Lee.org

The Gates, Christo’s latest crazy-giant art thing opened today in New York City.

From SignonSanDiego

“It’s a waste of money, but it’s fabulous,” said student Shakana Jayson. “It brings happiness when you look at it.”

Well then, it wasn’t really a waste of money then, was it ;-)

In a fit of wanting to type faster, I looked into the latest version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. After 30 mintues of googling, I’ve decided that speech recognition is still not ready for prime time. :-( (dear reader. Do not dispair. Read my update below!)

I found several blogs and sites that talked about how excited they were at the prospect of how the software could help them, but I never found any followups. That says to me that everyone who tried it got dis-interested quickly. When I first tried speech recognition several years ago, I had a similar experience. After a few days with it, I thought that if I only put more dedication into teaching the computer how I spoke, I could get some use out of it. But I just wasn’t interested in putting that much effort into it. Hence, the waning interest. Well, here we are, 10 years of research, my computer is 200 times faster (!!! 3 Ghz vs 14 Mhz!!!) and the reviews still say pretty much the same thing.

The most useful review was from John Udell’s Weblog. He included a video of him dictating a letter. His was virutally the same experience I had 10 years ago. The recognition had about a 2% error rate. That sounds good until you realize that this posting so far is 203 words… That means there would have been 4 errors in the preceeding text… errors that were spelled correctly and were likely gramatically correct, just not what I intended to say.

So then you have to correct the errors… That can be terribly slow, and error-prone in itself in an audio interface. Listening to John Udell patiently talk to his computer in a carefully moderated voice, and having the machine still make dumb mistakes drove me crazy, and I’m a patient guy.

Grr. I don’t know… Maybe I will give it one try. I tried to type as fast as John was dictating and I very quickly realized that, when it worked well, he was going at like 100 to 120 words per minute. I type at something like 25-40 WPM. I would love to be able to integrate this kind of performance in my typing life! Maybe I could dictate and then edit by hand? I don’t know…

update 4-29-05: I’ve been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 now for two days and I’ve got to say that I’m extremely impressed with it. My previous reservations were unfounded. I’m typing this right now with my voice. It’s pretty darn cool, and yes, I’m going a lot faster than I could type after only one day of training. it takes a little bit of getting used to, speaking to the computer, but really not that much. More importantly, I feel that I’m using a different part of my brain in order to write things. It’s a speaking thing, not a writing thing. That was one thing that I was hoping that I would get out of this.

Woot!

I’ll keep my intrepid readers abreast of how I’m doing with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

Oh, and as for the microphone, I’m surprised to say that I’m very happy with a cheap lapel mic that came with my web cam.

Gosh darn it, it’s even becoming easier to say things like “Send that” instead of clicking on the Send button in Outlook.

You know, I have to admit that it’s kind of nice to hear my voice in an otherwise quiet room. It’s better than listening to the mindless, brain sucking television in the background.

Update 5-3-05 I’m convinced.

I am now able to type and about 80 wpm. That’s twice as fast as I have ever been able to type in my life. With more practice and the new headset that will be arriving in a few days, I am fairly confident that I will be able to tie at 100 wpm very reliably. This gosh darned thing is good! There are still a few small issues but they all seem conquerable. For example, right now the integration with Firefox is less than perfect. But there are tools to get past that. I’m really pretty impressed.

Of course, instead of me doing just necessary things faster, I am now becoming more verbose. I think I like that in my Internet life.

Case in point: this is getting to be a pretty long blog entry, isn’t it? It’s not that I’m spending more time writing this entry, it’s just that I’m “typing” a lot faster. Woot!

(and it is a bit of a novelty teaching the computer to understand the word “woot”)

update 5-5-05: That’s it, I’m hooked. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 is amazing. I really can type/speak at about 80 wpm. It’s still taking a bit of getting used to but darn it, this thing works. I went out and bought a good dictation headset (an Andrea ANC-750) from Knowbrainer.com and that has improved the accuracy quite a bit (of course, it’s also an excellent gamer headset ;-). I’m thinking less and less about how I speak to dictate after just one week.

Update 5-20-05: I continue to be happy with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 (DNS8). My biggest gripe with it right now is its memory and performance footprint. When it’s running it takes longer than normal to switch between windows, even if DNS8 isn’t engaged. That makes it so that it’s a bother to leave it running on the odd chance I’ll want to issue a “close window” or a “send that” command. Though I admit that I’m a huge short-attention-span-theater window switcher. I have 2 monitors and at the very moment I have 12 windows open. On any day when I’m spending more time writing than not, DNS8 stays running.

Update 9-14-05: FYI I continue to be an avid Dragon NaturallySpeaking user. I got a DMCA takedown notice from copyright-compliance.com last week representing Scansoft saying about this very page (where I gush happily about DNS)…

It has come to the attention of Scansoft that you are distributing unlicensed and unauthorized Scansoft Products.

If anyone can find the unlicensed Scansoft product on this page, I’ll give them a prize.

Update 10-7-05: Sweetness. I just installed another gigabyte (bringing me to 1.5 GB) and all of the lag that I’ve been seeing when moving between programs has gone away. I can now leave Dragon NaturallySpeaking running much more of the time without a strain on my PC.

I got a prescription today. As I did before, I looked into Canadian drug prices. I found that the price from Canada for a generic is exactly (to within 1%) 1/2 of what I can get it in the states. My Rx insurance covers 1/2 of the bill so it’s a wash. I might as well go with a local, brand name product instead of a slow-to-ship, generic product.

