I’ve been watching e-Ink technology, waiting for it to be mature enough to make it a practical choice for supplementing/replacing my paper technical books. Products using this technology started to become available a little over a year ago, and I wrote a bit about them at the time.
A couple of days ago I hooked up a USB headset. For fun, I also activated Windows Vista’s voice recognition system.
It works, after a fashion. Some of what I’m typing here I’m typing more or less directly using voice recognition. But I have to do a tremendous amount of correction. Let me give you an example. The following text I will type directly using voice recognition, without any corrections.
I’m a technical worker. I think that the more generic term for my kind of work is “knowledge worker”, but whatever you call it, my stock in trade is generated by my gray matter.
I am not a genius: far from it, in fact. Every complex thing I figure out takes a tremendous amount of effort on my part. I’m good at seeing correlations: logical interactions or the like. But that doesn’t mean that I just pick up a book and instantly understand something. I really wish I did.
Part of my work involves designing and writing computer software. I come from an era when it was actually possible to understand a programming language more or less completely. I develop in several language frameworks these days, but even the simplest of them seems to me to be beyond the capabilities of one person to truly understand.
Iris was spayed yesterday. I was worried about the process, moreso than for our other cats. For some reason, I have emotionally tied myself to Iris in a similar way to how I did with Whisper years ago. And Whisper ultimately broke my heart when her little body gave out after her spaying operation.
There was a shudder throughout the Internet today: Robert Scoble, former Official Blogger for Microsoft and now writer/podcaster for PodTech.Net, didn’t receive an invite to a Microsoft developer conference. A fellow at Microsoft by the name of Alfred Thompson responded saying (more or less) that Scoble isn’t the target audience for the conference anyway. And Scoble was pissed by this response.
I found the following today during my usual morning coffee + web browsing session:
Wayne Crookes, a former campaign manager of the Green Party of Canada, said he “suffered an immense amount of frustration and emotional distress†over postings on Google’s Blogspot.com, a free blog-hosting website, within an entry under his name in Wikipedia, and on openpolitics.ca, an interactive political forum set up by Michael Pilling, an Ontario and federal Green Party activist.
I was reading one of my new favorite comics (thanks, Leaha!), and came across a mention of this:
April 19, 2007 (BELLEVUE, Wash.) – Paizo Publishing and Wizards of the Coast today announced the conclusion of Paizo’s license to produce DRAGON and DUNGEON magazines effective September 2007.
Source: NEWS: Paizo Publishing to Cease Publication of DRAGON and DUNGEON
It is odd how the death of a magazine that I haven’t read in years has caused me to pause
I found this quote on The Register from Intel’s VP and Director, Digital Enterprise Group, Steve Smith, really tickled my funny bone:
Sony just can’t seem to stop screwing their customers with various forms of DRM. First there was the Sony CD rootkit debacle (insert a Sony CD into your PC and get hacked by the best!) Now it appears that several of their latest DVD releases, including Stranger than Fiction and Casino Royal, won’t work on some consumer DVD players.
I am getting tired of the periodic pseudo-scientific “cellphones cause <catastrophe of your choice>” claptrap that gets picked up by the media. The latest one was brought to my attention earlier today via Slashdot: