Megalomania.me

When I moved to San Francisco in August 2011, it was a bit unexpected – even by me. I’d left Israel earlier that year without much of a direction or an idea about what to do next, and a few months later I’d begun looking for jobs. After very nearly accepting an offer for a position in New York, I got a phenomenal opportunity with CNET’s audience development team (CNET is owned by CBS, and part of CBS Interactive) to be its SEO Product Manager, and I borrowed a ton of money to move there very quickly.

I’d never really been west of the Mississippi River before. I had no idea what San Francisco or California would be like. It was kind of an adventure. Now, after two years working at CBSi/CNET and living in San Francisco, I’ve left both to return to New York.

San Francisco doesn’t need me to list all the great things about it, but I’ll point out a few of them anyway.

The thing I love the most about San Francisco is the climate. People seem to complain about the weather in San Francisco all the time, but it’s about as close to the ideal as I can imagine, with the only exception being that it never snows. I love the cool summers. I love the foggy, gloomy despair. I love the microclimates and knowing that there could be four or five real changes in weather in the next ten blocks. One of my goals in life is to be able to spend every June, July and August in this 49 mile paradise.

I also enjoy San Francisco’s business, food and park cultures. The high concentration of technology companies in San Francisco alone means that I’ll certainly be back many times, and may live there again.

In two years of San Francisco, the number of hooded sweatshirts in my wardrobe grew by three hundred percent, from one to four. And four hooded sweatshirts may actually not be enough for living in San Francisco full time.

San Francisco also taught me about about many new things and peculiar west coast euphemisms:

• foody: a person who likes food, whether cooking it or eating for it, and wants other people to know how much he likes it
• EDM: techno music
• Black Rock City: Burning Man
• succulent: a small plant
• Walnut Creek: very distant suburb where a surprising number of the Bay area’s attractive girls reside
• hella: west coast version of wicked
• geeking out on something: enjoying something

The bad part of San Francisco is that it has a serious problem with crime, poverty and vagrancy that people don’t like to acknowledge. These social ills are way out of control, in a way that would take a Giuliani to correct (that would be in our modern context, though I’d prefer something a bit more severe; neither, of course, is on anyone’s agenda). So the pleasant neighborhoods continue to be interspersed inconveniently with the ugly and gritty neighborhoods, the housing projects and the feces-laden slums, as if by design.

Where people do acknowledge this issue, they don’t particularly seem to consider it a problem.

Suggesting that places like Oakland and the Tenderloin could stand to be cleaned up and made more pleasant and civil for taxpayers to enjoy is a gruesome faux pas in San Francisco. When I mentioned things like this in the past on the facebook, I lost friends for it every single time (I use the Social Fixer extension, so I’m able to keep track of who unfriends me). I was also rejected by a girl I wanted to date because I failed to acknowledge that the Mission is San Francisco’s superior neighborhood. San Franciscans are the most intolerant group of people I’ve ever met.

Also, the hills are pretty but it’s really annoying to walk up and down them all the time. I thought I’d get used to the hiking, but I didn’t. I took scooter lessons last year and got a motorcycle permit, so if I’d stayed, I would have bought a Vespa to be able to get around more easily.

San Francisco, you are wonderful and I hope you’ll take my constructive criticism, but I don’t think you will. But I’ll see you some time in the future.

This has happened to me a bunch of times already, and I keep having to figure out what the problem is and how to fix, so I thought I’d write this to make it easier to find in the future.

What does it mean when your iPhone can no longer be backed up to your computer because of “Other”? What is “Other” and why does “Other” sometimes seem to take up five, ten, twenty or more gigabytes of space on your iPhone when you’re looking at it in iTunes?

In my experience, this happens because of a database corruption, which can sometimes be caused by disconnecting the iPhone’s cable from the computer while it is backing up or syncing. The corrupted database causes a file not to be recognized, which causes it to get duplicated, and it continues getting duplicated every time the iPhone is synced after that.

Most files are tiny, and so this shouldn’t be a major problem most of the time. But in my case, the files that got duplicated dozens and hundreds of times were voice memos, ranging in size from five megabytes to sixty megabytes apiece. These files are apparently considered “Other” instead of “Audio,” and that’s how “Other” grew in my case to take over my entire iPhone.

