First – a little background! As you likely know, I am a geek. I love tinkering, exploiting, pushing everything I touch to the limits. I’m good at it! I can make computers, phones, pda devices, televisions all do things that many others cant. Most people just pick things up, use them and move on… NOT ME! I get to know my gadgets. I learn all their features and use them! ABUSE THEM! I love it. It’s truly exciting for me.
This love for tinkering has led me to a new phone. Many of you love your iPhones and believe, beyond a shadow of doubt that I would love one as well. I believe that I would have lots of fun and enjoy the retina display. I don’t know that I would love AT&T – but that’s not the story here. Google produced a phone operating system called “Android”. It is an open source project which means if I every REALLY wanted to tinker, I could write code for my phone. I prefer to let others do that and creatively exploit their work – which is publish mostly, for free! Good deal!
I am the proud owner of an HTC Droid Incredible. Good phone. I like it a lot. I like that HTC supports cycling too… Well, when you own an android phone, you can do all kinds of fun things with it. Basically, you can take over the phone and install new software – not just apps – rather different versions of the operating system, different refined builds… all kinds of fun stuff. I love the flexibility. Enough on this… on to how I screwed things up!
As you all know, I have been using Google Voice. I have it really dialed in now – but yesterday, not so much! When I am at work in the secret bat cave, I bet zero bars. iPhones wont work here either so you can not tell me about that. The EVO would … but it’s Sprint. Anyway … I found an app for the droid that will forward my SMS messages to another number or an email address. SWEET! Here is how I thought it should work:
- People txt my phone.
- My phone forward text to GV.
- I get txt at desk.
- I do what I want with it.
In a perfect world… that would be slick like a big can of EZ Cheeze. Unfortunately, in the GV settings there is 1 check box that says “Notify via text when SMS is received”. Daily, we get a quick balance notification SMS message sent to our phones. I like that. This is what happened yesterday:
- Bank sends TXT
- Phone forward TXT to GV
- GV notified phone via TXT
- Phone forwarded TXT to GV
- Repeat the last 3 lines about 750 times
Now – here is where the story gets a little worse. YESTERDAY Verizon decided to install it’s new 4G network (LTE). During all of this txtplosion I ran out to my car to update my phone settings but had NO data connection! I couldn’t stop the madness. I tried over and over! I turned off the forwarding after numerous attempts, but I could fix the GV settings. UGH! I ended up driving about 1/2 mile away to a Days Inn that has free wifi to fix the GV settings there.
Well – of course, I wasn’t done with this crazy configuration … so here is how I have it set up now!
- Txt comes to phone.
- Phone forwards txt to new secret email address.
- Get notified of txt with a notifier on my desktop
- I can THEN use GV to reply if I so choose
You really can’t help but laugh at this. I tried so hard to refine my system – and was only 1 check box away from “perfection”. Ah well… at least I have unlimited txting! You can all txt me when you get done laughing! I need to test my configuration!