Say it with me.. Fax Machines and voice mail need to die. I’m not the first to say it, I won’t be the last, but this really needs to happen like, now.
At my current work place we use scanners and email for a majority of our document needs. Unfortunately we still have to deal with two nessesary evils.
Fax Machines
We used a service that emailed our faxes to us for some time, but upper management decided to let that lapse. So we are slowly going back to dealing with some faxes, which is just plain stupid. Fortunately efax provides a free incoming fax number, if you can find it. Here I did all the work for you. For the FREE efax form: https://www.efax.com/en/efax/twa/signupFree the free service uses a dumb fucking proprietary format, but if you need it to be free, there it is.
The fax machine was more or less invented in 1846, with some great strieds in between with the breakthrough of the… wait for it… 14.4 baud modem!
As you can see below, not much has changed in 20 years, fax machines still use telephone lines, have to be available at the same time, and have a noise free connection.
The email, has better error correction, emails are pretty resilient pdf’s or whatever you like to use will most certainly look better than a fax..
| ITU Standard | Released Date | Data Rates (bit/s) | Modulation Method |
|---|---|---|---|
| V.27 | 1988 | 4800, 2400 | PSK |
| V.29 | 1988 | 9600, 7200, 4800 | QAM |
| V.17 | 1991 | 14400, 12000, 9600, 7200 | TCM |
| V.34 | 1994 | 28800 | QAM |
| V.34bis | 1998 | 33600 | QAM |
Voice mail
In 1935 Benjamin Thornton invented the answering machine, privately he later admitted that Satan made him do it. Around the 1970′s tapes weren’t big enough and phones not quite annoying enough, the devil struck again with voice mail.
I HATE voicemail, it’s a passion of mine. People leave me vague voice mails, talk for 5 mins leaving little or no information and when they get to their call back number, say it so fucking fast that I must listen to their damned message two or three times to get all of it. if they had only sent me an email, I wouldn’t have this problem, better yet they had sent me an email, I could forward it to the correct co worker, they should have left a voice mail for in the first place.
To combat voice mail, I use Google voice, actually I’ve been using it since it was Grandcentral, before Google bought them out. I’m still trying to figure out how to get my work voice mail to forward to my Google voice account. It’s not happing yet… Until then.. Email me at cpuangel dot com
sure it requires rooting your Pre, but then you have a phone that can double as a 
