Ideas, Ipods and Smartphones

Today I drove to Portland to pick up my kids. They had spent two nights with their grandparents. I've made the two hour run many times (even on the same day) so the trip is uneventful, the landmarks tick off in my subconscious except for the rivers where I pay attention checking color and level. Chelle got me an Ipod nano for Christmas. I previously had an Ipod Shuffle, the memory stick variety, but I grew weary of forwarding over and over again to get to the song I'm after. Now the shuffle will be relegated to when I exercise.

I've decided that my favorite part of an Ipod is not listening to downloaded Old Crow Medicine Show tracks while driving home but passing the time of a long commute with podcasts. Podcasts are basically audio content that is published via RSS to which you can subscribe using Itunes, the Ipod pc-side software. National Public Radio has recorded and published many of their shows via podcast and I downloaded a whopping amount of This American Life, The Best of Car Talk and NPR Technology. NPR Technology is a collection of segments from all of the NPR news shows that have to do with Technology and how it affects our lives.

My cellphone, or more properly I guess, smartphone is a Windows Mobile 6 device. A Motorola Q9c that I selected because I like non-stylus interfaces, it had a very handy querty keyboard and a built in GPS. Among my favorite apps are Google Maps and the Google Search Mobile widgets. Google Maps has saved my bacon when it comes to making meetings on time and at least once when it came to a fishing rendezvous. The google search widget puts a google search box right on the front/main screen of my phone. A tool that I haven't often used is the voice note recorder. You fire it up and can record voice notes (ala the old school mini-tape recorder)for later playback.

The long drive to Portland and back goes a lot easier when my conscious mind has something to engage it and I actually can accomplish a lot of thinking while on the road but today I did something a little bit different. While I was thinking, as I found an idea that was particularly engaging I fired up my voice note recorder and recorded it. I was listening to the NPR technology podcast, all episodes back to June 2006. After I got home I looked at my voice note recorder and transcribed the thoughts into my Moleskine notebook. There were twelve in all. Considering that on the way back I had to attend to the kids that means I had about three hours to generate these ideas or about four/hour. Among the 12 there were five that may have implications at work and at least three that applied to problems that I'm actively trying to solve. There were five primarily personal ones of which two applied to my daughters (generated before I picked them up incidentally). Two of them could be considered musings for my friends and I.

My main office is about two miles from my house but at least a couple times a week I have to commute north to the regional office which is an hour away. About half of this time is spent (safely on my bluetooth) on conference calls but that leaves at least two hours a week where I could be listening to something that spurs questions and generates ideas. If I surmise that three ideas/hour will come along during that time I should have at least captured six ideas a week that otherwise would have been forgotten after a long drive to or from home.

So Ipod + podcasts + smartphone + voicenotes + Moleskine = ideas remembered, almost like keeping a dream journal. The kicker is it's fun both to listen to the news about technology AND think about this stuff. It may not go anywhere or materialize but I think I'll keep writing them in my Moleskine just to find out.