"It's going to space! Give it a second!" exclaimed comedian Louis C.K. in observing that we are completely spoiled by modern technology, when something ridiculously awesome shows the slightest hiccup or slowdown.
I'm the spoiledest of the spoiled, but I've tried to take Louie's advice and not let my blood pressure rise when my iPhone is a little sluggish or Safari 4 damn near crashes when trying to deal with Facebook throwing zillions of people's personality quiz results in my face. It's left me feeling a little more like grateful that I can connect into the hive mind while I'm out and about. And in theory, that lets me be out and about more, instead of connected to the computer, to do more interesting things and make further contributions to that hive mind. In practice, however, my mobile contributions are pretty slim. "I'm playing Peggle while waiting for my car to get fixed!" and a mildly funny, dimly-lit picture from a bar mark my mobile content sharing for the month of July.
At the very least, new techie things will help me be smarter on campus come next month. By the end of my college career, I was plum retarded. I forgot stuff that was written in my paper planner twice and on my hand at the same time. I accidentally stood up friends, forgot homework assignments and generally tested the patience of everyone who surrounded me.
Thankfully, I discovered an amazing toy and set it up to go through the interwebs to keep me on my game this time around.
It's called ReQall. Basically, it's a "getting things done" tool - a to-do list with some organizational flair - but this one's awesome because it plays nicely with anything you can imagine: email, texting, Google Chat, iCal, Google Calendar, smartphones, and so on. Oh, and your own voice. That one's covered too.
So, let me give you a few examples of things I've said into ReQall and had it take care of perfectly:
"Pack and ship electronics on July 14th." It made a to-do item, due on the 14th, which I'll check off when I'm done.
"Dentist appointment Tuesday at 2." It made an event item, due on this coming Tuesday (the 14th) at 2:00, and it will either email me or text me with a reminder one hour before.
It's hit-and-miss with proper names. So far it's got about 50% accuracy: it nailed friends named Netta and Red, but misspelled Professor Bohn as "Professor Bone" and got "U-Verse" right one out of two times, the other mistaking it for "users." All in all, an extremely impressive act.
Here's some more examples of cool things it can do:
“Remind Roger to buy bread after work today.” If Roger is listed as a contact inside your ReQall account, it will email or text Roger telling him to buy bread after work today. If he's your friend on ReQall, it will add "bread" to Roger's "shopping list" section and send him the email or text.
"Call Roger at home." You use GPS to tell it where "home" is, and once you're there, it will send you a reminder to call Roger.
For me, all this stuff is already amazing and revolutionary. But here's the kicker: it will push to your phone.
ReQall will automatically push your stuff to Google Calendar. It's incredibly easy to turn on, one click really. From there, Google Sync will take your calendar and push that to your phone.
So, long story short, I just say the words "Meet with Professor Joe at 2PM next Friday," and come next Friday at 1 my phone gets a text with the reminder that I'm meeting Professor Joe. And anywhere in between, I can see it on the iPhone calendar, because it got pushed to the phone.
I'm willing to have patience with technology that will do that. After all, I'm asking technology to have a lot of patience with my forgetful self.
