eric c wagner

ramblings, musings, and WordPress

Eric Wagner

About Eric Wagner

Eric Wagner is the owner of Fifth Cup, a small, highly caffeinated web design and development agency in Portland Maine, and an enterprise technology executive whose passion is helping companies take advantage of technology.

Mental Note: Google Voice Re-verification Bug

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A few weeks back I received an email from Google about needing to re-verify the phone I was forwarding my Voice calls to. Because I use the Voice number as my business number it was important I keep calls forwarding to my cell phone.

Using my desktop web browser I logged into Voice and went to the Settings portion to re-verify my phone. The process sends a text message to your phone, and you need to enter that number onto the screen.

I clicked ‘send the text’ and waited. And waited. And waited some more. The text message never arrived. Honestly I get this a lot when using Google features, like setting up two-factor authentication, so I clicked the ‘resend code’ button which always works. And I waited. And waited some more. No text message.

I even tried this through the Voice app on my iPhone. The app IS ON the phone it needs to text too! This should obviously work, right?!

Nope.

A quick Google search through their forums and I stumbled upon someone talking about getting it to work using the “legacy” Google Voice UI.

You need to click the menu hamburger in order to see it, but there it was. It takes you back to how Voice looked like 10 years ago, but low and behold, the re-verification worked! It sent the text message perfectly.

Sometimes to go forward you need to go backwards. (Psst, Google. Here’s a bug report.)

Apple Watch

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Day One

I received an Apple Watch today. I say I “received” one because I didn’t purchase it. Instead I won it at a conference I attended a few weeks back. That’s about the only way I would have gotten one as I haven’t yet convinced myself to spend that much for a watch that if not charged on a daily basis was useless to do even its most basic function, tell time.

My expectation… I’m going to like the notifications that pop up, especially when I’m in a meeting, as I can glance at the watch without having to check my phone. All of the long term reviews I’ve read about the Watch, that is the one thing that almost everyone agrees is THE feature that makes the Watch worthwhile.

So, it’s Day One of life with an Apple Watch. We’ll see how things go over time, and I’ll share more about my findings as time goes on. I already have a couple of tips for setting up the Watch that I’ll share in the next few posts.

One thing already… I don’t mind it on my wrist. It’s quite comfortable. I’ve had both the original Fitbit and the Fitbit HR rubber ‘bands’, and I somehow always knew I was wearing one of them. Not so with the Watch.

(BTW, my watch isn’t the one in the stock photo above. It’s the Space Gray A-loo-min-eee-um Sports edition with the black rubber band. Next up… buying the brown leather band. We’ll see if it’s as comfortable as the rubber band.)

Ford: Microsoft out, BlackBerry in

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The company’s attempt to integrate consumer technology into its vehicles was so complicated and undependable when it was redesigned four years ago that Ford’s overall quality ratings plunged…

On Thursday… The company announced a complete redesign, jettisoning Microsoft, its longtime partner, in favor of BlackBerry, and replacing the MyFord Touch moniker with a new name, Sync 3.

Oh my. Replaced by Blackberry. How bad do you need to be for THAT to happen.

Display Featured Image on top of Genesis Framework Posts

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Here’s a snippet of code that I re-use often. It will display the post’s featured image above the content but under the entry title on the post page and the front page.