Here is an easy way to use Google Voice for voicemail transcription in Australia, with a bit of help from Skype:

1. Sign up for a new Skype account (it’s best you don’t use your primary one, since you won’t be able to receive calls on it anymore)
2. Add an Australian Online Number to this account through the Skype website
3. Add some Skype Out credit to the account, or sign up for a subscription that includes calls to the US
4. Open the Skype application and turn on call forwarding for unanswered calls for this account. Set your Google Voice number as the number to forward to, and set it to forward after 0 seconds (this just tells Skype to forward right away)
5. Open Google Voice in your browser, click Settings in the top right, then click the Calls tab. From here, turn on Do Not Disturb mode. This is a crucial step, as it makes Google instantly pick up your call for voicemail
6. Set your Australian phone to forward unanswered calls to your Skype Online Number. The online number will then forward to Google Voice which will pick up the call for voicemail.

Skype occasionally messes up the called ID on forwarded calls, but it get’s it right 99% of the time. With this method you can now get free voicemail transcription to your email, or use the built-in Google Voice application on Android phones. If you have a Google Voice invite but don’t know how to activate it from outside the US, the easiest way is to get a US Skype Online Number and give that to Google in order to activate your account.

When the opportunity to move to the United States first came up, the number one potential issue in my mind was obtaining a working visa. The U.S. Embassy website makes the process seem incredibly complex, and the only first-hand accounts of the visa application process made it sound very hard and daunting. Plus, these accounts were from people that had their University degrees, which the Embassy says is a requirement, but I didn’t even have this (though I did have a lot of work experience).

I am writing this to let people that are thinking about going through the process for an E3 visa know that while there are a lot of forms to fill in, the process is overall very painless. The actual interview session, which is the part most people are most worried about, took no more than two minutes.

What follows are the tips and processes that I followed. This is by no means legal advise, but is what I did to successfully secure my working visa. Continue Reading »

As some of you may know, I am departing to live and work in San Francisco tomorrow, and I really wanted to do a quick post thanking a few of the people involved in getting me there.

For a start, I truly want to publicly thank the guys at Happener. Markus and Greg totally blew away any and all preconceptions I had about recruitment by being personal, fun, and actually caring about the outcome. It pains me to put them in the same category as recruiters. These guys went so far above and beyond the call of duty, and have become both people I respect greatly, and very good friends. If you are sick of the old ‘bums in seats’ approach to recruiting, give these guys a call – they are in the business of hooking up fantastic companies with fantastic people. In any event, I’ll have more to say about them some other time…

Secondly, I’d love to give a big shout out to the folks at Massive Interactive, who I have been working with for the last two months. Had I not had the opportunity to travel to SF, I would have signed with them permanently in a heartbeat – they are a bunch of incredibly smart people working on incredibly cool things. I hope that if I do come back to Australia to live in the future, they might consider having me back. This is despite them being a .NET house, and me being an OS guy, so that has to tell you something.

I’d also like to thank all the fine people at 3jam, the company that I’m trekking across the world to be involved in. They have bent over backwards to help me out at every stage, and I look forward to meeting them all over a few beers tomorrow night.

Then, there are all the wonderful friends in Sydney. You are all fantastic people, and having so many come up to me at STUB to wish me well last night was a fantastic feeling. While I haven’t been a Sydney boy for that long, you have all been very welcoming, and are very important to me in your own special ways. I look forward to coming back for visits, and I hope that if any of you find yourselves in San Francisco that you get in touch.

Of course, I wouldn’t be at this point in my life without the help and guidance of my parents, and the companionship of my girlfriend. But I will be talking to them in a not-so-public forum…

There will be a few posts coming up over the next few weeks about the process I’ve gone through to get here, and of course the experiences I’ll be having over there. I especially want to post information about the visa process, which was far easier than I thought it would be, even though I have never completed my University degree. Stay tuned, and I’ll be life streaming the whole trip on Twitter and Brightkite, of course.

For all those Twitter lovers out there, like me, I’ve put together a little script based on the work found here to calculate some statistics from your Twitter timeline and present them using the Google Charts API.

Statistics include:

• Tweets per hour of the day
• Total Tweets per day of the week
• Total Tweets per day of the month
• Top @replies
• Top overall @s

Please keep in mind that there are probably a lot of bugs in it, and it can take a very long time to process if you have a large timeline. Other than that, enjoy!

I was honestly surprised to read this week that the FIA has ratified a ten-year engine freeze for F1 motor sport. F1 teams must deliver an engine design to the FIA no later than the 31st of March next year, and must stick to that design through the 2017 season.

