Blog notes: I have a voice!

It’s time to write a blog post. What to do? What to do?

Unless there’s a burning issue sitting happily on my frontal lobe, step one is usually checking my “blog notes” and finding some scrap of an idea. But wait! It’s not as easy as it sounds.

For one thing, my notes are scattered to the wind across a wide variety of locations. In the physical world this includes sticky notes littered around my desk like dying leaves on an autumn lawn. There’s also two pocket notebooks filled with pages and pages of tiny scrawl. Most of it is not decipherable, even to me, the hand that did the scrawling. And they’ve both been through the laundry so the ink is fuzzy and faint.

In the electronic world I’ve cleverly tried to consolidate my little notes to self. There’s the “Notes” app in my iPad. There’s another app called “Werdsmith” I also use from time to time. And, in an app called “Evernote” there’s probably my biggest library of random thoughts. This one has the advantage of being shared with my computer, too. Lastly there’s a plain text file in the home directory of my computer that I maintain with a command line text editor.

Here’s a sample of what can be found in my notes. I’ve culled these from the herd for your edification of the writer’s process.

Artichoke or Boss?
Tags: smell, rat

As is often the case, my notes are generally useless when I revisit them later. They may seem obvious at the time but usually I don’t breadcrumb enough to lead my brain back to the scene of the crime and grok the point, if there even was one.

The first note I actually remember. I was going to invent a game show where we’d provide a clue and contestants would be rated on their ability to determine if what was being described was an artichoke or a boss. In a rare moment of clarity I even expanded the idea further and wrote a couple of sample questions.

1. You want to cut out the heart, dip it in a little mayonnaise and eat it raw. Artichoke or Boss?
2. Large globes, inedible beard, thorny stem. You call it: Artichoke or Boss?

Wow. I wish I’d stuck with this. It’s clearly another winner idea.

Regarding the second note where “smell” and “rat” are mentioned I have absolutely no idea. The world may never know. Pity. I’m sure it would have been brilliant.

Recently I discovered a way to improve my recording of notes and ideas for my blog. After owning an iPad for over four years I realized I can speak to the thing. Yes, it can translate voice into apps like Notes. Yes, I surf the cutting edge of technology. It only takes me years to discover built-in features. Follow me, everyone! The water’s fine!

Excited by my discovery, I decided to put voice recognition to the test. It was time to record some notes. I found this example from last weekend which is actually a list of chores my wife wanted to complete.

It’s a good thing we’re not using this technology to run a spaceship. Because, WTF? Only a few minutes later and we had no clue what the chores were. So I invented one of my own: Making mojitos or, as my iPad likes to call it, “Making money does.”

If things keep going this well I may be able to pull the plug on this blog sooner than I ever dreamed possible. Yeah!