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"Murphy was an optimist!"

Having fun with Jott December 18, 2008 12:10 pm

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Communications, Daily Life, Gadgets, Software, Technology
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Jott is one of my favorite web services. I use speed dial on my phone to call Jott, I speak the name of the person I want to send a note to (usually ‘myself’), I record my message spelling out difficult words "My name is McCaughan M-c-c-a-u-g-h-a-n", then I speak the date and time for when I want a text transcription of my words sent to my email and phone as sms. Jott’s magic is not in its speech to text software but in its human backup. Computers do the bulk of the work but humans (India I think) listen to difficult messages and provide a fairly accurate transcription although sometimes there are errors. My first reminder today:

Get a plunger.

Okay. I am pretty sure I never said to get a plunger. I can go to the Jott website and listen to my original message to figure out what I really meant. I also like to have fun with the messages sometimes:

Get a plant light, save the plants. Save the plants, save the world.

You can also use Jott to post to Twitter, Remember the Milk, and 40 some odd other services.

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Today’s Technical Challenge December 18, 2008 9:42 am

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Software, Technology
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About every 5th character I type, regardless of application (be it Twhirl, Firefox, MS Word, CFStudio..) the window I’m in loses focus. This means I have to click back into the window that I’m trying to type. Terribly annoying but I can deal with it because I have to be on my code today instead of on troubleshooting. I’ll run some antispyware checkers in the background while I work. This is terribly frustrating.

Update: This computer has an ethernet card and a wireless networking card. I’m using the ethernet so the wireless is unnecessary but the wireless connection manager kept polling for available networks and that was stealing the focus from the other applications. Disabling the wireless networking connection did the trick.

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Why do we blog? December 18, 2008 9:40 am

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Blog, Publishing, Tommy
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One reason I blog is for the memories. Some trackback spam caused me to re-read my post Such an inappropriate dad and that started my day off with a smile because that picture and Tommy’s statement show he far exceeded what The They ever thought he would do. Without the blog (and the trackback spam) that memory might have faded.

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