Micheal Espinola Jr's Blog

Manage the situation, and tomorrow you will have yogurt.

Go after her. Fuck, don’t sit there and wait for her to call, go after her because that’s what you should do if you love someone, don’t wait for them to give you a sign cause it might never come, don’t let people happen to you, don’t let me happen to you, or her, she’s not a fucking television show or tornado. There are people I might have loved had they gotten on the airplane or run down the street after me or called me up drunk at four in the morning because they need to tell me right now and because they cannot regret this and I always thought I’d be the only one doing crazy things for people who would never give enough of a fuck to do it back or to act like idiots or be entirely vulnerable and honest and making someone fall in love with you is easy and flying 3000 miles on four days notice because you can’t just sit there and do nothing and breathe into telephones is not everyone’s idea of love but it is the way I can recognize it because that is what I do. Go scream it and be with her in meaningful ways because that is beautiful and that is generous and that is what loving someone is, that is raw and that is unguarded, and that is all that is worth anything, really.

I am.

Google Gmail, along with Google’s other collaborative services, is out of beta after ~5 years and is now on to bigger and better things; such as their newly semi-opened product: Google Voice.

Its a remarkable service that brings to bear some of the conversational and historical features of Gmail.  Upon using, it all feels like a very natural progression and next-step to the unification of their communications platforms into a single interface in the near future.  Couple this with their voice recognition developments on the various mobile search platforms, and they are fitted to transcribe voicemails along with the emails that they are then able to data-mine for additional advertising revenue – similar to what they do with Gmail.

Google Voice is a service born from a company named GrandCentral that Google acquired in 2008. Its a service that centralizes phone number portability, call forwarding, text messaging and voicemail into a single solution that is completely free for in-country dialing, with reasonable rates for long distance use. It also brings to Google (and the masses) some of the typically corporate-only features of services referred to as Unified Messaging.

Unified Messaging capabilities are a likely baby-step into the future Google Wave platform and beyond.

Its brilliance on their part, and yet another extremely useful and free service for the rest of us. Forget Visual Voicemail.  If you have an iPhone, install the GV Mobile application, and see what Google is doing and how it will effect and eventually marry all of these technologies that are increasingly at our mobile fingertips.

What Google is doing here is the innovating benchmark that other companies will be forced to follow for years to come.

Its still in Beta, *ahem* just like Gmail, but Google now offers direct native synchronization support for Contacts and Calendar natively to the iPhone or iPod Touch.  It’s completely free, devoid of using any iPhone App, and uses the synchronization software and resources that are built-in to the iPhone and iPod Touch, and you might just be tickled as to how.

So stop where you are!  There is no longer the need to purchase an Apps Store stand-alone utility that you would otherwise have to remember to manually sync yourself.  Or some cruddy desktop add-on that force feeds the information through the otherwise horrible experience known as iTunes, particularly horrible on the PC anyway.  You can now enjoy push-sync technology the way it was meant to be used, automagically.  And it is true push.  You will see updates to your calendar and contacts hit your iPhone or iPod Touch with surprising speed – outside of your email pull-sync schedule.

Gmail mail is still not available for sync, but it surely seems poised to be next in line.

So how is this wondrous feat achieved?  Through your pal and mine, Microsoft ActiveSync!  You can read the easy-to-follow instructions from Google, here:

• Sync: Set Up Your iPhone or iPod Touch

This was originally written on February 8, 2008.  I recently got back into the notion of blogging, and surprised myself when I found this buried at the bottom of my draft posts.

I found this to be very moving… Almost as moving as the original speech it is based on. Having watched various documentaries that have reflected upon Dr. Martin Luther King’s power in spoken words for a better society, and the tragic loss of the dream that he tried to share with us all – I’ve grown up in a society that has become increasingly cynical, distrusting, and disenfranchised from what was the American Dream – myself included.

Listening to Barack Obama speak has been inspirational for me. He is the only living political or social figure in my lifetime to make me feel that there is still hope for this country – a hope that we can overcome and fix what is wrong in our society, as well as how we behave as people on a planet that we share with others.

I like to think I look past the boundaries of political parties, and judge people for the values and decisions that they have and will make. I hope in my lifetime I can see the two party system abolished. I think that the current party system intentionally divides people that would do better to come together in solidarity for improving our great land as well as our lives.