Fortunately, there are literally hundreds of search engines containing thousands of song lyrics that you can search for by phrase or individual words.

This week’s momelette is a quickie. When you’re out and about and hear a great song, pause for a few minutes to listen to the song and pick up a very specific key phrase in the lyrics. Using your mobile phone, Jott yourself the lyrics so they are out of your mind.

Then, when you are home and in front of your computer, read the lyrics from the email that Jott sent you and do one of the following:

1. Use a Lyrics Search Engine to plug in the lyrics
Though there are many, I prefer Leo’s Lyrics (www.leoslyrics.com). I’ve yet to find a song it doesn’t know, and it’s one of the few rare gems that does not contain an endless supply of pop-up ad banners.

2. Google the word “lyrics” followed by the phrase (in quotes).
The benefit of doing it this way is you can see the Google summary of your results, which can be helpful when it comes to trying to find a cover song, as you’ll see in the screenshot below.

Now if you’re an iPhone user, things just got a whole lot easier. The web service Shazam allows you to hold your iPhone directly up to the music, and within minutes it will tell you the artist and song name. I haven’t tried it, but I’d love to hear from those that have.

Here’s to finding new music, wherever you may be. And yes, I’ve Jotted myself song lyrics to look up later from the car, a public restroom, a train station, a pub, etc. Probably the most interesting place I have ever been desperate to find a song was something that was playing as background music on an amusement park ride when I was thirteen years old. I never forgot how the song went (it had no lyrics, bah!), and one day about ten years later I heard the song while flipping radio channels in the car. I will forever thank that DJ, whoever he was, for announcing the name of the song. (It was “Fire on High” by Electric Light Orchestra)

Have you ever been desperate to find out what a song was? What measures did you take? Do you have lyrics you want others to help you find the song for?

Shazam would have been nice back then, I think.  Sigh!

Voice: “Who do you want to Jott?”

Me: “Myself”.

Voice: “Got it.”

Me: “Buy a baby shower gift for Karen before next week.”

Voice: “Got it. BEEEEEP”

I hang up my phone, and about five minutes later, I can see on my phone that I have an email waiting for me from Jott. The contents of the email? Buy a baby shower gift for Karen before next week. Transcription confidence: High.

A small, innocent looking free online service called Jott (www.jott.com) has saved me from my mountain of Post-it Notes that have turned into wallaper over the years. The premise is simple:

1. Call Jott at 866-JOTT-123 (preferably put it into speed dial for maximum effectiveness).
2. Tell Jott who you are jotting, and a 30-second brain dump of what the reminder is (to do item, note, cure for cancer, etc).
3. Jott sends you a text message or email with a text transcription and audio recording.
4. You can then let go mentally of your reminder and move on to other things.

When you sign up for Jott online, your phone number is your account number, and you are given a password. You can log in to your account and change your settings, such as which email the reminders get sent to.

Here’s some more cool things you can do with Jott ™:

1. Jott to someone else

If you have friends who are already on Jott, you can add them as contacts and send Jott messages to them. In fact, my husband is on Jott, and the two of us send “To do’s” to each other regularly.

Find out more about Jotting to someone else.

2. Jott to Amazon

This is great for power shoppers. When making a big purchase, I trust the people on Amazon. It’s a fact they are brutally honest folks. If product sucks, they’ll tell you exactly why. If it’s great, they’ll all be in agreement. The problem is, I don’t carry my laptop around with me when I’m shopping, and sometimes I have a choice between two products while I’m at the store, and need to make a decision. Wouldn’t it be great if you could find out what the Amazon rating was while you were there? Now you can.

If you call Jott and Jott to “Amazon”, then tell it the product you are interested in, it will send you an email of the top 5 results, complete with pricing and customer ratings.

Find out more about Jotting to Amazon.

3. Jott a reminder

Call Jott and Jott to “Reminder”. It will walk you through setting a day and time, and then the text of your reminder. It will then send you an email and a text message 15 minutes before the event. You can also add the reminder directly from the website instead of calling.

4. Jott to a list

On the Jott website, you can create list names. It comes with the default list names of “work” and “home”. You can call Jott and Jott to your list name, and say your item. It will add it to your recurrent list. If you are the type of person who keeps your cell phone on you all the time, this is a fantastic way to keep your grocery list up to date!

There really is only one caveat I have found with Jott so far:

You need to speak clearly and in a quiet place. When I call Jott from my mobile in my car, I have to make sure the radio is off and the windows are up (even if the car isn’t moving, it still picks up ambient noise from outside!). However, that said, I am continued to be impressed by the accuracy of the transcription.

