I’ve hacked together a proof of concept connection between Jott and Plazes. If you have accounts on each, you can call Jott from your mobile and “voice plaze” yourself. Here’s how:

First, go to Jott.com and login. Then visit your My Links page and click on Add it here under “Developers - Got a custom link to add?”. Enter the following information:

• Link Name: Plazes
• Setup Url: http://ruk.ca/plazes/jott/configure.php
• Link Url: http://ruk.ca/plazes/jott/post.php
• Send SMS Response: your choice; all you receive back right now is “Your message was received.”

When you save the new link, you’ll be automatically redirected to a page on my website where you’ll be prompted to enter your Plazes username and password:

Please note that this information is not transmitted or stored securely. So use at your own risk.

Now it’s as simple as calling Jott (or, if you want to test, just sending a Jott message from the website) and saying “Plazes” when asked “Who do you want to Jott?”. Then, after the sound of the beep, say:

status message at plaze

For example, you could say “hanging out at pony bar” or “working hard at casa mia”. Jott will transcribe what you’ve said, send it to my link, where I’ll split the message into “status message” and “plaze” parts and use the Plazes API to create a new Plazes activity.

It’s important to note that the word at is used to separate your “status message” from your “plaze”. You can leave out the status message by just saying “at plaze.” And, of course, you can’t say something like “At home talking to Jim at work at Reinvented Office,” as this will drive the (very primitive) parsing algorithm insane.

Obviously this works only for existing Plazes, and will locate you at the first match for a keyword search of Plazes for the location you speak. Remember that Jott supports spelling out words, so it’s probably better to say “p l a z e s” than “plazes” if you’re trying to create an activity at “Plazes HQ”.

This is all only an hour old, so it’s prone to bugs, will not report failures properly (or at all) and may not work. I welcome any comments you have about any experiments you do, or suggestions for improvement.

Note that Jott transcription doesn’t happen immediately — I’ve had it take as much as 5 minutes — so your Plazement will not happen instantly. Check your Jott inbox to see how things are getting along.

Bendito Machine.

Air Canada has been running a curious seat sale for the past several weeks one of the unexpected deals of which was a fare from Charlottetown to Osaka, Japan for $1000 return, taxes included. Japan has been high on my list of places to visit, and with Catherine and Oliver away in Ontario for 10 days over March Break the stars seemed to be aligning. Then I started looking around for an apartment to rent and it turned out that Kyoto was possibly a better alternative. Then, suddenly, the prospect of flying for 20 hours to spend 7 days in Kyoto — yes, that Kyoto — seemed, if not absurd, in poor environmental taste. So you’ll find me in my usual chair at Casa Mia over March break.

Training chopsticks for kids. I don’t read Japanese, but there’s a lot of useful-looking information on that page, including an absurdly helpful number of real life action shots.

This new Clinton ad is simply crass. Say what you will about Obama, but it’s hard not to watch an ad like this and come away unmoved. Clinton wants us to believe she’s fresh off an overnight at Dunkin Donuts, Obama wants to change the world. Neither may be actually true, I’ll take sketchy hope over pretense any day.

If only for the novelty of it all, I’m running an ad in Facebook, targeting “targeting liberal and moderate people between 18 and 60 years old in Charlottetown, PE.” Facebook says there are 3,060 of these people out there. We’ll see what happens.

Update: Looks like I’m not running a Facebook ad after all:

The text of this ad contains excessive or incorrect capitalization. All ads must use appropriate, grammatically correct capitalization. The title of your ad, as well as the first word in each sentence, must begin with a capital letter. Lastly, all proper nouns and acronyms should be capitalized. As per section 4 of Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines, all ads should include standard and proper capitalization.

Lord knows what would happen if silverorange, e.e. cummings or the fifth estate — lower-case tilted all — try to advertise on Facebook.

The Valentine’s Day episode of the excellent This American Life program is well worth a listen: its theme is “people who have been in the same relationship for years” and it’s a welcome respite from the love is everything meme that soaks this season.

My favourite part of the episode is the essay Istanbul by Canadian writer and broadcaster Ian Brown. Here is Brown on “open marriage:”

That’s why monogamy has such a bad reputation: it’s boring. Monogamy is the habit of not acting on what you want. I even hate the word itself: it sounds so staid, so bourgeois. Monogamy. Like a board game. The approximation of excitement. Sometimes of course I hear about “open marriages.” Jung had one. Sartre had one. Henry Miller, Dickens, Freud. I hear about open marriages and they seem like some fabulous exotic city that I’ve always wanted to visit, but never seem to get to. Istanbul. Open marriages are like Istanbul: some ancient, mysterious place where there are minarets and strange music, where one entire civilization suddenly ends and a whole new stranger one begins. A whole new religion even. The mysterious east. I’ve always wanted to go to Istanbul.

You only have a few more days to grab the free MP3 of this episode — it’s oddly available only for a week after it’s first broadcast.

If you like what you hear on This American Life, here are three additional things you might want to check out:

• Host Ira Glass’s Manifesto
• This American Life FAQ (even if you don’t have any questions, it’s a nice read)
• Radio: an Illustrated Guide, a comic book about how to make a good radio show.

British writer and actor Stephen Fry has started a podcast. Episode One:

Stephen Fry discloses his work for the past two years including his performances for ITV’s series “Kingdom”, script writing for director Peter Jackson’s forthcoming film “The Dam Busters” and the pitfalls of filming in the Amazon jungle and breaking his arm whilst preventing his not inconsiderable weight from plunging into the murky depths of the Amazon River.

If you are new to Stephen Fry, this New Yorker article is an interesting place to start.

My letter to Planning Board elicited a friendly email pointing me to the Canadian Urban Institute, a “non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the quality of life in urban areas across Canada and internationally.” News to me, and looks like an interesting bunch with which I share a lot in common philosophically.

The Institute’s website led me onwards to Canadian Brownfields 2008, a conference being held in October 2008 in Toronto. What’s a brownfield? Turns out that a word used to describe:

Vacant, abandoned, or underutilized commercial and industrial properties, where real or perceived environmental contamination is an obstacle to redevelopment or utilization. Often the site of old industrial complexes and chemical pollution.

One hint to the organizers of the “CUI Brownies” awards, that “acknowledge the significant strides taken in brownfield redevelopment:” using the phrase “percolating across the country” is probably best avoided in this context. Makes visions of oozing toxic sludge dance in my head.

Today was not so bleak, as it turned out: there was sun and some faint (faint) sense of warmth. But this is a brief respite from the alternating bouts of heavy snow and teeming rain we’ve been having since Christmas. Surprisingly, given this weather, we seem to be avoiding the prospect of the “meltdown season” so far. It’s early yet, though, so there’s still plenty of time for complete mental collapse before spring arrives in four months.

There is perhaps no better work that captures this part of the year than In the Bleak Midwinter:

In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen,
Snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter,
Long ago.

No rendering of this lyrics captures its spirit better than the version on the now-alas-out-of-print CD A Celebration of the American Farm by David Schnaufer and Stephen Seifert.

If you can track down a used copy of that CD, which was created in partnership with our friend at The Old Farmer’s Almanac, you should; it’s got a bunch of great tracks from artists ranging from Maura O’Connell and Nanci Griffith to the Nashville Chamber Orchestra.

Of course if you’re looking for a somewhat more hopeful take on the season, there is always Raise the Dead of Wintertime from Allan Rankin (clip):

And when at night we’re by the stove
Our bellies full and our stories told
The winds of winter might blow cold
But none of us will feel it