http://www.cracked.com/article_18470_the-7-most-horrifying-things-ever-discovered-in-human-body.html

Earlier today I got an email from Google saying that my GrandCentral account was finally ready to be upgraded to the new Google Voice service. Naturally, I had to upgrade and check out the new features! After only a few minutes I had already decided that the new service was much better than the old.

The new interface is very similar to Gmail’s and much easier to navigate than the GrandCentral interface. Google Voice now allows incoming calls to go straight through to you rather than being interrupted by the voice menu that used to force you to manually choose how to route the call every single time (this was my biggest complaint with the old service). They’ve also expanded their SMS features significantly. You can receive SMS messages at your Google Voice number and view/reply to them from the Google Voice web interface. Additionally, you can have SMS messages forwarded to your mobile phone and reply from there as usual. I was able to receive SMS messages sent from mobile phones just fine, but unfortunately test messages sent to my Google Voice number from AIM were never received.

Google has also added a voice to text service for voicemail messages. Although it’s a sweet feature for sure, I suspect that it will be pretty useless for actual use.

The test voicemail message I left: “Hello, how are you? What are you doing? Goodbye now.”

Google Voice’s text translation: “hey bill how are you went are you doing good site now”

But hey, what can you expect for free? It looks like the only feature they did away with was the ability to set custom ringtones, which I never used anyway. The one thing I thought they should have added is the ability to receive voicemail in your email as an attached audio file rather than just receiving a link to play it back online, along with their crappy text translation. Still, aside from charging for credits to place international phone calls (another new feature) the service is completely free, so I won’t be complaining…

Unfortunately for those of you who don’t already have GrandCentral accounts, there are no open signups yet for Google Voice. They are, however, currently taking requests for invites on their site.

The integration is all up and running on my site at BayAnime.com. I’d like to add that I was able to put the plugin together without writing a single line of code! It’s literally all the necessary functions cut and pasted directly from WordPress 2.5.1 pluggable.php, so kudos to WordPress for making it easy!

Download this plugin at WordPress.org.

When you do cookie integration please keep in mind that there are some login hooks in pluggable that might not be called in either WP or bbPress depending on which side your user logged in from. This might affect the functionality of some plugins.

For example, after rerouting all my bbPress logins to WP I realized that the ‘bb_set_current_user’ action hook on a bbPress plugin I used was no longer being called, so I had to incorporate it in on the WP side using the ’set_current_user’ hook.

bbPress 1.0 users should use this plugin instead.

Anyway, here’s the plugin in case anyone else might be interested…

Download this plugin at WordPress.org.

YAY!

Any local Bay Area anime fans interested in helping out? Let me know!

Oh, and I also finally got a Wii!!!

YAYAY!

Now I’m off to buy a ridiculous amount of accessories and try to track down a copy of Mario Kart. But first I must transfer my Mii to my computer…

http://checkout.google.com/seller/gsc/beta/demo/index.html

On first glance it all looks pretty nice and appears to work simply as expected. However I quickly noticed a couple of problems that render it unusable in its current state… Anyway, here’s what’s wrong:

- Add an item
- Go to checkout
- Hit back on the browser
- Add another item

Problem: cart widget removes the first item (and any previously added items), and shows newly added item(s) only

- Go to checkout

Problem: error!

Oops!
Google Shopping Cart Demo has sent Google a shopping cart with errors in it. We’ll contact them to ask that they fix this problem. As this could be a temporary issue, you can go back in your browser to try checking out again.

Hmm… looks like QA missed something…

I’ve been complaining for years about the lack of a decent browser for OS X… that is, one that doesn’t crash every hour… or make that every few seconds when browsing ugly hacks like customized myspace profiles. FF3 has crashed only a couple of times somewhat randomly in the past few days which already makes it pretty awesome in my book, especially since it’s still in beta.

Anyway no matter what you’re running you should definitely check it out:
Firefox 3 beta 4 now available for download

By the way, I’d just like to say that Safari is absolute GARBAGE! Shame on Apple!

In other completely unrelated news… how is this possible?!
Woman Pried From Boyfriend’s Toilet After Sitting on It for 2 Years

I even pointed to MANY confirmed cases of others experiencing the exact same problem, all on Comcast:

A Letter To Comcast- You Blocked My Site!

WoW Forums -> WoW Website and Comcast Problem

But it was all to no avail. When I realized that she would not put in any sort of inquiry or request to try to get someone smarter to look into the situation (surely someone in their company with some knowledge must exist), and in fact wouldn’t provide any support other than to tell me to empty my browser cache (but “only on Internet Explorer as we do not support any other browser”) I angrily typed:

Me > This is worthless
Me > where can I file a complaint?
Me > I would like to file a complaint for your service

To which the response was:

Dawn > Analyst has closed chat and left the room
analyst Dawn has left room

It’s almost funny, really…

One of my recent obsessions has been with tabbed content. In my opinion, every page offering tabbed content simply MUST degrade gracefully without Javascript; there’s absolutely nothing worse than completely inaccessible content! For smaller, less complicated content panes, I’ve found this tabber script to be the best as the markup is very clean and minimal. In the absence of Javascript support, this method will simply show all content panes on the same page.

However, what I wanted was to have a dynamically loaded tabbed content page degrade to static tabbed content pages that still looked and functioned the same way. A web search led me to the Ajax Tabs Content script from Dynamic Drive. Without Javascript, it simply loads the content pane by itself in the browser window. I wanted it to load the pane from within the template of the original page, so I devised a method to accomplish this by using some PHP code.

All of the original features of the script are intact, including external css and javascript file support… but as with the original script, once loaded they’re there to stay through subsequent tab switches. I’ll have to see what I can do later about unloading those styles.

I also added cookies to the original script so that it now restores current tab content upon reload.

How it works should be pretty clear from looking at the demo source, and the PHP code is used in the same way that you would to handle any static menu and page templates: designate the currently selected item on the tabbed menu list, include the selected external source file in the content section, and add any associated stylesheets/javascript files to the header. To get the Javascript bit working, the link rel attributes should contain the content container id, and the rev attribute should contain a comma-separated list of the external files, source page first.

I suggest using mod_rewrite to rewrite the urls so that the links look pretty and ensure that all pages will get indexed by search engines.

Demo
Download demo source