Have you found Jott yet? Are you using it as a result of this article? What other uses have you found for it? Have you done anything creative with it? Add to the recipe below and tell me about it.

Let’s see, phone bill. Do I use the landline often enough to need caller ID? Nope. Do I need to pay for voice mail service? Nope, not when I have a digital answering machine. Right away I could shave $11 off my monthly telephone bill. I followed suit with each additional bill, checking them all when they came in.

And then I got to my cell phone, which at the time was Nextel (and had been for years upon years).

Between my husband and I, we were paying a combined total of $175/month JUST for a cell phone service! They didn’t even do anything fancy. They just dialed. And if I did want to send a text message, I had to use the tiny keypad and hit each key about five times until I got the character I wanted. I tried sending my husband a text message once on that old phone, got fed up with key-tapping, and finally called him: “Can you please pick up milk on your way home?”

Horrified, I realized I had been complacently paying the same high cell phone bill for the same service month after month. Just because it had always been that way, and my cell phone had always worked.

There may be some things stopping you, and they really shouldn’t:

You already are in an existing contract.

A quick Google search on getting out of your existing cell phone contract yields the fact that you are not the only person with this dilemma. There are ways to get around the dreaded Early Termination Fee. Stick to your guns. It’s hard for us women to be firm and speak up, but you can do it. Or, you can do what my friend Erin does whenever she needs to get out of a contract: she calls the company in question and tells them she’s leaving the country. Although, keep in mind, if you haven’t checked your plan for years, you probably aren’t even on a contract anymore.

You don’t want to have to buy a new phone.

Trust me, unless you want the new iPhone coming out soon, they aren’t as expensive as you think they are. Many cell phone providers are giving them away for free or with good rebates when you sign up for a new plan. You’ve had years on your existing plan, it’s time to re-evaluate the way you use your cell phone.

Choosing a new phone and plan

It’s really quite simple, when you break it down:

1. Evaluate how you use your cell phone.

• How many minutes do you use? Look at your last five month’s worth to get a good average. Be honest with yourself.
• Do you want to send text messages? You’ll want a phone with a qwerty keyboard.
• Do you want to use the Internet on your phone? You’ll need a data plan.
• What other services do you need? (photos, MP3 players, GPS, etc.) Brainstorm!

2. Price shop with the various cell phone companies to get to know the wide range of services they offer.

• T-Mobile
• Cingular/AT&T
• Verizon
• Sprint/Nextel

Once you have a plan, choose a phone that best suits your requirements you figured out in step 1.

When all was said and done, I went from a plain old cell phone from Nextel to an unlimited data/text/cell phone from Sprint with a Treo 800wx running Windows Mobile on it that also became my GPS and MP3 player. After the inital cost of the phone, I am paying $159/month for all that service on the same phone and plan for my husband and I.

Just think if I hadn’t gone over that bill! I shudder.

An ordinary dialogue between friends used to go something like this:

Friend: “You mean you haven’t seen Firefly yet? You need to watch it immediately!”
Me: “OK, I’ll add it to my Netflix queue when I get home.”
… three months later …
Same friend: “Have you seen Firefly yet?”
Me: “Whoops, I forgot to add it to Netflix! I’ll do it when I get home.”
... repeat four time over the course of the year.

Now the conversations with the moms on my street are more like this:

Sarah: “The new Scooby Doo is out on DVD.”
JoAnn: “I know, I’ve wanted it, but it’s always checked out at the library.”
Sharon: “That was me. I had it two weeks ago.”
Karen: “You bitch! I thought that was your name in the card. You had that for DAYS! I have it now.”
JoAnn: “DVDs will be obsolete by the time I get it.”

This is where I open my purse, whip out my Treo, pull up Netflix in the mobile phone’s built-in web browser, and before Shaggy can eat his first Scooby Snack, I’ve added the DVD to my Netflix queue right there on the street.

While you’re out and about, always be on the lookout for movie trailers that sound interesting so you can add them to your queue instantly! Netflix even allows you to add movies to your queue while its still in theaters – then you can just sit back and wait for it to be released on DVD!

If you can’t access a web browser on your cell phone, you probably either don’t have a mobile phone that supports the web, or you may not have a data plan. Check with your cell phone provider, and of course make sure you know what the charges will be for visiting a website if you don’t have a data plan.

Of course, now that we are parents, our Netflix movies sit there in the living room for about a month before we get around to watching them. Yes, I could have paid for those DVDs five times over by now.

But at least my queue is impressive, and I’m not pissing anyone off at the library!