I’ve been a T-Mobile UK customer for donkeys years since when it was One2One. In fact until a few months ago when I finally retired my GSM SIM card and rather late joined the 3G Smart Phone party (as opposed to the LG KS360 2.5G ‘blackberry style pay as you go phone for teenagers who can’t afford a blackberry’) my phone display still showed ‘One2One’ as the operator. Now I’m long past a teenager and the specifics of the handsets in questions are an irrelevant detour on the way to the subject of these blog posts.

Now ‘back in the day’, now it’s probably no longer cool to use this phrase, but never mind, back in the day listening to your voice mail messages would be free. However for many many years T-Mobile have charged you to listen to your voicemail.

You could pretend you were a Sunday Newspaper journalist and dial your own phone from another cheaper line and insert the pin number (which of course you had changed from the default) and listen to your messages.

Now paying 12p a minute was a minor inconvenience when I was a ‘Pay as you go’ customer. But when I switched to a pay monthly contract (on a SIM Only deal on the afore mentioned LG device) I find that listening to voicemail is not included as part of your inclusive minutes. I’m paying 12p a minute to listen to my voicemail no matter what.

Therefore the aim is to find a way to avoid this, so the obvious answer is a voicemail to email service, but if only life was that simple.

I purchased a nice 03 number from my normal supplier of such services, Flextel, this cost me a couple of quid for the number, plus a quid top up of ‘call credit’. I wouldn’t be using any of this as I configured the number as voicemail.

I set my call diversion on my phone to my new 03 number. When a message us left on the voicemail Flextel email me the message as an email attachment, which I can then listen to on my phone at no cost, the files are tiny as not to worry my “acceptable use” none specfic data allowance.

This threw up a problem. The email attachment is a ulaw formatted wav file. The native android media player doesn’t recognise this codec.

This is fixed with a 99p app called WavPlayer.

So for the price of a pint down the pub there’s no paying 12p a minute to listen to voicemail……..or THAT’S what I thought until I examined my phone bill……. Wait for part two to find out the next T Mobile plan feature I hadn’t spotted….

I got sent an invite to google+ the other day. As everyone is raving how good it is, I thought at least I should check it out (even if I don’t go onto use it very much).

So clickly click on the e-mail link and get asked to sign into my google account and….

So I can’t use Google+ without a  Google profile, but ‘my organisation’ doesn’t allow me to have a profile…… as I’m the admin I didn’t know I was stopping myself having a Google profile.

A little searching later shows multiple results such as this, showing that I’m not the only one encountering this. I have a Google Apps account and I can’t have a Google Profile with this, therefore I can’t join google+ (or at least I’ll have to set-up a new google account to use google+) This comes just weeks after I finally merged my ‘personal’ google account with my google apps account with the same e-mail address with all sorts of fun and games.

So  it’s back to the drawing board before I can create my “circles” and “hangout” with people….

So at what many people would deem to be “tea time” I embarked on what I thought would be a nice simple, and relatively swift job.

Your starter question, how many ‘Windows Updates’ would you expect to be pulled down onto a XP Pro laptop that hasn’t seen an internet connection since mid December 2010?

Your answer – 64!  (This will include MS Office updates as well as Windows) -  that is before the countless other updates in the way of Firefox, Flash Player,  Adobe Reader, Java and other countless sundry bits and pieces – though thankfully these are all automated.

Next uninstall some of the assorted junk that’s found itself onto the machine and I’m two hours down the line before I get to the main task in hand, loading the 500MB download of Quickbooks 2010 software. Quickbooks is a popular accounting software package.

Now my experience in the past is that Quickbooks is notoriously fickle. However on reading up on-line while I was waiting for the myriad of updates to load it seems that Intuit have finally come into the ‘real world’ of corporate computing and made Quickbooks run as a ‘limited user’ (I guess because they’ve got to do this to have vista/7  support were even an Admin user is not running ‘administrator’ rights all the time).

Good news after much loading time (including various .net frameworks, some Office 2003 integration tools and other various bits and bobs as well as Quickbooks itself) all seemed to work, bar the fact that the install was anything but ‘quick’. I’ll stand-by to eat my words about it “all working” once our finance guy has got his mits on the laptop.

So onto the other two points of my title for this post.

All this extended evening activity lead me to a couple of listening opportunities, the first was to a radio programme that I’d not normally tune into and found myself fascinated by an Iranian drama piece on the Persian Seda programme. I didn’t understand a word of it, but found myself drawn in by the drama of the different tones of voices. Although it was spoken word there is almost a musical quality to the delivery.

This is a great example of were radio works uniquely. I’d never think of downloading a Persian podcast or search out such content on a streaming audio service, but did discover something I enjoyed via the radio.

Once I’d concluded my software wrangling duties at what some may call “supper time” I could finally jump on the train and got out my Walkman (by such I don’t mean I’m retro and playing cassette tapes, rather it is my Sony ‘iPod clone’) and “discovered” – Burst of the Worst – which gave me some much needed light relief and a few chuckles. Now this was another nice discovery but in a different way. I’d made a deliberate decision to download these podcasts, most of which are somewhat different to this “Christmas tape” edition. An interesting thought for podcasters why not occasionally throw in something a little different. The listener can always just skip past it. Obviously in this case Jonathan Marks is podcasting archive radio programmes, so perhaps decades ago him and his team were doing just this on the radio.