I can’t help but think that some manipulation has happened here. I’ll guess that Canadian prices were forced up a little and American prices were forced down a little by some dealings. The machine is complicated, the FDA, Canadian drug authorities, rampant illegal drug shipments into the US through Canada, drug companies struggling to keep ahead of the game by any means… but it all works out (more or less) in the end. I don’t know, I guess I’m just happy that there are checks and balances and that no one of those organizations really has total control.

I can recommend Rx1.biz, phone 866-791-7711.

When you mouseover items in the blog, they now look a bit snazzier. This is due to Nice Titles.

It uses Javascript to snaz-up the title field of a link. I like that the site still works perfectly well without the script…. but the snazzing is well appreciated.

I was also going to use the nice looking semi-transparent .png from the site above (here’s a great transparent PNG maker) but Internet Explorer 6 doesn’t properly support transparent .png files Phoey on them! There are ways around this problem, by using the IE AlphaImageLoader Filter, but it’s a pain in the neck. I’m not much interested in jumping through Bill’s hoops when an internet standard exists and Bill doesn’t follow it. Besides, you know that such a browser-specific solution will require upkeep. Just like when IE 5.5 came out and my old company, Wavexpress had to scramble to re-write web pages because the new version of… I think it was I-Frames, wasn’t compatible with the old. We were working directly with Microsoft engineers on our project and we hadn’t gotten even a 1 day’s heads-up that the new release of IE was coming or that it might mess anything up. So Phoey on Bill.

There’s even a petition with 20,000 signatures asking Bill to put this promised native functionality into IE.

I kinda like the look. What do you think?

A few weeks ago I made Eggs Benedict for VC. To do so, I had to plan in advance, learning how to (this’ll show you how much effort I normally spend in the kitchen) clarify butter, make poached eggs, and make hollandaise sauce. It took me almost a dozen eggs to make a good poached egg. But now I know! The hollandaise sauce wasn’t difficult. I got it right the first time but it sure is time consuming. 20 minutes of “constant stirring” is a bother. So this week I tried hollandaise sauce from a mix.

Concord Foods Hollandaise Sauce Mix. “Simply Add water and cook”

It cooks quick enough…. 1 cup of warm water in a sauce pan, add the packet, set to medium-low heat, 6 minutes of constant stirring later and it had thickened.

But for taste it kind of fell flat. It -looks- perfect. Right-on consistancy & color. And it doesn’t taste bad, it just doesn’t jump out at you and say, “I am hollandaise, love and cherish me!” I don’t know, maybe my taste buds were biased by the amount of time they knew was put into real hollandaise. Maybe if I added a little clarified butter and lemon to perk it up. Yeah, thinking about it, I think it was seriously lacking in the tangy-lemon department.

I might try it again sometime but I’ll definitely have to fiddle with the flavor to make it work. That takes away from the ease of use, though if worked correctly, it could still save 15 minutes and setting up that odd double-steamer setup for authentic hollandaise.

For now, out of 5, I give it:
Appearance: 5
Taste: 2

I can’t believe this! There is a Star Wars Ep III trailer out and….. dare I say? No, daren’t I…. Yes. Dare I will. It’s good! It shows real potential! Check it out. It’s a 30 meg .mov available as a BitTorrent. Check it out!

Star Wars Ep III trailer

Don’t know what Bittorrent is? Get it here, luddite.

(sorry, I never got to finishing this… but here’s a start)

Here’s the easiest way, assuming the old (source) PC is still working.
The steps below will import from Outlook Express to Outlook.

On Source PC, install Outlook. Start Outlook and import email and addresses into Outlook.
Copy outlook.pst from Source PC to Target PC.

If all I have are Outlook Express files,
http://www.mailnavigator.com works to convert dbx files back into mail folders.

For each Outlook account, all dbx files are saved in one directory called the
store root directory, which can be defined by choosing the command:
Tools | Options | Maintenance | Store folder

There are also several predetermined dbx files which are in the store root directory and don’t have a corresponding folder inside OE:

Folders.dbx – – – stores a tree structure of folders and other information.
Offline.dbx – – – contains the data of interactive access to IMAP and Hotmail accounts if those are available to you.
Pop3uidl.dbx – – – stores information from messages left on a POP3 mail server.

To copy address book manually:
copy C:/Documents and Settings/(username)/Application Data/Microsoft/Address Book/(username).wab from Source to Target, putting it in the same place on Target. On Target, do an Import of Outlook Express addresses.

Here’s where Outlook Express stores folders:
C:/Documents and Settings/(username)/Local Settings/Application Data/Identities/(some crazy string)/Microsoft/Outlook Express
Or maybe
C:/Documents and Settings/(username)/Identities/(some crazy string, one per user on the machine)

Media night with VC was a great success. I wanted to reaquaint her with that wonderful overstimulating drug known as television. So we sat down and watched (via the miracle of Tivo) an episode of Drawn Together, Jackass, Mythbusters, and The Daily Show. Unfortunately, even the miracle of Tivo can’t squeeze the first 6 hour-long episodes of 24 into a single night’s viewing. We also managed to sneak in some time to relax. :-)

Someone told someone who told TJIC who told me about this. Now I'm telling you.

From The Lord of the Rings… well not really. 

Rock on! (as it were)