Added 1 new A* page:Only one page today, because I spent most of the day trying to configure my phone; see since I moved into this swanky new apartment and at about the same time activated a hand-me-down smartphone a friend gave me, which unfortunately is tied to a single cell phone service provider, I've had pretty bad reception, and this came to a head this past weekend when I finally took my turn hosting a revolving pot-luck dinner party of some old grade-school chums--I never did it before because my old apartment was too small and icky :p--and as it turned out I didn't know a couple of the guests had arrived--well one was re-arriving because he'd gone to rescue the other whose car battery had suspiciously died--because the hefty bricks in this old 1920s apartment building were blocking the call from the call box out in front of the building to my apartment in the back of the building. Fortunately the rescued guest was the person most familiar with my reception problem so he knew to email me when calling didn't work. : P
So anyway I can't have people coming over and starving to death on my front porch because their call doesn't get through, and I decided to take the rescued guest's earlier advice and get set up to take calls over the internet, and after porting my phone number and signing up with my cell service plan for a second time and then twiddling back and forth and back with phone settings and apps oh and my wireless access point, in *theory* I should be able to receive calls again. Nobody has actually called me yet. >_>
It's a simple setup that goes like this: a phone call comes through to the servers tied in to application 1, who now own my phone number, and their servers try to send it to their app on my phone and to my phone itself, except that application 2 and application 2's application-1-specific plugin, which detects if I am on WiFi or not, has gone into application 1's web settings and set it to ring just the app or the phone, depending on my WiFi connection status, so that actually if I am not on WiFi it rings my phone with an otherwise regular voice call, whereas if I am on WiFi it instead goes to application 1 which integrates with application 3 which handles the call as internet data which even after tweaking it and setting it to heavy bandwidth use and switching to a different wireless channel that may be the least busy in the vicinity of my apartment at certain times of the day, and so forth, sounds a bit skippy now and then but is hopefully more reliable than trying to take calls on my one-ish bar of reception while hunched down by the open window that isn't the one right next to my computer or refrigerator, although there was also the tantalizing possibility of a three-bars-of-reception spot at floor level in the corner and once I got a pretty good connection there for a few minutes by calling while lying down on the floor.
Boy, I dunno if telephoning has been this much of an adventure for 135 years or so!
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