Thursday, January 06, 2011

It doesn't recognise 'eh'. DOOMED.



hello, my freaky darlings.

for Christmas, my family put in together and bought me Dragon Dictate for Mac. It was at my request. A year is long enough to sit on an idea, and where it down, until, it is no more threatening than my age painted this. I was actually a little bit excited to receive it, as while I will not be using it for fiction it will enable me to properly e-mail all you far-flung distant beautiful friends. I have missed you.

Unfortunately, many in technology, well, we have “issues". When I installed Dragon Dictate it politely informed me that it refused to run on the current version of Eddie's operating system. Fussy little sheet. That shouldn't have been a problem, and I was quite happy to even pay for a legitimate upgrade (because Macs are just too weird and funky to our stuff on) and went to do that right away. However, Apple beings so forwardthinking shooter orientated, and all that, there was no option to simply download the upgrade. Noel. They insisted on shipping me the physical disk. Which... Was not what I wanted this year on the first day of the four-day long weekend.

Beach ripe Martin.

I cultivated some patients (meaning I stole some from our little old lady on a Zimmer frame outside the supermarket) and ordered the damp upgrade will stop. It was not delivered on Wednesday. It was delivered on Thursday. And of course Apple use a courier service so they weren't going to just shove it in the letterbox. I had to sign for it. So I missed that first delivery, and low! The next delivery would not be until Tuesday due to new years public holiday will stop. Fine stop. That's just fine. Fortunately they agreed to deliver to my workplace which happened on Tuesday quite early, and it was just a CD case. It's not even like it was a big cardboard box of new slots packaging will stop they could have quite easily have shoved in the letterbox. It was only $40. The.

After doing a quick backup of all my necessary files, of which I'm sure I forgot many, I upgraded Eddie's operating system. Which was surprisingly painless.

Then I ran Dragon Dictate.

Then, I pulled out the fancy Swedish headset that my family had also given me for an extra $100 and went to plug it in. The fancied swish headset has a USB plug that is the some reason ridiculously why stop.

Eddie has only two USB ports.

I could not plug the headset in and have my ergonomic keyboard plugged in at the same time.

Can't.

I can tell you right now I did not just say “can't" Asian stop.

So I had to unplug my ergonomic keyboard, which meant that Eddie could not sit in he's nice ergonomic laptop stand, as it covers his own keyboard. This seems to be, I don't know, ergonomic forces at wall? I know. Factions of occupational health and safety revolution coming into conflict and you're getting distracted so that they not actually fighting the problem which is RSI and instead bed is fighting each other and... It is a little bit frustrating. I'm going to have to buy a USB hub. The better Eddie gets for my hands, the first portable he becomes.

So. There we are a will stop. As you can see, I have a little bit of trouble ending sentences. I haven't corrected anything in this post. For ease of reading I will go back and insert paragraph breaks.

And then, I am going to teach this program how to swear will stop.

Expletive. Blasphemy. Expletive.

8 comments:

  1. For you kids watching at home/also considering voice-recognition software...you're going to need more than 1GB of RAM.

    Eddie is having a heartattack trying to process all the audio input. There is massive lag between my speaking and the words appearing on screen. Not real useful for anything work related.

    Have been thinking about refurbishing Eddie anyway, if it's feasible. Otherwise may just have to resign myself to a new laptop.

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  2. My freaky darling, does your ergonomic keyboard not have a USB port in him? I'm pretty sure mine does. On the right-hand side? (Or perhaps I am confusing him with the other keyboard I had at work?)

    Also, I hope you have better luck teaching the software to swear than I managed with my Nokia phone.

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  3. One of my most favorite posts ever. hee hee.

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  4. PS: USB hubs are cheap.

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  5. Hey Tessa - a former staff member of of mine who had RSI (before it was re-christened OOS) ended up using Dragon Dictate at work and found it helpful. Hopefully it will work out well for you.

    Love the pic by the way. :-)

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  6. You're going to train your software to recognise only bad language and then write a novel that can't be spellchecked for anything that is not entirely foul.

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  7. Debs, yeah, I don't think that port is going to be much use for anything other than a USB stick...

    Jaime, yah, was going to grab one today but the shop was out. Bah.

    Thanks Ross. It's good for emails so far (to the amusement of my friends), but it'll be sometime before I trust it with much else.

    Gillian.........I've already trained Word's spellcheck. :p

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  8. Good effin' and blindin' luck! And awesome picture.

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