One Abnormal Girl

When I first found Blinklist, it was pretty fantastic, and boasted a lot of improvements over the bookmarking giant Del.icio.us.  By now, however, the greatest of those improvements (the ability to mark certain bookmarks as private) has already been incorporated, and all Blinklist has over Del.icio.us is an easy-to-type domain.  But my real concern here, as I was never tempted to use Del.icio.us before, is that Blinklist has become almost unusable.  It feels as though its developers have left it behind: the Firefox add-on hasn’t been updated in years, there have been no major changes aside from the removal of some useful features, and the service itself is majorly unreliable.  Even when the service is up and responding, I can’t trust it to hold on to the link I just submitted to it.  Blinklist is becoming less and less usable.

This leads me to either Del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia.  The former is no-frills but simple; the latter is gorgeous but socially complicated.  There’s no requirement to use all the social tools that Ma.gnolia boasts, but just having them there makes me feel like I’m not living up to its standards.  So despite the fact that Del.icio.us can’t seem to overcome its infatuation with pre-Windows-95 underscores, and forces me to un-private every single link I just imported, I’m choosing Del.icio.us.  So begins the edit of all 644 of my links.

So I just got a new phone last week, and now that it’s all crazy with its address book (and syncs with my Windows Address Book), I realize that my contacts are way out of date.  I realize a lot of the people I need info for probably won’t see this, but for those of you who are reading, I would like your contact info if you are willing to provide it.   Include things like your name, mobile number, and home address if you don’t mind me having those things.  This is more applicable to some than to others, so please don’t feel like I’m phishing for something.

You might already have my e-mail, but if you don’t, click here and enter the text to have it revealed.  I look forwarding to updating your info XD

The world will still be here when you get back. Honest.

Last week sometime I got the rejection letter from Cornell, so that’s one down, three to go. Ohio State seems to want me to apply for some of its scholarships, though, so I’m not sure if they’re just leading me on or what. I’ve got a bad feeling about this first rejection because I think it follows that the other three (being higher on my list of hopes) will do the same, but I’d rather not think about it until I have to. It’ll take some major overhaul to come up with an alternative life plan where I can still do and be something/someone useful.

In the meantime, I’ve got a new temp job, but it should be a pretty steady one. I’ve been at this place before, but not in the same department, and I like the atmosphere a lot. I have a cubicle, I have a computer (although I can’t get away with Intarwebs), and the phone use is limited. This in particular is good news, as one of the primary sources of stress I get from jobs is unpredictable phone calls. When you’re a temp and you barely know what the company does, it’s almost agonizing never knowing how to handle the customer/business who’s calling for a reason you can’t fathom just yet. I want to have a job doing something I’m good at. And, while insurance certainly isn’t my forte, I think I could be okay at this.

One of the definite perks, however, is that the company is replacing everyone’s old CRT monitors with widescreen 17″ flatscreens, and because IT had to bring a computer into the department for me to use, I’m the first one to have one. It’s not exactly fair to them, but IT says they’ll get theirs soon. I hope so. I’ve seen a lot of people eyeing it up, and for good reason. Their monitors are atrocious, especially with all the data screens they have to sift through all day. Definitely easier on the eyes.

Later today I have a viewing to attend, and while I have no work tomorrow, there’s the funeral. My great aunt died after a brief illness. That leaves two sisters out of five alive; my grandma was the second one to go. This aunt didn’t have any grandchildren, though, and one of her daughters had already passed due to cancer. I guess there’s only more of this to come.

ETA: Just opened the rejection letter from OSU.  2/4 done.  This had been, according to my profs who knew profs there and had written me recommendations, one of the most promising, so I’m pretty down about things at the moment.  But I guess I won’t have to worry about those OSU scholarship apps they e-mailed me about.

I’ve been following Lifehacker’s articles for a while now. Seems to be just my kind of blog, bringing me new and cool ideas for using technology for neatness and efficiency. Recently one of their writers posted about Jott, which is a new(ish) Web service where you can call their toll-free number and speak a message either to yourself or someone in your Jott contacts, and Jott, after transcribing it to text, will text/e-mail your contact, or if you Jotted yourself, keep the note for you (or even in a folder if you tell it to).

More complicated than pencil and paper, yes, but I’m willing to bet we have our cell phones on us more often than pencil and paper, and I always have a hard time keeping those impromptu slips of paper safe for later retrieval. It’s also handy for keeping track of unposted expenses without you having to collect–and keep–receipts. And if you use Twitter, you can now avoid texting to the service and its many third-party applications (like Google Calendar and Remember the Milk) by using your free minutes to speak your appointment or task instead. Cool.

I was pretty intrigued by this service. Technology has come a long way, and I love anything that uses automation to make life just a little bit easier, or maybe just my idea of cooler. And its voice transcription was supposed to be spot-on, too. I was enthused.

But when Jott gave an example of a voice message you might leave with a difficult name contained within it, in which you would pause and spell that word, I wondered how voice recognition software, even a really smart build, could recognize that 1) you were spelling a word and 2) which word you were spelling for it.

Well, the answer is that Jott has the best voice recognition currently available to us: the human brain.

Yes, that’s right, they’re not submitting your message to a computer for deciphering, they’re just feeding it to a call center, where your message is transcribed by another person.

. . . I am so creeped out by this.

It’s not an issue of confidentiality for me. I know it’s confidential. I fully trust that whoever is listening to my to-do list, or the lyrics I need to look up when I get home, knows nothing about me (other than my gender and maybe my age, depending on what my voice sounds like) and that my voice is essentially disembodied and that we’ll never meet. The only embarrassing thing about the sort of messages I’d be sending Jott is how mundane they are.

But that’s the thing. These messages are miniscule, unimportant, the fringe of my soporific life. I don’t want to belittle another human being by making them write it down. Yes, they’re being paid for it, but I can’t get over the shock. I like using technology to take care of my annoying tasks; I’m appalled at the idea of using actual people for such a thing.

And now that I think about it, the voice transcription for Livejournal used to be conducted by a person on your friend’s list, if you allowed it. Then it went automated. Was their service also outsourced to real people?

Google Reader has a bunch of flaws that I’ve read about but don’t understand, but the awesome thing about it is that it makes reading 60+ news posts per diem fun.

It’s the keyboard shortcuts. Gotta be. Keyboard shortcuts combined with feed highlighting as you j j j your way down your list. No scrolling, no ticking–hell, I don’t even have to lift my hand to view where the post came from. The drawback is that much of my reading list is via livejournal, and it won’t pick up locked entries whether I’m logged in at the time or not. Flock used to have a pretty nice feed reader that would use livejournal’s cookies, but that was before Flock decided that it wasn’t really that important to separate read feeds from unread feeds.

So now, I actually like seeing that I have a gazillion new feed items to sift through, because it’s easy as pie not only to get through them, but to actually read them. This is the way transient information ought to be viewed. Fleetingly. Easily. Conveniently. Aaaaaaah.