Pilgrim’s Progress

I’ve been using a voice recorder to take action items in my car for a couple of years now, and since I started messing around writing VoiceXML applications I’ve wanted to create a simple telephone-based reminder service, and the guys at Jott seemed to have done it for me.

The way it works is you set up a Jott account, then you call their phone # (1-866-JOTT-123) and leave yourself a message. They use speech recognition to turn it into text and email it to you. That way when you’re driving down the road and remember something you’re supposed to be doing, you can just call yourself and the todo item will be waiting in your email inbox. I haven’t really used it seriously yet, but I’ll keep you posted.

I’m posting this from my phone, waiting for my son Skyler to go to sleep. He has been grilling me about Santa Claus since he was five, just plain doesn’t believe it. But the tooth fairy, he believes. So now I wait for him to sleep so I can trick him into thinking some supernatural being “bought” his tooth. Parenting is always full of surprises.

he’s the guy I want to talk to.” That’s my paraphrasing of one of my favorite Zen koans. Koans are like puzzles that try to snap you out of your rational mind into a state where you can really see and hear what’s happening around you. Like most people, I operate on autopilot most of the time. But I’m hoping that if I start writing more, and reading more, maybe I can actually become aware of what’s going on around me.

Things are very busy in my life right now. My professional life is in flux, and I’m working very hard to get ready for my blackbelt test in Dan Zan Ryu Jujitsu. The test will be in the first week in November, and I’ve had to take CPR courses, first aid courses, an athletic taping course, and even an ethics course (but I’m thinking of skipping that one and just falsifying the documentation). And to be honest, I’m a little scared. I can learn all of the techniques, I can fulfill all of the requirements, but I sometimes hear a little voice inside saying “you’re not good enough”.

The testing board might not like me. They might not think that I have “it”, whatever that is. My uke (the guy I use as a crash-test dummy for my test) might have it in for me and make me look stupid. I might have some kind of brain freeze and just stand there when they call out a technique…

But I won’t think about that. One thing I’m sure of is that if you concentrate on the bad things that can happen, they will happen, guaranteed. Better to visualize myself wearing my new black belt, with a big, dumb grin on my face. That’s much better.