I Speak On A Meteorite

It is almost 7 PM Pacific time. I'm sitting in the living room with the golden sun at my back casting parallel lines on the kitchen wall. It's quite beautiful. I'm writing this entry in Dragon, the commercial voice recognition software. I've been using it for about a year with the Logitech headset and microphone. Periodically while I've been using it the wrong word would drop in. Sometimes not just the wrong word but in entirely strange sentence.

I've also taken to using Siri on the iPhone. Something that happened on the iPhone prompted me to take a different approach to Dragon on the computer. I noticed on the iPhone when I was using the voice-recognition software that it was dependent upon the quality of the Bluetooth that I was using. That led me to wonder if Dragon on the computer was dependent on the quality of the microphone.

The answer is yes. I invested about $40 in a meteorite microphone. It's a small relatively high quality microphone. The difference in Dragon, in Dragon's ability to accurately type what I'm saying, is remarkable. In this entire paragraph Dragon has only made one mistake and that wasn't really a mistake but an antonym. Most voice-recognition software struggles with them and generally takes a best guess based on context. If you have a tendency to write in short sentences, or to talk in clipped phrases, it can often miss them. So if you are using Dragon or a similar voice-recognition software I would highly recommend investing a bit of money in a microphone. Though there is probably an upper limit a good microphone seems to make quite a difference.

Let me fill you in on the rest of the day because it was pretty busy. I slept in a bit then drove up to Fremont to meet Tony for breakfast. Tony had to take his new car into the dealership give vacuum valve replaced. So I met him at his apartment and then followed them over to the Ford dealership there in Fremont. We drop the car off and headed over to the Black Bear diner for breakfast.

After breakfast we wandered Fremont a bit. I don't know Fremont very well so when I do drive up there I like to take the side streets and just kind of see where they go. This gives me a better feel for the city. This is how I learned that Tony gives crap directions. The standard set of directions he gives people to get to his apartment take them about 2 miles out of the way.

Anyway, after a bit of driving we swung over to the Fry's electronics there in Fremont, on Osgood, and just walked about the store that. Were both technical geeks so there are plenty of things we can simply look at and dream about when we are in an electronics store. I picked up some odds and ends there while we killed time. We weren't there very long, maybe 45 min., when the dealership called and told Tony his car was ready.

So, I drove him over, dropped him off and then headed south. I stopped at McCarthy Ranch, at a men's clothing store there and bought some new sport coats at a two-for-one sale. I already had a nice selection of sport coats, but they tended toward business casual, that is black or gray or navy. I wanted to pick up some lighter colored sport coats for a little more casual look. I got some very nice ones and am looking forward to wearing them.

From there I went over to the great Mall and met Don for lunch at outback steakhouse. I've been doing really good with my diet the last two weeks so I treated myself to a steak lunch. It was as good as I imagined it would be.

After lunch Don I took a walk through the great Mall just to stretch our legs. That place is always an amazing zoo. The press of humanity is something to see. From there I headed back over to McCarthy Ranch and stopped the Best Buy and it was at the Best Buy that I bought this new microphone.

After the Best Buy I went up to Baylands Park and took a long walk. It was a beautiful day for it that's for sure. After the park I came home with a stop at the drugstore to pick up some odds and ends for next weekend's trip. Then back to the house and a simple dinner of homemade vegetable barley soup. It was outstanding. I have a fairly good recipe and I'll have to post it here online. Right now I am watching the clock tick off the minutes and I am hoping to talk with TR tonight. They are out to a movie so I'm not sure what time they wrap will wrap up.

Daily Life: Zoom - Or The Impact of Single Tasking

I think many people in our current world multitask. We do more than one thing at once, layering them together, interweaving them like a tapestry. One of my New Year's resolutions was to spend more time single tasking this year. Focus on doing what I am doing, as I am doing it. I've been doing it for six months now and it has pretty much settled into habit.

It has certainly made the time fly by. This week is a classic example - I am three days through a four day and week and it seems to have passed in the blink of an eye. In ten working days I will start my vacation and be blessedly free of work for a remarkable 17 straight days (counting the overlapping weekends). I cannot remember when hung that much time off on a single thread.

Additionally, for the first time is about five years I am going on vacation without a major program, project, or problem hanging over me. It the previous years when I have gone on vacation I have always had to take my work laptop, so I could attend meetings, teleconferences, review data, etc. This time - I am leaving it behind!*

There have been some unintended side-effects though. In addition to the aforementioned flow of time I also suspect it is related to my feeling that I am not writing as much as I normally do, nor as diversely as I normally do. Often, especially when I was home, I would have the laptop fired up while I was doing other things - I would write while watching a movie, or I would write while playing guitar, or I would write while eating dinner.

I am pretty sure that in the space between spaces I was carving out an extra hour a day or more to write. The other observation is this - I seem to be one of those people who is both more outgoing and more productive when I am crunched for time. I suspect it is because the time crunch means I have to be better at managing my time and carve out specific blocks of time to do those things that I want to do.

I can also attribute part of the feeling of a lack of productivity to the iPhone. The iPhone has a touch screen key pad and, in my experience with it, it is no where near as convenient or as quick as thumb typing on the QWERTY keyboard in a Blackberry or any other device that has an actual keyboard. The iPhone is fine for firing off short notes and texting, but for anything longer, it is just not as good - it is purely hunt and peck. On the Blackberry I could write entire paragraphs and long documents with ease.

Finally, I think there has been a third influence and that is the Amazon Kindle 2. I am already a rather voracious reader and the convenience of the Kindle 2 has definitely increased the amount of time I spend reading - if you can afford one, and you are a voracious reader, well, I definitely give that device both thumbs up. The application that allows you to read your Kindle 2 books on the iPhone also gets a big thumb's up from me. Basically what it means is that, wherever I go, I have the current book I am reading with me. I am sure some of the time that used to be spent in incidental writing has fallen over into the incidental reading category.

So, I am single tasking, time is flying, and I am enjoying myself but trying to figure out how to carve more time to write out of my day. I am pretty sure it is just a matter of applying some discipline and focus and over the next couple of weeks I am going to try and move over into that space. I think that is really the only tweak I want to make in my 2009 New Years Resolutions.

*It is more of a psychological thing than anything else, I will take my personal laptop with me on vacation and I'll be able to access work email from there via VPN, but it will be a different feeling because I won't HAVE to do. Funny how that single phrase "you have to do it" can turn into a burden.