Short and Sweet Voice Mail Greeting (Sprint)

When I posted a while back about 10 annoyances, number 3 on the list was:

When I'm trying to leave a voice mail and I have to sit through a long obnoxious automated message, such as "The caller you are attempting to reach is not available. At the tone I will take your message, or press 5 to page this person. Press 6 to leave a call back number. When you are finished with your message, if you are satisfied with your message, press pound, or hang up to deliver the mesage, or press star for more options. [PAUSE...] [PAUSE...] [CALLER COMMITTING SUICIDE...] BEEEEEP!"

I discovered, in my voice mail (which is provided by Sprint), how to eliminate the long automated greeting. Here is how to do it:

1. Call into your voice mail
   
2. Main Menu
   
3. Press 3: Change Personal Options
   
4. Press 2: Greetings
   
5. Press 1: Change Main Greeting
   
6. Press 3: Add or remove caller instructions that are played after your greeting
   
7. Press 2: Do not want these instructions played
   

That's it! Together we can make the world less annoying one voice mail greeting at a time! :)

Remote Control Your PC... For FREE!

I've tried out GoToMyPC a few times over the years, and I always thought it was very cool, but I never needed it enough to pay $20 per month.

I recently came across a provider of a similar technology called LogMeIn, and this one has a free version! It seems to work just as well as GoToMyPC. Check it out!

Semi Annual

Semiannual, last I heard, mean's every 6 months. There's nothing in the definition that would make it acceptable to mean "once a year, but 6 months after the other one that we refer to as annual". But yet that's exactly what the church uses it to mean in reference to general conference!

Can someone explain how they can get away with this? Do they think their tax exempt status makes them dictionary exempt as well?? I think I was confused by this for about the first 25 years of my life. (Me: "Wait, wasn't the last one the 160th??") I'm still outraged by it. I'm tempted to boycott conference or start a Facebook group demanding that the naming convention be changed.

Aside from that, conference was really good.

Tax Credit of $8,000 for First Time Home Buyers

If you are considering buying a new home, you should be aware of this $8,000 tax credit for first time home buyers.

Letting Go

I've been carrying the same wallet for about 10 or 15 years that my brother Matthew bought me for Christmas many moons ago. It's gotten so ragged that I have tenants who don't even pay their rent who have offered to buy me a new one. I've put it off for a long time, but tonight I finally broke down and bought a new one.


The little one in the middle came as an added bonus, I guess for when I want to travel light. Here's the open look:


You can't even tell from the pictures how ragged the old one is. But I did get a nice shot of the lint build up:


That 20-10-29 number you see on there? I'm not really sure what that is. Probably the combination to a gym locker at some point...

However, I'm not really sold on this new one. Having those slots for credit cards makes it look like a girl's wallet. And when I put all the cards in it got kind of fat like George Costanza's wallet.


I didn't even put in all the cards I had in the old one -- I had a credit card that I don't use, a Cold Stone gift card with 97 cents on it that I've been carrying around forever, and an old BYU ID.


That white line? Yep, my social security number was printed right on the front. Maybe identity theft didn't exist back in the 90s.

The Limits of Exhaustion

I ended up pulling an "all nighter" accidentally last night. It really was an accident -- I went to bed at a normal time, but because I had slept in till noon on Monday I couldn't go to sleep. The reason I slept so late on Monday was that I had been sick on Sunday, and apparently a combination of a generic Day-quil knock off during the day and Nyquil at night make me sleep for 15+ hours.

So anyway, I got up at noon, I went to bed at midnight, and I couldn't sleep. I got up, did some work for a couple hours, and tried again. Still no good. I didn't want to take more Nyquil and risk sleeping for another 15 hours so I got up and started reading a John Grisham book (that I ended up with because my roommate's girlfriend was going to donate it to charity but it got left on our kitchen table instead... but I digress from my perfectly streamlined story...). And then of course I just kept reading until I finished. (I have a little problem with "moderation" sometimes... good thing I don't drink... or play Word Twist on Facebook...)

I don't remember how many all nighters I pulled in college, I know there were quite a few. But I always got to sleep the next day as soon as I could. This time I started getting phone calls around 8 AM, and I thought, "What the Heck? I'll just see how long I last." So I went to work (meaning I commuted to my home office 20 feet away) and acted like it was a normal day.

About 3 in the afternoon it started really hitting me. By about 4 PM (hour 28) I crashed. I got up at 8 PM (and of course had 6 voice mails...can't you people leave me alone while I'm doing SCIENCE?).

So I guess 28 hours is my reasonable limit. (I could have pushed it further if really necessary but I wouldn't have been at all effective.) Which leads me to wonder about this policy of having doctors work 36 hour shifts in hospitals. How safe can that really be? How many patients have been killed or harmed because the doctor hadn't slept and didn't know what he/she was doing?

I think Barak should look into this... but hopefully he'll worry about more important things first -- instituting PLAYOFFS IN COLLEGE FOOTBALL!