JPDavidson.com

When I moved down here I got a cell phone – Emily doesn’t have a land-line so I didn’t have much choice. I’m a big gadget lover though and I hadn’t had a cellphone since working at Rogers AT&T in high school so I was pretty psyched about getting one. While the iPhone beckoned I really couldn’t afford such a luxury so I bought a used Nokia 6030 on eBay for $35. This isn’t a fancy phone, basically all it can do is can make calls, text message and play Tetris. No MP3s, no Bluetooth, no camera although it does have an FM radio which is kinda neat. Anyway, I’ve been looking for creative ways of using my phone and I’ve found a couple of neat services that do pretty amazing things:

• Google 411 is basically 411 powered by Google. It’s free, just call the 800 number, say the city, state and business name and Google will give you relevant search results and even connect your call. I’ve found Google 411 to be really useful, you can even say “text” to have the name, address and phone number of the business you looked up sent by SMS to your phone. Neato.
• Jott is another amazing service, after signing up you can call the 800 number and a voice will ask you “who would you like to Jott?”. You then say the name of a contact and Jott will prompt you for a message – talk for up to 30 seconds and Jott will transcribe what you’ve said into text and email it the contact you specified along with a link to listen to the audio version! I think people would start to hate me if I sent them sometimes-poorly-transcribed messages via Jott so I use it primarily as a way of getting reminders to myself into my email when I’m out and about. That said the transcription done by Jott is usually excellent (they use real people trained in medical transcription). Did I mention this service is free while it’s in beta? Here’s a sample Jott of the first two sentences of this post:
  • “Remember(?), down here I got a cell phone. Emily does not have a land line, so I did not have much choice. I am a big gadget lover though and I had not had a cell phone since I worked at Rogers HENT(?) in high school, so I was pretty sight of getting one.”

Here’s the logo I worked up for my new, as-yet-not-online website:

As you can see I am not a graphic designer – although judging from the flower above the “i” I may well be a 12 year old girl.

I just completed a redesign of Emily’s website – EmilyCook.ca.  It may look a little familiar but what can I say, I love this Wordpress template.  Emily’s a really talented visual artist and I encourage you to check out her site.  The work there chronicles her art from highschool, through her degree at OCAD to her current work being done at LSU.  I really enjoyed looking through all her work putting together the site – I’m proud she’s my wife.

After weeks of watching Craigslist and visiting various bike stores around town I finally settled on buying the bike you see here at Walmart for about $100. I resisted the Walmart bike for a while, hoping something better would come along – buying a bike in the toy section of a store doesn’t exactly instill confidence. But here I am with my craptastic full-suspension “comfort bike”. It rides alright and it’s nearly the right size for me but I really couldn’t resist getting a bike any longer. Now as long as I’m willing to endure the sweltering heat, my range has increased significantly. I’m going to use the bike to check out the Saturday farmer’s market downtown and to go see the athletic center on the other side of campus. I’m also using the bike so go see a used car tonight. If everything works out with that though I’ll probably never ride the bike again