…Jane, bless her, got out in the darkish smalls of 5AM and lugged our garbage to the curb through 6″ of snow, while I was sleeping away.
You have to read her account of Shu-shu’s stunt last night. We laughed, OMG, we laughed.
And Dragon and I are getting along very well: using it means sessions of intense concentration, usually a couple of hours until my ears overheat. There are moments I have to stop and coax it to understand that there’s a diff between mani and money—to my ear, very, very different, no way you could mistake the two, but because it’s set for English, it’s reluctant to hear the accent on the second syllable, and didn’t pick up that one is mah and the other is muh—
On the other hand, I was amazed that it picked up Bren and Cameron without my having to ‘train’ it — it just knew the words.
And it is a lot easier on my fingers.
I can also say that someone using it with a word processor like WordPerfect or Word is going to be a lot happier than someone using it for social media. The wp’s themselves have some settings that clean up the edges.
I think I can recommend this technology as finally ready for prime time. Getting a good headset helps a lot—I used the free one provided and it hurt my ears after about 30 minutes. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003VW41G8/ref=oh_details_o03_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 is the one I bought. Andrea brand. And it’s very comfortable: no pain, just a sense of ‘ok, my ears are officially too warm and I want a rest’…after a couple of hours.
I spent many, many hours in the mandatory language lab at OU, using headsets that were probably military surplus. Not bad ones, but OMG, after a while your ears begin to protest. I wish they had one adjustment: the amount of pressure they exert on your ears. An earbud would be even nicer. But this set I have is mike and headset and the working time I can easily tolerate with it is about the limit at which my brain begins to go to mush in a writing session. Time then for a break.
Because it is capable of filtering background noise, I can also keep my habit of watching telly while I write…it’s my white noise and colored lights. And I’ve done it since the days when I lived alone in a small house and wrote at a desk (the only chair in my living room that ever wore out) and the only way I was going to keep in touch with the world was watching telly WHILE at the keyboard…
Now I do knock off at 5 pm. Even on birthdays and Christmas and New Years I usually get in a few hours. But I am relieved to say my fingers are feeling a lot less stressed. Just because I CAN type over 100 wpm doesn’t mean I want to do that for hours every day.
Of course it did. ISTR “bren” is a gun.
Ummmmm
phweet! Hey, Goog, what’ve ye got for “bren”?
#1 “The Bren Gun, usually called simply the Bren, was a series of light machine guns adopted by Britain in the 1930s and used in various roles until 1991.”
they were a collaboration of a factory in Brno, Czechoslovakia and the Enfield Small Arms, and the name was taken from the first two letters of each. BRno and ENfield. There was also another British submachine gun called the Sten, but no relation that I know of.
“STEN is an acronym, from the names of the weapon’s chief designers, Major Reginald V. Shepherd and Harold Turpin, and EN for Enfield.” –Wikipedia
So, a cousin, I suppose. Half-brother?
Speaking of machine guns, I worked with a lady who could type 100+ WPM. She rarely did so. She used a Selectric, and when she typed full speed, it sounded like a machine gun with a very, very long ammunition belt. One reason she rarely typed so fast is that everyone in the office would come over to see what the noise was. It didn’t sound like typing at that speed.
Good to hear the Dragon is working well.
lol, Walt, I used to destroy Selectric balls. I always kept a spare. I’d be typing away, and all of a sudden the typeball would fly to pieces and then I’d have the fun of picking the plastic shards out of the works of the typewriter. They have a metal coating, but they do destruct without warning when you get on a real roll! I wuz a schoolteacher on a very limited budget, so my destruction of Selectric balls was very disturbing… I used to do things to typewriters that the repairfolk used to shake their heads over; and I kept losing -m- slugs. The whole slug would fly off the stem and I’d have to go on an -m- hunt. It’s the central one with the longest sweep, and I’d find that thing over in the far side of the room in the shag carpet.
Mmmm…?
Blooey!
