Category: Personal

It’s been a very long time (I feel) since I have posted anything and for that I apologize. I have been extremely busy with work and believe (and hope) that it will continue for a while.

I will try to find a way to blog from mail, so things will work better offline – via plane and such to keep this active. Any recommendations would certainly be appreciated.

On the same sidewalk, a woman dressed for the business day was bent down and picking up after a dog so small that he deserved to be crushed and the woman, after making such a sight of herself, should have been shunned.

Doug Rushkoff has created an “Open Source Hagaddah” — a Passover Seder prayer-book that anyone can contribute to and annotate.

Link [Boing Boing]

Back from the surf and sand to find ~ 2000 emails about 1000 spam…

Many things to catch up on at work and a very full schedule of business travel this week. Postings might be quite light until I can figure out what time zone I am in … 😉

For the past 30 minutes I have been listening to a ridiculously loud employment interview directly behind me. It’s hard to appreciate the lack of privacy my common area (literally) office provides without seeing it, but it is killing me. I just put headphones on, just to block sound. Soon…

Different roads and times but our minds clearly crossed…

Mine is the left shot – driving East on I80 from Portland last Winter. I used my Sony Handicam and did a video still capture. Dave just completed a cross country drive though I think we used a still digital camera for his capture.

It is a truly beautiful one here in NYC today but I have spent the whole day working and (mostly) waiting… We have a major pitch happening and coordinating between shops has been taking over all that I might have been doing. Too bad since it is just over 50 degrees today and would have been perfect to be out and about.

hopefully tomorrow will hold out for me!

Update – I guess I could mention that the only advantage to all this waiting time has been a serious amount of MP3 ripping. Some old (160 and less) and some new – all set to 192! Love that SliMP3! Though my 5GB iPod sure holds a heck of a lot less since I became 192 obsessed!

While I am certainly not going to let it expire, do I really want to deal with transferring from VeriSign?

In order to unsubscribe to an MSN newsletter, you must actually sign into your Passport account. Since I don’t use Hotmail or MSN, my account was put on hold. When I tried to reactivate, the MS Server told me it was too busy… like there are that many people doing that same thing right now. Talk about the “Power of .Net.”

I can just set the newsletter as Spam in POPfile and say good-bye.

Thanks to the blizzard here in the East, my company is closed today…. My webcam will be running again today capturing the latest snowfall…

After a few more hours of use and a few more lessons of learning/training, iListen is turning out to be much more useful than I would have imagined. I feel better than I did earlier today which is great. Dictation into applications is working much more reliably. I just need to work out the kinks in commanding certain key commands within different applications and in general.

After some reluctance and I guess some frustration with ViaVoice, I decided to try iListen. Technically I have been a beta tester for some time, though I’ve actually never really used it. Shame on me…

The recognition engine seems infinitely more responsive, and though the commands seem a bit different I think I can easily adjust and the more satisfied with how to talk to my computer. I’m sure you remember the ads “you talk it types” but the reality is quite a bit different in general. IListen does seem to learn quicker in my short amount of time using it which terrific. I will spend some more time training this evening and report my progress back.

Since last Friday I have only have use of my left hand and arm. This makes it very difficult to do many things proactively on the computer amongst many other personal activities. Since this is actually the second time my right arm has been immobilized in a cast I was at least prepared this time. In order to function at work I try to limit the amount of text in my e-mails. I have been dictating into the computer using ViaVoice which works fairly well. Then in combination with some macros that you can program I am able to launch applications as well as command certain functions within them such as “delete.”

What I can tell you is this … voice recognition and command is far from perfect. It is actually quite difficult to be even moderately as efficient as I was only a week ago. I find that my performance on the computer is roughly 40 percent of what it was with two hands. In short, it sucks.

I had surgery on Friday … still in quite a bit of discomfort. My painkillers are working, but creating a slight haze in my brain.

For the next four next four to six weeks I will be dictating everything to the computer as I only have use of my left hand to type. Entries here will probably be fewer unfortunately just because it’s less practical for me to do this.

For the curious … My surgery involved stitching the meniscus which was torn in my right wrist. This is where your wrist connects to the ulna (pinky side). We also learned that the ligaments in the middle of my hand/wrist were stretched not torn. This is better than being torn but still not great. Apparently it’s still a wait-and-see after I recover from this procedure. From my conversation with my doctor, it will be a matter of how much pain or discomfort I can tolerate in the future which determines whether I need or want to have another surgery. Fixing the ligaments however will certainly limit my future range of motion probably by one third.

I slept horribly last night…

I leave in about an hour to head to the hospital for hand surgery. Partial discovery and part repair… The ligament damage I have suffered cannnot be repaired with this procedure but the cartilage can. The Arthroscopic procedure will allow for a significant (I hope) amount of learning to come from this.

My hope is that I will be able to escape without the need for a cast, but that is all based on the actual amount of damage in my hand. Unfortunately there is no way without going in, to determine the exact issue. Having never had surgery before, I am a bit nervous and uneasy.

I finally dealt and added an RDF feed that works with RSS 2.0. You can replace the RSS 1.0 feed with this one if you prefer. Links and the few pictures I post will now come through in your newsreaders. Both feeds fully validate so you should have no issue with either.

More – I am debating just replacing the 1.0 feed with the 2.0 feed so existing RSS readers don’t have to do anything. Good or bad idea? Thoughts?

So here’s a good question for you. How do you politely request someone’s kid to shut up? We can regularly here our neighbor’s kids screaming, both in pleasure and with tears, from their apartment and within the halls. In their apartment, OK. I am can deal with that. But in the halls? They seem to think it is a great idea to let their kids run up and down the hall for fun (during the early morning hours and on weekends). These kids love to scream in pleasure… We can’t possibly be the only people who feel some angst towards these kids, but what are we supposed to do?

Are you having a more difficult time reaching the site? I am… My email seems to be having trouble as well as my connection to the site. I can’t figure out whether it is the DNS on my domain or whether my Host is having some issues. Any thoughts would be appreciated.