Dave’s not here. Well, sort of. Dave here. For a minute. Di’s taking the weekend off. I sent her a bunch of material that she’ll work in next week. I just spent a lovely day cleaning my apartment, reading a few chapters out of the book of Matthew, and catching up with friends. My ex-bandmate Will Matherly (if we ever were a band, I don’t know) called early this evening looking for lyrics. I gave him some of my old lyrics (a pop/punk number reminiscent of The Cars and a dreary, gothy tune that was trying to sound like Joy Division or The Cure but ended up sounding nothing like either), then I started rattling off some lyrics I’ve been carrying around for two years but never finished properly. I told him I’d fix some dinner, finish them as I ate, then call him back in a couple of hours. The result was a hard-driving punky number called “Not Much Like You” using a really uncreative straight-A rhyme scheme (the exception being a brief “But Wait!” interjection). For some reason, my specialty seems to be breakup songs.
Monotonous songwriting
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2000/09/monotonous-songwriting/
Binary file editing and hardware compatibility
Binary file editing. I’ve recovered many a student’s term paper from munged disks over the years using Norton Disk Edit, from the Norton Utilities (making myself a hero many times). Usually I can only recover the plain text, but that’s a lot better than nothing. Rebuilding an Excel spreadsheet or a QuarkXPress document is much harder–you have to know the file formats, which I don’t.
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2000/09/binary-file-editing-and-hardware-compatibility/
Modems, voice recognition and video cards
More NaturallySpeaking adventures. You must all the thinking now that my life consists of church brochures and NaturallySpeaking. That’s just about right. I work for hours on the church brochure, and then I come home and play with NaturallySpeaking.
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2000/09/modems-voice-recognition-and-video-cards/
More impressions of NaturallySpeaking
Wednesday, 9/27/00
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2000/09/more-impressions-of-naturallyspeaking/
First impressions of NaturallySpeaking 5
I am dictating to this with NaturallySpeaking. I still have that cheap ESS sound card in my system, but thanks to the aftermarket noise canceling microphone I am getting decent results. I will install the new Sound Blaster when I get time. I only had to make one correction on this post, which is a tremendous improvement over my previous experiences with voice recognition (and I have some, dating back to 1996, since I was one of the 12 people who actually bought OS/2 Warp 4, which included a predecessor to ViaVoice).
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2000/09/first-impressions-of-naturallyspeaking-5/
NaturallySpeaking arrives, plus W2K hardware compatibility issues
Naturally Speaking is here. Along with my SB Live! card. But alas, I’m not. I’m up to my neck in a brochure for my church. I’d grade my writing an A or A-, my editing an A, my design a B+, and my photography a C. Not perfect, but it gets the job done, and there’s no time for perfection. And I never claimed to be anything more than a competent designer and I never claimed anything at all about photography, besides owning a good camera.
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2000/09/naturallyspeaking-arrives-plus-w2k-hardware-compatibility-issues/
Brightmail, plus voice recognition
Brightmail update. I promised an update earlier (or at least I implied one) on Brightmail, the free (for private use) spam filtering service at www.brightmail.com. They’ll of course gladly sell your business spam filtering tools–that’s the point of their free service: Get you hooked, so you go tell your boss about it and they get some business.
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2000/09/brightmail-plus-voice-recognition/
“Apple lost,” Steve Jobs says
Apple obsession continues. See if you can guess who said the following:
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2000/09/apple-lost-steve-jobs-says/
Sound card and hard drive troubleshooting
Sound card woes. Gatermann recently ran into some problems with sound cards forcing his Internet connection to drop. It had literally been six years since I’ve seen a problem like that before, but he kept running into it. Finally, it dawned on me: Try changing slots to force it to use a different interrupt. Therein was the silver bullet. The problem didn’t go away completely, but the culprit arose: the Sound Blaster 16 emulation. So I had him go into Device Manager and put the SB16 emulation on a different interrupt, and the problem went away.
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2000/09/sound-card-and-hard-drive-troubleshooting/
Sounds cards, hard drives, and initial dual G4 impressions
The underwhelming dual G4. I had a conversation Tuesday with someone who was thinking about ditching his PII to get a dual G4 because he thought it would be faster. I guess he thought if he got VirtualPC or SoftWindows, a dual G4/500 would run like a dual PIII/500 or something, plus give him access to all the Mac software. Nice try.
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2000/09/sounds-cards-hard-drives-and-initial-dual-g4-impressions/