Here’s how to solve the problem:

1. Download iExplorer; open it and connect your iPhone.
2. In iExplorer, navigate to {your iPhone} > Media > Recordings.
3. Identify the duplicated files. This can be a bit tricky, since the files are named numerically, and they’re also identified as duplicates numerically. The key is to see that duplicates get a 1, 2, 3, &c. added at the end of the original’s file name (pre-extension). For example, if there’s a file called “20090828 115904.m4a,” then “20090828 115904 1.m4a” would be its first duplicate, “20090828 115904 2.m4a” would be its second duplicate, “20090828 115904 3.m4a” would be its third duplicate, and so forth.
4. Highlight all the duplicated files, being careful not to highlight any originals.
5. Right-click and select Delete.

As long as you’re only deleting files with the m4a file extension, you can be sure that you won’t be destroying your iPhone and causing irreparable damage, so the worst case scenario is that you might delete some of your voice recordings that you actually intended to keep.

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I recently had a problem with my iPhone: after SMS GV Extension was updated to work on iOS 6.x and I installed the new version of it, I returned to Messages app after having used Google Voice app exclusively for sending text messages on my iPhone for the past several months. I quickly noticed that Messages app did not display incoming text messages from my contacts with their correct telephone numbers. Instead, it showed a unique Google Voice direct access number for each contact.

This extremely annoying “feature” was intentionally developed by Google to let Google Voice users make outgoing calls or send text messages to others and have them come from their Google Voice numbers. There is no way to turn it off, even for people who are using the Call on GV (formerly Phone GV Extension) and SMS GV Extension tweaks available for iPhone users, which solve the same problem in a far more elegant way that’s prohibited by Apple.

The problem was really annoying and I knew that there must be a way to solve it. I was nearly certain that it must be a configuration issue somewhere, so I started searching the web for a way to get rid of it. Unfortunately, I found nothing, and even less than nothing in the completely useless Google Voice support forums.

I tried using Google Plus to ask some of the people in the jailbreak community who had developed the extensions after Zhi Zheng open sourced them. Note: needless to say, I’d normally never use Google Plus for something like this because it’s a ghost town, but in this case it was the only way I had to contact these people.

I posted on this thread:

Can anyone help me configure SMS GV Extension so it does not show Google’s alias numbers (direct access numbers) in my Messages app? I know I had this configured and working right in iOS 4-5 using the older SMS GV Extension, but I can’t figure out what I did then to make it work right.

No answer.

Then I started a different thread in the jailbreak community:

Using Google Voice on iPhone – how do I get it to display the correct contact number instead of Google’s aliases (direct access numbers)? I know it worked on the old SMS GV Extension, but I haven’t got it working on the new version, which I have installed and am able to use.

A fellow going by the name “sherlock holmes” took the time to answer me, but he professed never to have seen or heard of this issue before, so unfortunately he wasn’t able to help (thanks to him anyway).

Since I love Quora, I decided to try asking the question there: Why does Google Voice make my iPhone Messages app show the direct access numbers for incoming text messages?. To elaborate, I added these question details:

iPhone 4S (Verizon) running iOS 6.1. When I receive a text message to my Google Voice number and it’s forwarded to my iPhone, my Messages app displays a GV direct access number associated with the contact, instead of the contact’s actual number. How do I make it show the contact’s correct number?

I’ve checked this with a few other iPhone users with Google Voice, and they confirm that it’s not happening for them.

Is it caused by: a GV setting that I’ve changed? a GV bug? something related to my iPhone or Messages app?

And to elaborate even further, I explained what I’d tried to far to identify the problem:

1. removing my iPhone number from my GV account, then adding it back
2. uninstalling and reinstalling Google Voice iPhone app
3. fiddling with various GV settings
4. uninstalling and reinstalling Call on GV cydia tweak
5. uninstalling and reinstalling SMS GV Extension package
6. hard rebooting (multiple times)
7. installing BiteSMS (problem is replicated there)

I paid 1000 credits to promote the question to a bunch of people, and I paid probably another thousand or so to ask some Google Voice experts to answer, and I privately messaged one Googler and former Google Voice engineer for help, but nobody answered. The only comment was from someone who expressed doubt that even people at Google are using Google Voice. I tend to agree with that sentiment.

Not having luck with Quora, I decided to turn to Stack Exchange, even though in the past I’ve had mostly negative experiences with the community there.

