In march, I signed up to receive an invite to Google Voice (GV), google's telephone service. The premise is simple: one phone number, that will ring all your phones, plus a slew of other features.

I recently received an invitation from Google, and signed up, and was fortunate enough to get both my home area code, and a number that incorporates my first initial and last name.

Some other features are described below: Google Voice gives you a single phone number that rings all your phones, saves your voicemail online, and transcribes your voicemail to text. Other cool features include the ability to listen in on messages while they are being left and the ability to make low cost international calls. To start enjoying Google Voice, just give out your Google Voice number. You can record custom greetings for your favorite callers or block annoying callers by marking them as SPAM.

A couple of the features I noted in my account set up is call screening and call presentation. When an incoming call comes from an unknown number not listed in your google contacts list for the first time, google voice prompts the caller to say his/her name, which is recorded. When my phone rings, I see the corresponding caller id #, and when I pick up, I am greeted by google voice saying, "call from ", where I'll here the recorded caller's recited name in place of . Then I'm prompted to either take the call, send the call the voicemail, take/record the call, or send the call to voicemail and listen while the caller leaves a message. Subsequent calls from the same number would not prompt the caller to say his/her name, as it will be recorded and stored in called GV account, to be replayed each time a call is made.

If the caller number is in my google contacts list, GV will "read" the contact name using text to speech tech, much like a GPS navi unit, and will not prompt the caller to say his or her name to be recorded. Everything else is the same.

Background aside, I have a couple concerns.

Firstly, would people have a privacy concerns with allowing their voices speaking their names to be recorded and stored by google? I keep thinking of voice recognition locks in movies, and could see such a system exploited to obtain voice samples of specific people. Fortunately, both sets of prompts for callers to identify themselves and for the call recipient to enable certain features can be disabled independently.

Secondly, is it weird for you to give out a GV number, that rings all your phones, and then to call out using a completely different number, like your cell phone? I feel like such a system could be confusing, and would essentially mean you're giving out at least 2 numbers, a common inbound number and one or more outbound numbers so people know who's calling. You can make outgoing calls via your GV number, through the web interface, and on any associated phone if you know the number you want to call. However, both are somewhat cumbersome to use, and are just glorified call forwarding mechanisms.

I think the value of GV is more for people with multiple phone numbers which they have already given out, and want an easier way to be reached. Still, it's hard to say no to a personal number, which has some pretty nifty features attached to it, like "visual" voicemail and seamless text message forwarding between GV to cellphones, and all your texts are archived in the GV web interface.

What do you all think about GV? If I gave you my GV number, would you call it, or just call my cell # directly?

Ever since I got a mac a couple years ago, I've repeatedly evaluated and tried different internet browsers, to try and find the right blend of compatibility, features/ease of use, and speed. And with the "benefit" of also having a Windows computers, I can also try browsers like Google Chrome, which I was generally impressed with, but found it had some quirks and bugs in addition to ones it shared with Safari, since they are both based on Webkit (ironically, Chrome had issues with gchat in gmail on my computer).

In my opinion, the nicest feature on Chrome was the Opera-like speed-dial feature that shows your most frequented sites, and where you can click and open up a site without ever having to type in the url. Now, Safari 4 beta adds that feature to safari, and even adopts the top of the window tab scheme, just like in Chrome. Seems like Apple stole these Chrome features and adapted them to safari before Chrome for Mac was finished. I still have to see how the java performance is on Safari. It's supposedly much faster. Hopefully, now Safari won't hang as long with the spinning beachball when it hits javascript.

P90X update: Day 2 was intense. I did plyometrics (jump training) and disturbed the people living in the apartment below mine. I felt bad, and stopped, intending to finish after work. I came back to finish, but they banged on the wall and threw stuff at the ceiling again. Fortunately, we were able to sort things out, and I finally got to meet at least one of my neighbors. Legs are sore, arms are sore, abs hurt every time I sneeze. Day 3/Ash Wednesday awaits... as for Lent... netflix be gone.

If you like "The Office," and like stereotype-based humor, you may get a kick out of this. I sure did.