? Don’t they make the “big” bucks to do this type of work? I really don’t think that allowing an algorithm to choose what your top stories for the day or week are going to be is a good, new business model for AOL.

AOL says that they will also be paying upwards of $100 per post yet some may not even be reimbursed for their work. AOL’s payment terms seem to be a bit vague at the time.

Anyways, I can’t see this going to well and I have a feeling that after a few weeks or months this type of content creation strategy will go out the window. Maybe AOL should just find and hire some decent writers that know what the hell they are doing?

For tech students and professionals, something that may be as important as knowing how to use functions and classes in programming and how to correctly normalize a database table is being geeky and obsessed with technology. In an article by Mitchell Ashley entitled, “CS Degree? Constant Learners and Self-Sysadmins Required” earlier this year, Ashley states how knowing more than what is required for a CS degree is desirable and one of the only things that can set you apart.  It seems that tech learners and even professionals need to diversify.

For what? Someone else can do that.

Ashley’s argument is that if you are a programmer and you want to be a great programmer, understanding networking, hardware, software, operating systems, and even having your own home network is almost mandatory to stick out in the tech industry. With Computer Science, MIS, and other tech degrees valued at so little nowadays, to be a pro you have to make yourself standout with added skills that you have learned yourself.

Knowing how to fix your own PC and how to fix common hardware problems should be considered part of most tech job descriptions. Knowing anything beyond what you are applying for is a definite plus.

How far does this go?

Ashley seems to concentrate on how geeky and enthusiastic about tech that potential programmers and IT people need to be to stand out. What about other things that can be combined with with skills like programming, hardware, software, and general information technology management?

Other skills that you could pick up along your tech journey would be the use of social networking and media, blogging, creating websites, marketing, Photoshop and design, etc. The list is endless; there are many different combinations in the tech industry that need explored. If you want to ONLY program computers or ONLY normalize databases, I will say that there isn’t as much value in that as their is in a hybrid type of specialization and a broader range of interest.

The integration of tech concepts and other topics may never be exhausted and that’s a good thing. That means that anyone in the tech industry can be somewhat unique, have their own niche, and create their own value in the industry. It’s time to get to work.

Suggested readings:

• ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
• Wireless Home Networking For Dummies
• Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business
• Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust

In the middle of the summer I finally received my Google Voice invitation.  I have to say that Google Voice is extremely powerful and could change the way that we use our phones as communication devices in the next few years.  There are some core features to Google Voice that I would add to truly make it the killer mobile app.

1. Customized Voicemails

In Google Voice you can add customized greetings for groups of your contacts.  Instead of keeping a whole group of people together in a “group” you could assign just one person to a group and then give that one person a personalized greeting.  What is missing is the ability to add a customized voicemails per contact, time of day, or group of people.  It would be nice to let someone know you are driving at a certain time and will be able to get back to them later; I commute to school every day at a certain time so this voicemails setting could stay the same for months.

2. Mobile Interface (I know they’re working on it)

This one is pretty self explanatory.  Having a mobile interface for Google Voice so that any phone can change and update settings via a mobile browser (dumbed-down or otherwise) is key for Google Voice to truly break into the mainstream market.  The Google Voice team is working on it, I believe mostly to combat the crazy, unbelievable lie-fest from Apple and AT&T.  Hopefully sooner than later.

3. Calling from Google Voice number without software.

I own a Palm Pre and with the Google Voice application I can call out from my Google Voice number.  This means that when my girlfriend sees my number pop up on her phone she wouldn’t see my Sprint number but my Google Voice number.  To have this feature without the software would be great.  The way that I see it working would be when you dial a number the Google Operator asks you if you want to use your Google Voice number or your Sprint number.  You of course could choose in your user preferences if you want this enabled or not, or if you want either number used automatically.  The faster people learn your new GV number the better.

There isn’t that many more features that need added Google Voice; it is robust just the way it is.  There addons would be a benefit and would make GV an excellent tool for anyone that wants more control from their phone.  If there are any other addons that would make Google Voice better than it already is, leave them in the comments below.

I saw this first over at Lifehacker.

Omni DiskSweeper is a small application for OS X (yes, Snow Leopard safe) that shows you a list of the hard drives and or network drives that are connected to your Mac, allows you to view the size of them, and then allows you to delete what you will.

When the software is first opened you are greeted by all of the drives that are available to you.  When you click on a drive you are presented with folders and files on that drive. Next to the folders and files is the disk space that they are eating up.  System folders and files are differentiated in red.

Basically you can look for files and folders by size and decide if you want to get rid of them.  I cleared out about 36 GB of space from my new MacBook, mostly because I am a Mac noob and never cleared out my .trash folder.  There were a ton of applications that I have tried and deleted, movies that I have burned, music, etc.