The reasoning the FIA has given for this is that F1 engines are already incredible pieces of machinery, revving to 19,000 RPM whilst still being surprisingly reliable. While this might be true, F1 has always been the pinnacle of motoring – demonstrating what could be possible in consumer motoring in the future. Stopping this incredible innovation might have short-term benefits, such as limiting the huge budgets that these teams must operate with, but curbing this pool of innovation will also remove the goal that is being set for consumer brands to aim for.

Instead of putting a freeze on development, perhaps the FIA should instead set environmentally friendly targets for teams, such as reducing emissions. This will truly make F1 a target for general motoring. If F1 teams can work out how to pull this incredible performance out of environmentally friendly engines, then it may open people’s eyes to be more acceptant to these kinds of technology.

The FIA has a real opportunity to make F1 a leader in motoring for the world, but instead they have put a total halt on the amazing innovation possibilities.

This is in response to Kent Newsome’s request for inspiration for his feed reading list (his ’swivel feeds’ experiment). As you can imagine, most of my 150 or so feeds I read regularly (there are more that I only glance at now and then) are focused on mobile technology, but there are still some that I think would be of interest. I don’t read as many personal blogs as I should, but there are quite a few one-man shows that I enjoy, and even non-commercial group blogs that come in very useful.

So without further ado, here are five blogs not already on Kent’s list that I think he, and others, might enjoy:

• Blogging Pro
  Lots of news and tips for personal bloggers and pros alike
• D’Arcy Norman
  Works at the University of Calgary, has an interesting insight on the education scene and internet trends in general
• Daily Cup of Tech
  Timothy Fehlman’s blog, full of freeware and really great guides to doing fun things with technology
• UNEASYsilence
  “Observing the unobserved,” full of interesting little bits and pieces on all sorts of topics
• PaulStamatiou.com
  Young blogger from Georgia Tech, interesting insights and reviews

I have tried to steer away from the larger, professional blogs in favor of the smaller outfits. Also, I mainly subscribe to technology feeds, which may have limited appeal to some. Hopefully someone will get something out of that lot though.

Remember, my main reading list is always available in OPML format here, and a rotating selection of links from that list that refreshes every ten minutes appears in my sidebar.

Save for a couple of hours this morning, I’ve just emerged from bed for the first time today (it is getting late at night here) due to a nasty chest infection and head cold. Now my wonderful other half has hurt her back at work – seems there is no luck for us today. Consider this my formal apology to my editor for the lack of work today and more than likely tomorrow morning should this keep up. I promise I’ve got some stuff in the works.

Update: To make matters worse, I’ve been dealing with Conjunctivitis in both eyes for the last few days. Great…

I don’t know how it is in other countries, but here in Australia there is a general uproar over the closure of a lot of bank branches, especially in rural areas. It is not limited to just one bank, either, all of the banks have come under fire for branch closures. While the case is probably very different in more remote areas, living in the city I don’t actually have a problem with not having bank branches.

Personally, I hardly ever have the need to go into a bank branch. The last time I found myself in a bank was to sign the papers for my car loan over a year and a half ago. ATMs and EFTPOS serve me very well for withdrawals and deposits, and I use internet banking for bill payments and other monetary transfer needs. I would be more than happy to have lower bank fees in exchange for not having a branch nearby to go to.

ING have its ING Direct banking service here, wherein there are no branches and all transactions to and from the account are electronic, but it is only for savings accounts – no ATM card. I think there could be a market for a purely electronic banking account, but so far I have not seen it from any of the banks here. I don’t know what the situation in other countries is, but I really wish someone would capitalize on it in Australia.

I guess there will always be the need for bank branches, mainly for business banking and for people in more remote locations, but for my needs I would be more than happy to have an electronic-only account.

Readers from the US may not know what a Christmas cracker (or bonbon) is, so have a quick read here if you are confused. In any event, here is a list, in no particular order, of some of the terrible jokes that came out of my family’s Christmas lunch crackers this year:

• Q: Why are giraffes so slow to apologize?
  A: It takes them a long time to swallow their pride.
• Q: What two fish are needed to make a shoe?
  A: A sole and an eel
• Q: Why did the boy blush when he opened the fridge?
  A: He saw the salad dressing.
• Q: How can you tell which spiders are the trendiest?
  A: They have their own websites.
• Q: What button won’t you find in a tailor’s shop?
  A: A belly button.
• Q: What do you get when you cross a lighthouse and a chicken coop?
  A: Beacon and eggs.

Bah-dum cha!