A few new faces.

[rsquared256]

Over the past few months, Ecko-It has been a solo developer (me) and
user (me) and that is a lonely road :) I have shared Ecko-It in the
couchdb mailing list, in the rockbox mailing list, and at a DemoCamp
in Edmonton. The response has been great, with lots of "That's pretty
cool". But with a hardware component (the liferecorder), people have
been reluctant to try it out. So over the past few days I have gone
out to people that have both interest and technical experience, and
have offered them a liferecorder. As early adopters, I hope that they
will get to benefit from, and drive the development of this open
source project.

So without further ado, the new 'recruits' are Al, Derrick, Johannes,
and Matthew. Welcome!

Now, to completely ruin your day, I have a task for you to complete. I
would like each of you to reply to this message with a short
introduction about what interested you in Ecko-It, what you might be
able to contribute, and maybe some vision for it. It's kind of a get
to know you exercise so we can understand each other better. I want to
try and make this worthwhile for everyone, and foster a great
community. Each of you have explained these things to me, but please
let the rest of the group know.

Thanks, and welcome aboard! ( I have some other introductory posts,
but I will start separate threads for those.)

PS. - The existing members of this google group are people that know
(and maybe like) me. So they are here mostly because they are nice :)
I am not expecting them to participate, but they can if they want to!

[Al]

Hi all,

my name's Al - Alastair in the long - I live in Italy and the UK. I
arrived on this group via Ryan's Reupholstered project, which rocks.
Rummaging around the internet led me to Ecko-it which I thought could
help me with my Italian learning (my spoken Italian is appalling) and
my wife thinks that it could be of use for her English teaching. I'm
a generalist software developer with experience in Javascript, Ruby,
C# and Java; I build web applications, write technical blog posts and
support web sites for a living, so I guess these are the areas where
I'll be able to assist. My past life includes time in a rock band and
writing low-quality radio comedy scripts.

That's me in a very small nutshell.

[Matthew Woodward]

Hi all--my name is Matt Woodward and I'm Principal IT Specialist for the Office of the Sergeant at Arms at the United States Senate. Basically that means I'm a web developer and (like most people I'm sure) do some necessary sysadmin work as well. We just put CouchDB into production on a few of our apps and have had fantastic luck with it thus far, so we're looking to do more and more with CouchDB moving forward.

Philosophically I'm a huge free software advocate so the fact that this entire project, including the custom OS for the hardware, is free software is a big part of why I'm interested.

What interested me in Ecko-It from a technical standpoint specifically is a couple of things:
1. The extremely slick, innovative use of CouchDB
2. Use of RockBox (which I'm a huge fan of)

From the perspective of using Ecko-It, I go to a lot of tech conferences and meetings, and have a lot of meetings about projects, and in many cases there's a lot of noise but a few very important gems that may get lost in traditional pen and paper (or even typing) note-taking, because you may remember for a day or two exactly what you meant when you wrote half a dozen words down, but when you come back to that short sentence weeks later the context is lost.

Given that situation (at least that's typical for me), I love the idea of recording things I know I'll want to refer to later and tagging the interesting bits. This lets me focus on being fully engaged in presentations and meetings instead of frantically taking copious notes so I don't lose the hidden gems later. Also where projects are concerned as weeks pass since planning meetings, I've found in my environment a lot of subsequent discussions turn into arguments between people who remember the original meeting differently from one another. So having something to which to refer back can be (in my opinion) a huge time saver.

As far as what I can contribute ... on that point I'm not sure. :-) I'm one of those very odd people who love writing documentation so that might be a big way in which I can contribute, but I'm also a developer (Java, Groovy, CFML, and a smattering of other things) and huge CouchDB fan so if there's things I can do in those areas that's great too.

Like most people my schedule is pretty full but if things are relatively organized I'm great at jumping in for slices of time here and there so there's always some forward progress being made.

Not sure that qualifies as "short" but I really look forward to working with all of you in various capacities!

Thanks,
Matt

--
Matthew Woodward
ma...@mattwoodward.com
http://blog.mattwoodward.com
identi.ca / Twitter: @mpwoodward

Please do not send me proprietary file formats such as Word, PowerPoint, etc. as attachments.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

[Ryan Ramage]

Fantastic. I really appreciate these responses. And I know some more replies may trickle in. Everyone is busy, so don't feel obliged by any of my requests. :)

I am fascinated by the various uses people describe. I had never thought of it for learning a new language (although I have not had to learn one), but I can see how that would be useful! 

For me I, as I use it, I find various things all the time. Here is my list:
-Fantastic for kids. They say fun stuff all the time that never gets written down and is soon forgotten. 

-For work. Those quick questions were an answer is given very detailed, but quickly. 

-Personal Goals. I use it to count things I want to improve or avoid doing. 

-Recording Dreams. Not that I find meaning in dreams, but I usually have very funny/weird dreams. Its just fun to have the recorder by the bed and just tell it out loud.

-Family stories. When a relative is rambling on, its kind of fun to capture and archive family history. 

I could go on. It's just very useful. Anyway, I hope that you can endure a bit to make it work for what you need it to, and find little cool things that surprise you. 

[Schwabe]

Hey guys, Eckoit is an awesome idea and potentially a really cool product.

This intro is a little late, but anyway I'm interested in this because I
am an avid note taker. I take notes all the time (by typing mostly,
but sometimes with pen & paper too) about anything and everything.

So obviously Eckoit represents an excitingly different way of going
about it. When I saw Ryan's demo in Edmonton I was 'enlightened'.

I'm looking forward to connecting with him again to get setup with a
unit. Would love to test drive this.

---Derrick Schwabe

[Mike]

Hello everyone! I heard about Ecko-It from the comments in a
BoingBoing post a while back about a researcher who had 10,000 hours
of recordings of his kids. I have a toddler and love tracking the
funny things she says and the way her language develops (I have some
linguistics background and just find it fascinating). I've tried to
track it somewhat by taking short videos and by tweeting out things
she says, but the idea of having a recorder running and just tapping a
button to tag something is very appealing. I'm also a musician, and
would love to see if a simple audio memo device would help me remember
little ideas that come to me but are always forgotten by the time I
get to the studio. I also work on a life-logging type project and hope
that interesting cross-applications will suggest themselves.

Anyway, I should be getting my Ecko-It in the mail soon and look
forward to trying it out and giving my feedback!

Mike