Rambling Saturday

I have a whole Saturday to geek out. Have a bit of real work to do, some personal finance, some filing, and some fun projects to work on.

So a little rambling here as I go.

Gave some thought to how a 10 digit phone number can support just shy of a billion people. There are are 303,824,640 in the US now. We each may have 3.29 phone numbers. Let's see, I have a landline, a cell phone, a Google Voice number, and a personal efax number. I've exceeded my share.

Interesting article from PCWorld (via Digg) about how the cell phone is changing the life of children on the planet. Did you know there are only 1.27 billion landlines, but over 4.1 billion cell phone subscriptions? Better connectivity is thought to improve education, healthcare, political organization, and can reduce fraud. When I was in Journalism School in the late 70's theory then was that the then looming satellite TV technology would bring news across borders and help eliminate totalitarian regimes . I suppose you can argue it did to a degree. Maybe cell phones can continue leveling the playing field.

Of course, nothing is without consequences. The Guardian (again via Digg) warns of privacy issues with your cell phone.

In the "I was born too soon" category, I sort of resent that my childhood didn't have Super Soakers or Nerf Guns.

In the "Duh!" department, researchers have discovered women are attracted to men with nice cars. I once lived in a building where a wealthy car collector kept his "city" apartment. In the garage below he had three Ferrari's. One day he paid the teenage son of the building manager to wash one outside. The kid took all day to do it, while he collected the phone numbers of 20 something girls who assumed it was his car.

I heard an urban legend when I lived in San Francisco about a guy who lost a home in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, took his insurance money and bought a home in the Oakland Hills. When he lost the home to the firestorm the next year, he took his insurance money and quit San Francisco for good, buying a home in Northridge, in Southern California. Lost that home in '94 to the earthquake there. If true, his luck isn't as bad as this guy. Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived the Hiroshima atomic bomb in 1945, and then went back to his home, to Nagasaki.

Will kids today see photos of themselves in 30 years of themselves wearing earbuds and text messaging and cringe? The photo on this post is that photo for my generation. Take a look at the size of the cassette recorder she carries to class.

Comments

Notes Folder : My new note taking system

I'm in the process of moving to a new way to keep my notes. It would be best to make a separate post on my long time notetaking app, Evernote, and how it now disappoints me. Bottom line, I no longer trust the company behind Evernote since it was acquired. My first inclination was to finally look at alternatives. like Notion, Joplin, Obsidian, etc. I was not enamored with any of them, so I gritted my teeth and stayed with Evernote. The situation made me think about how I use Evernote. To keep up additional posts on this topic, search on the tag Notes Folder Updates : January 24, 2024 and in updates noted here. Most of the things I store are quick notes, lists, online receipts for online bills, that sort of thing; kind of an online file cabinet if you will. If I were a doctoral student though I could see storing PDFs of papers and research materials. If were working on a large project, then plans, communications etc. would all be there. Back when I began using Evernote way b...

Recording your own notes with Google Voice

Note : April 2016: Frankly I don't know if this works anymore. It is 7 years old. I stopped using this when Google Now became useful on my phone, and I could dictate reminders using it. I found a way a while ago to use Google Voice to record a personal note, transcribe it, and email it to me. A recent Lifehacker post "Five Things We'd Like to See in Google Voice" lists that need as their #5 request, so I realized what I'd figured out is not common knowledge. In GV's Contacts, create a Group "Special Transcription" To avoid listening to my standard voice mail when I call, I recorded a short voice mail greeting for this group simply saying "Record note now" I added a contact with my own cell phone number as the only number, and made it the sole member of this group. In GV's phone settings, I edited the settings for my cell phone. In the section "Direct access to voicemail when calling your Google number from th...

Your First Day with Evernote

I've written many times before about Evernote . I love this program. It is my brain's memory on steroids. I have over 6000 notes in it now. And I keep finding ever more uses for it. While originally written in 2009, this post has been frequently updated. New January 2012: If you like what I write about Evernote, check out my 136 page e-book, " Get Productive Fast with Evernote ". Just $10. Sunday October 11, 2009 I wrote about Evernote in my print column, Family Tech. If you are wondering what is Evernote, and why would I want to use it, start with the column . I promised in that column this post to help new users get efficient fast with Evernote. I thought I'd write a quick plan for someone's first day with Evernote. This is really meant for after you've installed the client to your computer, so this picks up after you've gone to Evernote's Get Started Page and created an account and downloaded and installed a clien...

Ideas from Mark Stout

Search This Blog