Reid Dossinger

If you're feeling like the world of tech is moving too fast and you'd really like to go back to the year 2000 when things were simpler and more clunky, just get on a conference call. It's an irritating slapstick comedy of "what?" and "sorry, go ahead" and "who said that?" and "no you go ahead" and "everyone remember to speak into the microphone for the one person calling in". I'm thankful for the technology, basic as it may be. It lets me stay home on treacherous travel days like today and yet still call in to an all-staff meeting. But every conference call has that annoying elephant in the room that folks refuse to acknowledge: that conference call and virtual meeting technology is still only at the basic stage where they're  possible , but barely useful, usually aggravating, often counter productive and nowhere near as efficient or effective as in-person meetings and presentations.

A Facebook yesterday had a friend of mine pleading rhetorically to a cell phone not to die because if it did, she would lose all the pictures and video she had of her youngest child. This blew my mind. How could you only have pictures of your child on a phone ? Why wouldn't you download and back them up? When you know that the internet often (almost always?) has easy solutions to your problems, why wouldn't you search for those solutions? I'm a guy who's tech support and tech recommender for his fiance* and family, but it's not because I'm a deeply technical engineer type. I know the answers to these questions because I know that computers and the internet often have a way of improving them, and so I go and look for them. Often, these problems aren't even ones that need to be solved, but just ones of convenience. Mint drastically improved my financial life and Dropbox improved backup and transfer. But I looked for them not because I needed to or because ...

Here's what my issue was: the call box on the apartment building that my fiance (let's call her "Katie") and I live in could only handle one number, but we needed it to ring both of our cell phones so that either of us could buzz people in. The initial solution was to put both of our cell phones in Google Voice and then a call from the call box rang both of our phones. SHAZAM. Only there was a little problem: I started using my Google Voice number more often, and so every time anyone called it, her cell phone would ring, and she'd be wondering who the hell was calling her. I figured there must be some way to have it only ring both of our phones when it came from the call box number, but I couldn't figure it out. The GV help didn't have an answer and I couldn't find anything in the forums either. But--SPOILER--I figured it out. Or rather, I'm pretty sure that I figured it out. Everything in this list of instructions is sponsored by...