an excellent service: Jott

I'm so glad I found Jott recently. It is a service you can call from your cell phone, and it'll send emails.

Its simplest use is like this: call it, tell it to Jott yourself, and leave a message. It'll transcribe your message and email it to you. It also includes in the email a link to the voice message, in case the transcription isn't accurate.

It works really well. I use it to send myself reminders and to document conversations. I also use it to send stuff to my Backpack home page for processing later, especially when it's not convenient to send emails.

Did I mention it's free for now? I'll likely convert to a paid customer when that happens, if it's not too expensive. I love it; it's not yet bungled a transcription.

Try it.

Good bike rides this weekend

I set a new one-ride record for myself on Saturday. My brother and I rode about 10.9 miles in three segments. It was raining for the segment home. Riding in the rain was so much fun!

We rode Sunday also; the weather was much better, but we were fairly burnt from Saturday, so we only did 6.25 miles.

Sunday evening we watched the Pixar movie Ratatouille on DVD. It seemed like it wasn't in the theater very long; we weren't able to make it at the time. It's brilliant; it's as good as any other Pixar movie.

Buy it, rent it, watch it.

I can't get to my backpack site; here's why

Very interesting. I can't get to my backpack site to update my to do list for my trip Wednesday. Here's why:

Quick, Plug The Internet Back In: Major Rackspace Outage

email on my iphone rules

I love my iPhone. I love the fact that it has a real, usable email client.

When I got it, I configured it to check my two primary personal email accounts. When Google announced free imap access to its Gmail accounts, I cleaned up my gmail inbox and added it to my iPhone. And today, I cleaned up my Yahoo email inbox and added it to my phone. It seems that the Yahoo email connection with my phone is imap rather than pop, which is cool.

So nice. All four email accounts in one place, and I can quickly check them most anywhere. So nice.

Unfortunately, my earthlink account is only accessible via pop, which is a bit of a bummer. But at least it's accessible. Oh, well.

bike update

I rode three times this pass weekend, and I feel great. It's so nice to be getting exercise again.

I rode Friday morning by myself. I had a few issues with my bike. I got those issues resolved Saturday; I found out my bike was too small for me, so I exchanged my blue 20" Trek 7.3 FX for a black 22.5" 7.3 FX. Jeff at Cyclepath Hayward took very good care of me.

The new bike works so much better! My brother and I rode together Saturday evening, and then again Sunday evening; it was great!

Now I need only figure out how to ride during the week. Right now, my plan is to ride Tuesday and Thursday morning before going to work. I'll start tomorrow.