Wednesday 8 August 2007

Pic of the day: Unnatural dragon speaking from the anime Sumomo mo Momo mo.

Imaginary 2008

I randomly came up with this awesome idea, not that you had expected less from me What if I write an entry set 1 year into the future, then 2, 3, 4 etc? I would describe my day or recent events or whatever I usually do, but based on the premise that I am in the future I expect for that year.

Of course, it is by no means certain that I will really be alive at that time, much less have all necessary body parts and brain required to write an entry. But this is the human condition. And it matters less to the writing than it does to me personally. For in truth, I don't know the future, and all I write will be more than a bit off anyway. Still, it should be fun when that year comes around (provided we aren't all eaten by a man-made black hole in March 2008) to see just how wildly off I was.

Fiction starts here

8 August 2008

I always expected that there would be one final issue of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. This seems to be it. It has been two years since version 9, which was already unbelievable (at least on a good computer). It was advertised as having a 99% success rate in transcribing speech, and I would not be surprised if that was true for native English speakers after a couple weeks of training. As a foreigner with English as my third language, I never got quite that close to perfection, but it was still a decent alternative to typing when my hand hurt. (Luckily my hand has improved a bit over the years after I stopped having large typing jobs at work, and after I began exercising more at home.)

Ironically my relationship with Dragon NaturallySpeaking started with the NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, which is November (and which is, incidentally, now international). Writing 50 000 words in 30 days was more than my wrist could handle, and so I enlisted speech recognition. The first years I am sorry to say the speech recognition had little more than entertainment value. By version 8 it could be used in a crisis, but the strain on my voice soon made my throat hurt instead of my wrist. Only with NaturallySpeaking 9, almost exactly 2 years ago, could I speak softly to my computer. Even that is more than I'm used to: I tend to spend my days in silence, except for exchanging a few words at work now and then to solve computer problems of my coworkers. Whatever the reason, 2006 was the first year I completed the NaNoWriMo challenge. It was also the last year I tried.

In 2007, my creativity was much reduced. This had happened temporarily in the past, and rather scared me. Now, I was OK with it. Creativity is a property of the spirit, after all: We are made in the image of the Creator. But increasingly I had found other uses for my spirit. I was not, and am not, a spiritual person by any means. But the pull toward a richer inner life had picked up strength, and the idea of harboring the "muses in my head" did not much appeal to me anymore. I still dabbled a little in fiction, but I could not imagine something on the magnitude of NaNoWriMo. It is a safe bet that I won't do it this year either, and - God willing - never again.

Even so, I have ordered Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10.[NOTE to the new reader: There is no Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 as I am writing this. It is an imaginary event, as explained above.] There are a couple reasons why I expect this to be my last, though: 1) It is now (according to the various people who have tested it) more reliable than a professional secretary. 2) It will be included in all future versions of Windows, after Microsoft bought out Nuance this past spring. [NOTE to the new reader: Microsoft has not shown any interest in Nuance as I write this. It is an imaginary event, as explained above.] While I have gravitated toward Linux at work, I still use Windows at home because I still play games. So at least until equivalent software is available under Ubuntu Linux, this is it.

I have to admit I'm impressed by the progress in Ubuntu. There is hardly a day without some new update, although most of it is not relevant to me. I have no idea when they made the start button available: I accidentally read somewhere that you could assign any key (shifted or otherwise) to any of the menus. That way they are not the ones that have assigned the start menu to the Windows key on a standard PC keyboard, and nobody can sue them. It is pretty much as easy to use as Windows now, and prettier. And of course it runs faster, even on older hardware. If only it could play Sims 2 but no, that one thing seems beyond them forever.

Speaking of Sims 2, I am totally not buying the Hollywood expansion pack, which is out in September. I know I said the same thing about Bon Voyage last year (or didn't I? I certainly meant it) and about Pets the year before. And then I bought them anyway, and regretted it. Never again. I think

PS: My Greater Pleasantview neighborhood now has well over 1000 sims. Of course most of them are townies. In a way I dread the coming of Sims 3 in 2009, because I don't want to leave my pet project. (Not the kind of pet that sheds fur, mind you.) I have run Greater Pleasantview since I got Seasons in spring 2007, and even then I was returning to the neighborhood I had used between Uni and NightLife. It may seem unlikely that I would know over 1000 sims by name; that's certainly far more than the number of humans I know. Of course, you can't just point at humans and see their names. Yet.

Well, that should be enough for one entry. I am still mysteriously two weeks behind Real Life, such as it is. Perhaps writing more briefly would help. Although I think I have tried pretty much everything except quitting my job, and I seem to be stuck running behind forever.