My own digital lifestyle post

by on January 10, 2006

This afternoon I spoke with Sean Lyndersay of the IE team to a bunch of Microsoft employees about RSS. Interesting conversation. These were mostly field folks, so basically were technical field people, premier services, MCS, tech specialists, and information worker specialists. Lorin was in the audience and he used to be CTO of Sprint and he calls himself a “sales guy”. Yeah, right. Heheh. Every single one of them used an RSS aggregator. That’s the first audience I’ve spoken to where that was the case.

But, that’s not my digital lifestyle story.

On the way out Jeff Sandquist called me about a meeting I’d have in about 35 minutes (I was in downtown Seattle, which is usually a 17 mile drive, according to Live Local. Jeff asked me whether I knew where the next meeting was. I looked at my phone to make sure the details were there. They were. And headed back for Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, WA.

Well, turns out it was raining cats and dogs. I wondered what the traffic was like. So, I start up SmartPhlow, which shows all of Seattle’s roadways and current traffic conditions (unfortunately that’s not yet available for public use since it’s still in testing). I see that there’s some slow traffic, so things aren’t gonna be too bad. I leave that on my phone, and soon I hit the traffic. I check SmartPhlow again, see that it hasn’t gotten any worse, but that I’ll probably arrive five to 10 minutes late.

So, I call Jeff up. But, wait, I don’t have his phone number programmed on my phone (bad boy) so I call Microsoft’s main switchboard. A computer answers and asks me to say the person I’m trying to call. “Jeff Sandquist” I answer. The computer answers “did you say Jeff Sandquist?” “Yes.” The voice then says “OK, dialing that person.” Within a few seconds Jeff answers the phone and I say “I’ll probably be five to 10 minutes late.”

Well, end of the story is I pull into the building 18 garage at 3:04 p.m. and am at the meeting at 3:06 and I realized just how dependent I’m becoming on my new phone.

Oh, when I got to my meeting? Jeff came and said another participant would be 10 to 15 minutes late. So, what do I do? Pull my phone out and start reading feeds.

  • Christopher Coulter
    So you use your phone. Wow. BREAKING NEWS. Welcome, the rest of world, namely Japan and Europe, has been already there for a decade.
  • dmad
    Yawn! Did you take a time machine back to 2001?
  • What type of cell does he have that can read RSS feeds and take the pics that he does?
  • I use TrafficEdge for traffic info - it is a bit slow but I can wait 1 minute to save a half an hour ;-) It would be interesting to see if SmartPhlow is faster.
  • Ever think you might be too connected...
  • Incoming phone calls are automatically registered and entered into the corresponding list on the cell phone, so it should be fairly straightforward to call somebody back that called you just before. The only exceptions are phone numbers, where the Caller ID has been suppressed and PBXs that do not support direct dial-in.
  • Robert, you forgot to mention that when you called the main switchboard you were talking to a speech app running Microsoft Speech Server...
  • Jeff W
    There's also CEFlow, available to the public, which works great on many devices - including the new Treo 700w! Linked by the WSDot (http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/traffic/seattle/products/) to http://www.premisedenied.com/CEflow/
  • Is there any possibility that you entered Jeff Sandquist's phone number into your phone BEFORE you sat down and started crusing the web with your phone?
  • The Web: 'Digital home' comes of age
    CHICAGO, Jan. 11 (UPI) -- The "digital home" came of age in the last year as global revenues from sales of Internet-related products surged past the $100 billion mark for the first time, experts tell United Press International's The Web.

    According to new research from the Boston-based consultancy Strategy Analytics, a survey on the connected home devices, MP3 players and portable games consoles powered retail revenues to $118 billion in the category, a growth rate of 25 percent. This year promises to be another record year, according to the study, with revenues forecast to exceed $150 billion. By Gene Koprowski
  • Mike: I could have, if I had known it. I never need to call Jeff usually since he works a few doors down from me.

    Graham: that's a possibility! :-)
  • Christopher: the problem is that phone calls made from Microsoft just have our main number. 425-882-8080 and not the direct extension.
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