The Professor's Notes

Apparently, Grand Central (my new “go to” place for freakishly great phone service) was down for a while this past Sunday, April 13th, 2008.  According to news reports the site lost power

Power issue knocks GrandCentral offline — The online phone company which Google bought last year was down for most of this morning, TechCrunch reports. While the company blames a power outage on the service going down, it speaks to a larger issue as more everyday services move online — what happens if one of these services goes down? With traditional phone services, if there was a bad storm, you might lose service and understand why. With a server power issue happening in the middle of nowhere, the service can go down and you don’t even know it — you just don’t get your calls. Find our recent coverage on Grand Central here and here.

Anyway, I still find it quite useful, and for now, will continue to count on Grand Central to be my “main” way of channeling calls.

For those that haven’t heard my pitch about why I like using GrandCentral.com it comes down to these key points:

• One number rings any, or all, my phones.  My Choice.
• One number means I can be reached whenever, and wherever I wish.  Again, my choice.
• If I don’t answer, it has it’s own voicemail system that I can access by phone or web.
• All calls are stored as mp3 files, so I can download, if I wish (I hope you aren’t surprised that recorded calls are, well, recorded.)
• I can actually record an incoming call in progess. (It does notify both parties that recording has started.)

So, despite the weekend’s problem, I remain a fan.  I am just glad it was over the weekend.