My mom would have fits over me studying and doing homework with the TV on — she could not believe that I was working and not goofing off but my grades were the proof that I was. Did the same when I was in college. I needed something to filter out in order to really focus and concentrate. Mom still thinks it was nuts, but it sure worked for me.
I had the radio or the record player…..everything seemed easier when I had the music in the background. TV was not a good thing for me, too much noise from sound effects (gunfights, car crashes, etc.).
I have often studied, and sometimes worked, with music playing in the background. Usually, I know when it’s a distraction and when it goes into background noise. But somehow, it works for me most of the time. (I don’t tend to play music in a pro work environment with other people around, because (1) it would give the wrong impression and (2) it would distract others.)
—–
Re: weather — Our weather has had two strong cold snaps over the past month, down into the 20’s, and otherwise, it has been wildly up and down, 30’s and 40’s for a couple of days, 50’s to 70’s for another couple of days, back down to winter temps, up to spring and fall temps, very erratic.
Neither myself nor the cats like those 20’s and 30’s with wind and humidity.
I’m beginning to wonder if it’s going to confuse the plant life as to how soon to bud.
Very odd winter, this.
I have huge amounts of difficulty writing with the TV going…all those words interfering with my words. Can’t write with rock in the background for the same reason. It’s the whole reason I became a fan of classical music…on the rare occasions the radio played something with vocals, they were in Italian. 🙂 Doesn’t work with J-rock though. Most of mine is lifted from anime, so as soon as I hear a theme song from, say, Rurouni Kenshin, suddenly I’m watching swordfights in my head.
I used to play ‘Dogs of War’ for emotionally difficult bits.
I used to listen to tapes of French chansons while doing my homework. We didn’t listen to the radio much at home, but I had a tape-player in my room and about 8 hours of songs in French on tape, as my mom loved those. The French was both different and familiar enough not to interfere with my thinking in Dutch ; normally I can’t listen to anything containing recognisable and comprehensible (speech or song) language when I’ m supposed to be doing something else language-based. Only during French homework I’d have to turn it off.
It did help me to get a real feel for how the language should sound, and how the words get used naturally, which was very useful in gaining fluency and keeping enough of it to be useful on holidays.
Oh, words do not mesh well with other words in my brain, add in the movement of TV too and all focus is gone. If a TV is on or even a conversation on the radio, my attention is swiveling to it whether I want to or not. Songs with a tune I can relegate to background fairly well (Pete Seeger is playing in memoriam right now on my IPad, RIP) but not an evolving, changing conversation.
It’s one of the reasons I have taken up knitting at most meetings: the knitting uses a distinctly non-verbal part of the brain and engages me enough while permitting full tracking of the spoken words going on around me so that I don’t get bored and wander off into a daydream… and I get knitting accomplished!
On the other hand, my spouse paints miniature figures while watching TV and doing e-mail at the same time – bleagh. Makes me anxious and distracted just thinking on it!
The weather, after drying out for the last couple of days, has gone schizo again. Rain in buckets for 15 minutes, followed by 15 minutes of sun, then another downpour. Sometimes, as it did this morning, downpour WHILE sunny. This made a spectacular rainbow, nearly full circle, at dawn this morning while I was driving to work.
Lamb stew on the menu for family and guests tonight. I wish I could say i was prescient, but it was raining when I started the batch.
Love lamb stew. Haven’t had it for yonks … and lamb is priced exorbitantly down here in the Okies.
I listen to music, but it has to be instrumental music. I used to listen to a lot of Narada’s stuff, Tingstat and Rumbel, etc., but now I listen to ambient on internet radio. I can’t stand radio with talking in, and there are several little independent internet radio stations I’ve found (and love) that play nothing but ambient genre music. No station idents, nothing but music. I can knit with the TV on, but I can’t do writing type stuff.
A lot of the digital recorders will also work with Dragon.
If the muse strikes while you’re out and about, you can still take advantage of the program.