Sunday 28 August 2005

Pic of the day: Dash dash dash! Rizel from the anime Rizelmine. No reason really, except I wanted someone who looked dashing. That and the phrase "dash dash dash!" is her refrain. ^^

Dashing to catch up

OK, this should be quick. Because this Sunday I did little more than write the entries for the preceding week, dial up to upload them, and then write another. Oh, I took some time to play Civ3 and Sims2 and even Morrowind. These are all great as long as I don't play them for too long in one stretch. I play Sims2 and Civ3 on my bedroom PC, then get up and get over here. By changing back and forth whenever I start to tense up, I don't utterly destroy my hand and arm.

I have also discovered that my mobile phone, which is fairly new, turns itself off if any pressure is applied to it, and possibly at random. I am not sure what caused this, but probably because I carried it in my pocket one day. It is no big deal, it seems that text messages that are sent while it was off will arrive when I turn it on. Or at least that happened on Friday.

Finally, I have once again downloaded Dasher, the text entry tool that is more like Tetris. You catch characters as they drift across the screen. This may sound crazy, but the smart thing is that the program has a statistic on which characters are most likely to follow after the four preceding once, and the next most likely and so on, and makes boxes in corresponding size. So after a T comes a H that fills around half the screen in most cases, since "th" is roughly as common a sound as "t". This makes it very easy to catch the right sequence of characters, just move your cursor (or stylus on a pocket PC) so that it intercept the boxes as they drift over. You choose the speed of drifting on the fly, and can even reverse the flow if you made a mistake. The only problem is that it is slow at first. But it is also fun at first. It probably gets boring before it gets fast, though, since I have never used it for any long period of time in the past. I had it on my previous pocket PC, Cassie the Cassiopeia. It also works flawlessly on my iPaq. Well, unless you consider it a flaw that there is no comma, semicolon or apostrophe...

Tomorrow I am going to take a day off from work and wait in vain for the techies who promised to show up then between 12 and 16 (noon and 4PM).

Also my throat is beginning to be sore. I still tried to walk to the shop, as my pulse was if anything lower than usual. But heavy rain made me return less than halfway there. My digestion is improving after a bad day. But the sore throat is getting worse. No dictating for the near future.