Echo Invite

Okay so it's the end of the first week of 2015 and of course, Friday. It has been a pretty good week overall other than being busy and Cicely being completely slammed at work as well which drives me batty when I am unable to help her through it and remove some of the stress she is dealing with on her games.

Generally around this time of year things are much slower because we are finished with our gaming show and other games are just starting to ramp up or people are still slowly migrating back into the game studio after taking holiday time off to spend with family and friends. This year was a little different because of the way our schedules and licensing approvals unfortunately.

ECHO, ECHo, ECho, Echo, echo....

So this morning I was asking Cicely to please remind me to look into water heaters that are the 'on demand' style. I have been meaning to for weeks and continue to forget every time I am online.

Generally she forgets as well, rarely does she remember to remind me of things that I ask her to honestly. Nope, that is not a 'dig' it's true, she has a lot going on as well. Why do I do it then? It's sorta like writing something down. More times than not you remember it because you wrote it down, not because you found the note, read it, remembered and then took care of the task at hand.

Anyway to my point. I said to her, "please remind me to at least open up a tab in Firefox, point to Google and enter search terms for the on demand heaters, at the very least email me a reminder message" she said okay and fell back to sleep.

I though to myself and even mumbled to her that if I had my Amazon Echo smart home device I could simply ask it to setup the reminder for me and move on with my shower or whatever.

Sure there is Siri on iOS as well as others on various hardware. The difference for me and why I am willing to shell out $106 ($100 off the non beta price) is because Echo sits in the house patiently waiting for a command, question or otherwise and then acts upon it. You can connect it to your smart home devices, have it adjust volumes or play music and change the mood lighting in the house.

So many possibilities with it and I am doing virtual back-flips in excitement and anticipation of its arrival. Unfortunately like most good things I have to wait until March for it to show up. My original date was February 15th but by the time I walked into the bedroom to show Cicely that I had been selected for the beta, walked back out to the living room to log-in to my Prime account and pay for the hardware my date already moved out nearly a full month - dammit!

Again, not a big deal, it will be fun to have in the house and exciting to learn the cool and the nuances of the technology. Again, haters are gonna hate and conspiracy nuts are going to conspire. Complaining about lack of privacy, big brother and everything under the rainbow that is related.

I'm not worried about all of that shxt to be honest. I don't have anything to hide and if they want to know that I listen to punk rock more than the current top 40, watch more comedies and action flicks over romance and Spanish novellas then fine, so be it. Use that data to your hearts content.

Okay

Enough out of me for today then. The day flew by like crazy and I feel as though I accomplished absolutely zero, zip, zilch and basically divided by zero otherwise. I did manage to get on Facebook for a few this morning and peeps that commented on my posts early on have heard nothing from me. Probably a good reason to not use it as much as I have been trying to the past few weeks, namely to get in the habit and share a little of my life with friends and family even if I'm being nothing more than a smart ass.

Stopped at Panda Express on the way home and picked up some Chinese food for dinner. Friday's are usually our cheat night, well my cheat night anyway, Cicely can pretty much eat whatever she wants to eat and whenever and remain skinny and fit as though she goes to the gym everyday and eats salads and healthy foods. She is quite the opposite, eating more crap and sweets than anything else.

So once home I am going to eat while my food is hot and then give it an hour and go for a bike ride otherwise my calories will be way off the charts tonight. It's 7:24pm right now which means I won't even get on the bike until nearly 8:30 or 9:00pm. Any other night that would really suck but tonight being Friday it works out great and I can spend some time with my girls!

Have a great weekend with whatever it is that you plan to be doing. As I always say, no drinking and driving or anything like that please. No reason to hurt or kill someone else because you're being an idiot and not thinking straight!

Photo: This is my new toy that will be showing up on my doorstep sometime in the near future, well more like sometime in March -- is it March yet?