Dragon Dictation

OK…Yea…I have one of those iPhones.  For most purposes, it has replaced my computer.  I recently went over 4 days without firing up my laptop or my home computer to get on-line and check out the pulse of facebook, twitter, email, wordpress, weather, Fantasy Football, my schedule, etc.  I did all this from my iPhone with just a few touches and pushes on the screen.  I am now one of those people who I used to make fun of. 

One of the latest applications that I thought was too cool, is called Dragon Dictation.  This is a voice recognition application that allows you to speak and then transfer that text to email, text message, facebook status updates, tweets,…just about anything that you usually type, can use Dragon Dictation to transfer your voice into text.  I’m shocked at how well it works.

So, I was driving to a meeting last night and saw something that was funny.  I decided to use this newfound technology while I was driving.  I talked into the mic; it magically knew what I was saying.  I transferred it to a text message and forwarded it to a  friend that would get the humor of what I just saw.  This went on for about 5 minutes, until I arrived safely at the meeting.  I sent him 7 messages in this fashion.  Much safer than texting whilst driving I justified, which I am guilty of doing on occasion.  On top of being safer, I thought the whole thing was pretty cool.

Until I reflected on it today….

Technology has evolved,….let me rephrase that,….I have let technology evolve so much in my life, that I actually spoke into a mic, let it determine what I was saying, so I could then paste into a text and continue to have a conversation in this way.  As I contemplated this, it seemed so impractical; so unproductive; so….pointless.

When did I stop picking up the phone?  When did I stop talking with friends?  Why have I allowed technology to sterilize some of my relationships?

…running through my mind…

Communism and Corvettes

I have run with a couple of friends this week and had lunch with a few as well, and there is this over-riding theme that we don’t really talk about, but you can tell it is there.  That theme is that we are all just trying to get by, make a paycheck, pay the bills, do what we can to not get laid-off, and press on (go to bed, get up in the morning, and do it again).  There seems to be no time for passion or time for us to reflect and attempt to write a new – or a different – story for our lives.  At least in the movie Groundhog Day, Phil Conners gets to change how he approaches each day.  We seem to be stuck in the same day, yet feel as though there is nothing we can do about it. 

Have we always been this way, yet I’m just now seeing it?

This over-riding theme seems to slip into most of the conversations I have anymore.  Sometimes it is directly addressed; other times it is the elephant in the room.  Yet, I can feel its power over the conversation.

Is it just me?  Am I the pessimistic one now; poisoning those around me with negativity?  (I swore I’d never be that person, but could I be…..)

Is it the economy?   (Forget that I asked that, it’s too easy to say, “Ya, it’s the economy”)

During my drive home from running this morning, I started thinking about Russia and how hopeless their citizens were back in the middle to late part of the last century.  Russians had everything they needed to survive, yet from what I was taught in school, they had no ability to change their plot in life (or so they thought).  Let me repeat myself; they had everything they needed to survive.   Why were they so hopeless?  Was it the Communist regime?  Could it have been that there was nothing to fight for?  Wasn’t everything already provided?  Why the hopelessness?

Is there a link here?  

Is it possible to get passionate about something if all of our needs are met?   

Do our survival needs make us passionate people?

What if, once our survival needs are taken care of, we were programmed to start focusing on other people’s survival needs?  There is something I could get passionate about….

Or I could go take out a loan and buy a mid-life crisis Corvette.  I’d probably opt for a Black one; it would go well with my iPhone.

 

…running through my mind…