I was dinking around with my blog, and happened upon WordPress.tv. I found a few neat lecture videos that made me wish that some WordPress guru would come around these cold, wintery Iowan parts sometime in the near future. And maybe they have, I just haven’t been looking hard enough. Without further ado, here is the splendid info vid I enjoyed watching, starring Shayne Sanderson (former 3D animation student turned web developer – see a correlation?? Eh? Eh??):

Oh my goodness! You don’t know how long I’ve had to deal with friends, family, and even potential employers getting that silly, “Caller has not set up voicemail,” message. Ugh!

I have Google Voice. I have a tracfone. I use Google Voice to forward calls to whatever phone I’m around, pretty much, so I don’t use my tracfone much. It’s a great money saving technique. I am a poor college student, and money saving is pretty dang important. But I digress… Google Voice is an excellent tool, especially if you’re online all the time like me. My computer is pretty much my life. I went to an online college for a short stint, and at that point it was more than my life. Anyway, Google Voice is useful for texting, but in case I’m not near a computer with an internet connection (Yes, that can happen. *Gasp!*), I forward those Google Voice texts to my cruddy little tracfone. May not be fancy, but it gets the job done. For 0.30 minutes to send and read a text, and for not getting charged anything for just receiving and not reading a text, it’s quite a bargain – especially since I’m usually at a computer and can text away at top speed with a giant keyboard as opposed to eeking out poorly phrased and scrunched blurbs with a pre-T9 (but not ABC) number pad entry system.

OK! To the meat of this post…
How to get your Google Voice voicemail to work with your Tracfone

1. Turn on call screening in your Google Voice settings online. [Google Voice > Settings (top right) > Voice Settings (dropdown menu) > Calls (middle tab)]
2. Set up voicemail with your Tracfone. Make sure it is about 15 seconds long. It doesn’t have to sound nice because no one is going to here it. Go ahead and record some armpit fart symphony or something… You won’t actually be using the Tracfone voicemail. Here’s how it works:

• Yolanda calls your google voicemail number.
• Your Tracfone rings, but you don’t answer it (because you’re too busy baking strawberry cake-mix cookies).
• After however many rings, your Tracfone voice “answers.”
• Your Google Voice number asks if you want to take this call or not.
• Your Tracfone decides to answer in a melodic armpit fart symphony, and refuses to take the call.
• Your friend Yolanda is routed to your Google Voice voicemail.
• You win the battle and celebrate by eating delicious cookies.

So there you go. Now your tracfone is even more useful.