How To Get A Google Voice Phone Number

1. Go to your Google Account settings

2. Under the heading "Email addresses and usernames", and next to your email address, click the "Edit" link

3. Set the Country to "United States" and click "Save"

4. Select "Language" and choose "English (United States)"

5. Go to the web page "google.com/voice":

6. Open Voice Settings

7. Click on "Get a Voice number"

8. Click "I want a new number"

9. Search for a number that you like

10. Choose a PIN and accept the terms

11. Enter a US number to associate with the account (this is mandatory to activate the Google Voice number, but can be removed once it is active, so you can use a friend's number if you don't have your own number in the USA).

12. Click "Call me now", answer the call and when prompted, enter the code

Once you've entered the code your new Google Voice number should be active.

It is also recommended to install the voice and video component for your web browser, so you can make and receive calls directly from within Gmail.  For Chrome, this component is called "Google Talk Plugin", and can be installed from within Gmail, using the Google Talk widgets.

Call Me with Google Voice

Below is my Google Voice "Call Me" Gadget. Enter your name and the number that you want to call me with. Google Voice will then call your number and put you in a call with me.

From a pile of gravel to actual Google Maps vector data

I just find it amazing that there exists a piece of data on Google's servers in the form of a vector tracing a piece of road which for 10 years I was the only person on this entire planet to walk along every day as I went to school from the ages of 9 (4th grade primary school) through to 18 (year 12 senior high).  I am referring to the dirt driveway leading from Glen Ora Road to our house on the 15 acre plot of land where we lived those years.  I saw this piece of road constructed from a 200 metre long, 1 metre high pile of yellow limestone rocks and reduced down to a driveable and walkable roadway leading from the public road to our house.  During those 10 years, the road was driven on every day only by my father, and several times a week by my mother, and walked on by myself everyday as I went down to the bus stop on the Pacific Highway to go to school. This piece of road doesn't even have a name, and it was protected from casual wandering members of the public by 4 pieces of fencing wire and a rusty metal truss which I had to stick into a hole in the hard clay ground and push against the 15" wooden fence post with all my might so that I could lower the fencing wire loop over it to close the "gate" every morning and afternoon.  

Many of those days included me writing software on a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer with 64Kilobytes of memory and an audio cassette as the only means of saving my projects.  This often failed, leaving me to write down all my code on paper by hand because I had no real need for a printer, and reenter the code another day in the hope of being able to save it to cassette. Aaaaanyway....
Now this insignificant piece of dirt road exists persisted as a polyline within the cluster of Linux boxes which host the Google Maps application!  Absolutely... mind blowingly... amazing!!!

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&om=1&t=h&source=embed&msa=0&ll=-32.115857,152.37564&spn=0.005025,0.009656&z=17