My solution to "Ooops! This number appears to be from an area we don't currently support."

If you are reading this post, chances are you already know that this is a message that you might get when you try to port an existing number in to Google Voice.  I became acquainted with this message when I tried to port my land line to Google Voice.  While Google does say this is not supported there have been several blogs detailing a two step process in which you first move your land line to a wireless account and then to Google Voice.  This process seems to work flawlessly for many people,  there are even details on how this can be done for as little as $21 (a T-mobile sim card + the $20 Google fee).

Before you begin this process you really need to check if your number can be ported,  while the process does work for some numbers, it does not work for all numbers! If you are thinking about following the two step process,  check your number here first.  When you check it you can get several results back.  If you get  Ooops! We currently don't support porting from your carrier. We apologize and are working on adding support for more carriers.",  then the two step process will probably work for you.  However if you get "Ooops! This number appears to be from an area we don't currently support." ,  then this should be a red flag because it seems that the process will not work for that number.  Most of the blogs describing the two step process do not mention this,  so for me I just assumed that I was getting that particular message because my number was a land line and that everything would change once I ported my number to a cell phone.  In retrospect, the message is pretty clear that it's the number that is not supported, not the provider.  I can't really fault Google on this one, the only thing they could have done was to have a message that said something like "you can't port this number no-way, no-how, not matter what tricks you try, it's not going to work period" and even with that I probably still would have convinced myself I could get it to work.

So I found myself in the position of having my precious land line number on an att goPhone (in prep to be ported to Google Voice), only to find that I could not complete step two of the process.  Now I got here because I changed my home phone service from Frontier to Time Warner Cable, and Time Warner could not port my existing number to begin with (which should have been a red flag to begin with i guess),  so I really did not have much to loose in trying the two step process.

How did I resolve this?  Well, it's not a perfect solution, but I think it comes pretty close to what I was hoping to gain by porting my land line to Google Voice.
The biggest sacrifice was that I had to loose one of our cell phone numbers.  In my family,  changing my cell phone number was going to cause the least amount of pain, so I took my wife's cell phone number and she took our old land line number.  Her having the land line number is fine since I was planning on forwarding call s to her phone anyway. Since these two numbers were the most important numbers for us to keep, that  just made the most sense.  Now anyone that would have called her or us on either of those two numbers will still get in touch with one of us, and yes it might be a bit confusing for a little while, but it is something we can deal with.

Here are the details of what I did and how this setup works.
First thing I did was create a new Google Voice number in my wife's Google account (basically this will be our main home phone number people will call).  Then I added our new Time Warner phone number as one of the forwarding phones.  Next I added my wife's cell phone as one of the forwarding phones.  This was what I wanted in the first place, only I wanted that Google Voice number to be my old land line number.

Here is where I think I found a feature in Google Voice that really made all the difference for me.
Once I had my wife's cellphone added as a forwarding phone, I noticed the the option to "Activate Google voice mail on this phone".  This is a nice feature since it would allow calls to her mobile number (again our old land line number) to be handled by Google voice mail.  After going through that process, I hit the Edit button next to the link that now says "Deactivate Google voice mail on this phone".  Under there is a "Show advanced settings" link.  Finally under that is what I call the "magic button" that makes this solution almost perfect for me.  There are two options for voice mail being delivered from this mobile phone.  The default is to go straight to voice mail.  This means that if someone calls your cell phone and you don't answer they get your Google Voice mail greeting.  The other option is to "Ring my other phones before going to voice mail".  I have that option selected, so if some one calls my wife's cell phone number and she does not answer then my home phone rings, and if some one does not answer that phone then it goes to voice mail.

Let me summarize it this way.  I had a land line number that I was going to lose because I could not port it to either Google Voice, or my new home phone service provider.  I now have a setup such that when someone calls that old land line number it will ring my home phone, almost exactly like it did before.  That is almost as good as having ported the number to Google Voice.  A side effect of this is that someone calling the old land line number will have to wait a bit before they get to the voice mail box, since they have to wait for the cell phone to go to voice mail and then they have to wait for the Google Voice number to go to voice mail.

What are the down sides of this?  I had to loose one of my cell phone numbers, and I think I will end up switching my wireless plan to an unlimited minutes plan.  For me that would be Verizion's "Share Everything" which is not such a big deal for me since I never got in on the "unlimitted" data to begin with.

I think in the long run we will tell everyone to call us at the new Google Voice number,  but if we forget inform an important contact,  we still get the call from them since we still have "own" our land line number.

Some thoughts on bookmark syncing

I have been using Xmarks for some time now to keep my bookmarks synced between my home desktop and my work laptop.  I also started using a vmplayer virtual machine on my home desktop machine when I work from home.  Again I used Xmarks there as well,  keeping all may bookmarks in sync.

I finally got a smartphone and so naturally wanted to have may bookmarks synced to may phone as well.  Here is were Xmarks lets me down a bit.  It turns out that in order to sync to my android phone I would need to be a "premium" user,  which is $12 a year.  This seems like a lot for just a little gain, especially if you consider that I would need to do this for my wife as well.  I supposed we could share one premium account and use different profiles,  but this situation made me think about what and why I want to sync bookmarks.

The original idea of Xmarks was nice,  you have one set of bookmarks that you can access from anywhere, using any browser.  In reality however I tend to use the same browser and same applications , across all my devices.  So for example right now Chrome is my main browser,  the only real reason I still have firefox or ie is because some web apps, particularly some of my work apps, don't like Chrome, so for those I fire up firefox.

So the situation really is that I really only need to have bookmarks for the applications that I would actually use with a given browser.  What I am doing now is using Chrome sync for most of my bookmarks and firefox sync for the applications that I need to use on firefox.  It may not be ideal, but then again having to have multiple browsers installed on the same device in the first place is not ideal.

So in the end what I have is cross device bookmark syncing,  but not cross browser bookmark syncing, which is what I had with Xmarks.  If I could go back to using Xmarks for everything I probably would but at this point $12 a year seems like a lot for that little bit of extra functionality.