When typing in my question, I found that someone in the past had experienced the same problem and had already posted: text messages forwarded from my google voice number aren’t recognized as being from my iPhone contacts. He explained:

I set up my google voice number to forward to my AT&T number, but when I get texts from some people who are in my contact list, the text appears to come from phone numbers I don’t recognize. The text message itself will be prefaced by the phone number the text is coming from, but even though that number is in my contact list, the message does not offer me the name of the person. I have an iPhone 4 and I’m running iOS 6.1. Any help is appreciated.

I emailed him to ask if he’d gotten any resolution. He quickly replied to say that he hadn’t.

So I voted up his question and spent all of my Stack Exchange credits to add a bounty on it. Here’s the note I put on my bounty:

This question has not received enough attention.

I’m adding a bounty on this question because (1) I am experiencing the same problem; (2) nobody has given an answer here; (3) I have asked in other places and not gotten an answer; (4) Googling for an answer doesn’t give me anything useful; (5) I’ve tried to fix it in a bunch of ways and gotten nowhere.

I should have known that the bounty idea wouldn’t work, but I didn’t, and the bad Stack Exchange community members suddenly started coming out of the woodwork.

Here’s the first incorrect answer by a user named cablesm:

This is, unfortunately, a limitation of Google Voice. Google Voice cannot spoof your friends’ numbers, so it has to send texts from its own numbers. However, each of your contacts will have a unique number from which Voice will send you texts, so you can send messages to those numbers and reply to them and it will reach your friends.

There are two ways around this. You can use the Google Voice app. Messages will come through your data plan and not your SMS plan, and they’ll show up with the right names and everything. Alternatively, you can add the numbers Google uses as the “from” address as another number in your iPhone contacts. The number will still work to reach them, and the messages will appear to come from your Google Voice number.

I wanted to comment and tell him that I very much appreciated his effort in helping me, but that unfortunately his information was incorrect. However, using all my credits to make the bounty meant that I couldn’t make a comment, because commenting required credits. So I added my comment as an answer instead, hoping that someone would convert it to a comment, which was done:

THIS IS NOT A LIMITATION OF GOOGLE VOICE. It is an isolated issue that happens only to some people, not to other people. I have checked with multiple other GV users with iPhones and tested it with them: when I send a text message to their GV number that gets forwarded to the iPhone Messages app, it shows up with my correct number, NOT a GV direct access number.

Cablesm then asked:

Are you sending from your own GV number? Because in that case, Google does own your number, and can forward it on to the destination with your GV number and not a forwarding number.

I replied:

Hey, thanks for asking for clarification. This issue is not about sending, it’s about receiving. I can use SMS GV Extension when sending to ensure that other people see my correct GV number when they receive a text message from me; but what I’m trying to fix is what I see in my Messages app when I get a text message from someone else to my GV number.

Then a user named Elliott added this completely useless and even nonsensical comment:

cablesm is mostly correct, although I would add that some people consider this a great feature rather than a limitation, because it gives you a “shortcut” number for each person. You can add those numbers to your address book, then use them in the Phone app to make calls too. But it is true that when GV forwards an incoming text to your cellphone, it cannot spoof the sender’s real number unless the sender is using GV also.

I ignored him. After this, nobody else should have added the same answer as cablesm, and nobody should have upvoted cablesm’s incorrect answer. But that didn’t stop user HelpingHand from jumping in:

As google has shown in this link, this is a normal feature of Voice.

Well… maybe Google has a web page stating it, but I wasn’t able to find anybody who had ever seen anything like this, including someone intimately familiar with SMS GV Extension, except for a lone question on Stack Exchange. So it clearly wasn’t a “normal feature of Voice.”

Not content to be wrong and repetitive, HelpingHand felt the need also to be an asshole, so he commented on his own false answer:

If one of these answers has answered your question, please confirm it. Don’t be a loser by waiting until the bounty is over. That’s not how things are done here.

That’s right, he called me a loser because I hadn’t upvoted any of the incorrect answers, two days into a seven day bounty. This sort of treatment is why I hate the Stack Exchange community.

And then I solved the problem myself.

What fixed it? All I had to do was turn off Google syncing for my contacts, and then reactivate it: Settings app > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > [my Google account] > flip Contacts to off, then flip back on. I am certain that the above step solved my problem. By re-syncing all the contacts’ telephone numbers, it seems to have forced the correct ones to appear in Messages app.