Three months after making my Sprint cell phone number into a Google Voice number, I’ve decided to cancel the service.

Recently, text messaging has become unreliable. In the last 4 days, only about 30% of text messages I’ve sent have gone through. And it cost a lot of miscommunication before I got to the bottom of it, because on my phone all messages indicated they were sent successfully.

When I went to troubleshoot, I checked Google Voice and realized that not only had the messages failed to reach my recipient, but they failed to make it to Google Voice in the first place.

I realize that hosting a telecommunications network with 100% uptime is a challenging problem, but frequent silent failure is an unacceptable user experience in this case.

I’m going to miss Google Voice, because I enjoy a lot of its features: text message indexing and archiving, voicemail archives, voice mail transcription, etc. They just aren’t worth all the extra unreliability and headache at this point.

I got a new microphone and am testing it out with a quick run-through of this old jazz standard, “The Days of Wine and Roses” by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer:

Could use a pop filter and some second takes, but I’m blown away by how much better everything sounds on a real microphone.

Thanks to Albert Alexander for insisting it was unacceptable that I continue recording on my laptop’s built-in mic.

Update:

You will be taken to a confirmation page. Select “Delete Google+ content”, check the required box and click on the “Remove selected services” button. You should be good to go.

Unexpected UI changes are met with resistance by users, who get the old way ingrained in their muscle memory.

If you joined Google+ but long for the days when its options didn’t clutter the toolbar on all of your Google services, there is a way out. You can disable Google+ and restore things to how they were by following these 3 steps:

1. Mouse over the gear icon in the top right corner and click on “Google+ settings”.

2. Click on “Account overview” in the left menu.

3. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on “Delete profile and remove associated social features”.

And you’re done!

This post has been republished on the Mozign blog with my consent.

So I found myself writing an email today and Cc’ing a friend who I thought would be interested. Then in one paragraph of the email, I made explicit that I’d included them and explained why. This happens frequently in human exchanges, but I’ve never seen a bot do it.

If email marketers could find a way to emulate this behavior and leverage it, it could add a whole other dimension to their campaigns. They could relate subscribers with common interests and spur discussion.

Edit: I’ve rewritten this post after an email exchange with Kartik Agaram. He made me realize that the original content was rather short and cryptic. The original text is pasted below for those interested:

A very human thing to do is write an email to multiple people that specifically targets their overlapped interest. A mailing list that could do this could be very successful.

Context: bitovod created a site which aggregates the “Best of ” for any user on Hacker News.

After he added a feature to make queries linkable, we can now compile a “Best of” list for all the leaders on Hacker News. This is an attempt to compile and maintain such a list.

If you’re active on Twitter, you may also be interested in the Hacker News Leaders list on Twitter.

1. tptacek
2. patio11
3. edw519 (compare with curated version, see edw519′s comparison)
4. jacquesm
5. fogus
6. cwan
7. jrockway
8. swombat
9. vaksel
10. ssclafan
11. raganwald
12. davidw
13. robg
14. icey
15. RiderOfGiraffes
16. jasonlbaptiste
17. grellas
18. DanielBMarkham
19. mechanical_fish
20. rms
21. nostrademons
22. iamelgringo
23. cperciva
24. yummyfajitas
25. Anon84
26. jerf
27. blasdel
28. nreece
29. axod
30. mahmud
31. tokenadult
32. petercooper
33. jgrahamc
34. shawndumas
35. bensummers
36. peter123
37. ryanwaggoner
38. lionhearted
39. gaius
40. staunch
41. bootload
42. mixmax
43. hugh3
44. wheels
45. prakash
46. mattmaroon
47. rbanffy
48. bjonathan
49. SwellJoe
50. sant0sk1
51. gojomo
52. _delirium
53. gruseom
54. acangiano
55. btilly
56. epi0Bauqu
57. ugh
58. scott_s
59. there
60. wallflower
61. mcantelon
62. andreyf
63. philwelch
64. stcredzero
65. twampss
66. tlrobinson
67. Tichy
68. ojbyrne
69. ErrantX
70. abraham
71. chaostheory
72. ivankirigin
73. anigbrowl
74. Alex3917
75. wglb
76. j_baker
77. pchristensen
78. chaosmachine
79. gnosis
80. soundsop
81. jonknee
82. mbrubeck
83. bdfh42
84. timr
85. kenjackson
86. ph0rque
87. silentbicycle
88. barrkel
89. michael_dorfman
90. kqr2
91. potatolicious
92. byrneseyeview
93. noonespecial
94. MikeCapone
95. r11t
96. kirubakaran
97. pclark
98. DanielRibeiro
99. timf
100. eru

One service SearchYC provided that remains a need unfulfilled even with the new feature is search for Arc Forum, pg’s other news.arc forum. This had been an extremely valuable resource to the Arc language community as SearchYC had been to the Hacker News community. It kept the old gem posts and comments which tend to get buried in the forum accessible to new readers.

How can we address the problem of lost search to Arc Forum and the other Hacker News sister forums in the wake of SearchYC’s shutdown? You can share your thoughts below or in the corresponding HN thread.

Update: The ThriftDB guys are interested in taking on search for Arc Forum! I’ll make another announcement if anything materializes.

Update: Both Search Y Combinator and Search Arc Forum are back online for the moment. Thanks to Typhon for breaking the news.

Update: SearchYC is now officially done.

If you find your phone running so slow it makes you want to destroy things, destroy your media or move it to your computer. You’ll feel like a kid again.

Don’t target text-based data like call records and text messages. It’s not worth it. You’ll force yourself into making hard decisions about what to keep but see little gain in performance.

Go after the media.

Here are the specific times when each jazz standard plays in the clip:

• Now’s the Time (0:00)
• Lotus Blossom (0:17)
• Milestones (0:44)
• Misterioso (1:39)
• Blue Monk (1:52)
• Sister Sadie (2:02)
• Waltz For Debby (2:16)
• No Problem (3:37)
• Blues March (4:27)
• Doxy (4:57)
• Five Spots After Dark (5:13)
• Cleopatra’s Dream (5:51)
• Comin’ Home Baby (6:27)
• Maiden Voyage (6:50)
• Donna Lee (7:31) (Personal favorite)
• Cherokee (8:15)
• Fables of Faubus (8:41)
• ‘Round Midnight (9:04)
• Moment’s Notice (9:14)
• St. Thomas (9:45)

Thanks to the Austin guitar teacher who brought this video to my attention!

A Google search will turn you up some results. One blog decided to paste such a list right into the post, apparently as part of an ambitious SEO strategy to appear in the results of every search query. (Well, at least they appeared in mine.) You could use that list, if you trust its authority.

Another option would be to download The Corncob list of more than 58 000 English words. This conveniently provides all caps and all lowercase versions of the list. However, it favors British spelling over American, which may not be your cup of tea (har har). In this case, if you’re using Mac, Linux or another Unix-like, you have one more compelling option to consider…

Your computer already comes with a list of every word in the English language! It’s in a file called (aptly) “words”, and it’s located at either /usr/share/dict/words or /usr/dict/words, depending on your system.

Sometimes what you’re looking for is right under your obscure Unix path.