Mentioning this software is due only to the shear fact that it saved me about 36 GB of space and that it is so easy to use.  The application is free and available here.

After listening to many podcasts in the TWIT universe I finally decided to give Dropbox a try last night.  The only reason that I was finally moved to do it was I didn’t have a jump drive near me and I wanted to work on a school paper on my MacBook. The paper was on my desktop PC. Yes, I could have emailed it but that seemed so 1998.  Instead I decided to download the dropbox client on my Vista machine and then my Mac. After about 5 minutes with Dropbox I realized that anyone that is super mobile should be using it.

So easy

I have tried in the past of creating a web folder with my unlimited account at HostGator and then sharing it between multiple machines. This was always janky and never seemed to work right (definitely not HostGator’s fault, those guys are awesome!), so I resorted back to using jump drives and email to get files back and forth.

Dropbox creates a folder anywhere you want on your drive. Anything that goes into this folder will be automatically synced to your Dropbox web account and therefore synced with any other machine that has your Dropbox file on it. It is seriously that easy. There isn’t anything else to say about it.

Can you say ‘convenient’?

I primarily work off of three machines on a daily basis; my home PC, my MacBook that is glued to my back, and my work PC. Knowing where my files are is sometimes tricky.  I work on several website projects and sometimes files are in the wrong place, meaning that I forget where they are. I put my entire project folder in my free 2GB dropbox and that was that. Anywhere I go now I know that I will have the files that I need to work with.

Sharing capabilities

This is something that I am excited about but have yet to try out; mainly because I installed Dropbox last night. I can imagine that this would change the way that I work at school with other students, the same way that Google docs has. This could be especially useful when I want to share a Visual Basic program with someone; rather than send them the code in text I could share the entire solution folder. Pretty awesome.

And that’s about it. Dropbox is one of those programs that “just works” or has worked for me thus far. If you have a bunch of PCs, Macs, and even Linux boxes (that’s right, Linux) that you work on daily or are a student that works on multiple systems, then Dropbox is for you. Go get your 2GB of free storage here.

Hey, maybe this is a good piece of software to add to this list.

Recommended books about this topic:

• Dot Cloud: The 21st Century Business Platform Built on Cloud Computing
• Cloud Security and Privacy: An Enterprise Perspective on Risks and Compliance (Theory in Practice)
• Cloud Computing, A Practical Approach

I am currently enrolled in an Intro to Visual Basic class and I am loving it.

I spend quite a bit of time reading and taking notes about methods and properties and such.  I spend a lot of time writing psuedo code to get things laid out on paper and make sense of them.  I spend a lot of time problem solving and trying to figure out what order I will put things in.  I spend a lot of time going over “programming challenges” from the book that are not even assigned to me just so I feel like I have learned as much as I can.  In a nutshell, learning programming takes a damn good amount of time.

When I was younger and first interested in computers and technology, I always was searching for the guide to learn how to do something as quickly as possible.  What I am learning today is that programming is a gradual process.  What I am learning now is that there are three steps to living “the programming way of life”:

1. Learn how to solve problems

This is something that has taken me years to understand.  When I was young up until about last semester I thought that learning programming was all about the language and learning all the different methods and how that language was laid out.  I am sorely mistaken.  I have learned that it is all about solving a problem efficiently.  Not every language is going to be appropriate for every programming problem.  That is why it is important that I know how to approach the problem and decide what action to take next.

2. Learn one language at a time

This is probably the hardest thing that I have had to overcome.  Once I starting learning some of the first languages that I learned, I wanted to jump to a different language and start “banging” that one out.  What I have found from formally learning VB and then looking at other languages such as C or even Python is that they are inherently the same.  Of course these languages can do different things in different ways and sometimes look completely different, but programming and problem solving is the most important and hardest part; learning an additional language when you have one “down” doesn’t seem as hard as that first language.  I am excited to move on and learn more and more languages.

3. Slow down

This is something that I have to remind myself everyday.  I need to slow down and take the language that I am learning in and let it “marinate”.  I’d rather learn how to program in 10 years than learn how to do it in 24 hours.  I want to know the intracacies and know deep down how the language works.  I want to be able to think in code and be able to use it as a second language.  This cannot be done in 24 hours.  This requires a ton of patience, caffeine, hard work, and insight.  Slowing down is what is going to keep me above the cut.

I believe that if I apply these three guidelines to my programming methods that I will of course succeed and go as far as I want to as a programmer.  I am not entirely trying to be a “programmer” per se, but I know that my future in computers and technology will be filled with programming and problem solving.  To be able to learn both and do them well will be indispensible in the future.