Archive for October, 2008

I used to type by pecking two-fingered at the keyboard — it was very laborious and painful, hunching over the letters with my head nodding up and down as I checked between the screen and keyboard every few seconds. Finally, I taught myself to touch type using a book from Pitman’s Secretarial College, which was a long tiresome process in itself over the course of three months. It paid off, however, as I slowly increased my typing speed over time from 20 words per minute to around 70 — 80. Touch typing helped me write my novel is easily, enabled me to do my job as a lawyer more efficiently and these days, means I can churn out e-mails, documents and blog posts very quickly. However, the downside is that spending hours on end at the computer during office hours and then in my own time in the evenings typing away means that my hands and elbows get tired and cramped. My shoulders and neck are often stiff and achey. Also, being stuck in a sitting position for long periods means that my legs and back are also badly affected.

I am guessing that this is a common experience for many people. All the discomfort that comes from having to sit and type in order to communicate on the computer takes the joy out of surfing the net and connecting with friends, doesn’t it? Well, for those of you who are fed up with typing, salvation is at hand!

I have just installed the latest speech to text software from Dragon Naturally Speaking and I am dictating this blog post while wandering around my study, occasionally standing by the window to watch the world go by. I hardly have to touch the keyboard as the program types out everything that I dictate and if I want to make an amendment, I can give it voice commands to do so for me. The version that I am using is the “Preferred” version 10 which comes with a wireless headset. It is very intuitive to use and has a huge vocabulary — it has recognised place names like Dulwich and Norwood, proper names like Joan Baez and John Steinbeck and unusual words like chorizo. I can give it voice commands to move around web pages and also control the keyboard. One of the other functions I like about it is that if I am away from my study, I can dictate into a digital recorder and then later, can next be recorded to my computer and Dragon will transcribe the audio file into text.

When you first install the program, you have to spend about 10 — 15 minutes training it to get used to your voice. Initially, it felt a bit strange “talking to” the computer and I was a bit shy! However, after a few minutes I got quite into it and now it seems the most natural thing in the world — in particular, because I use the wireless headset and tend to do my dictating while looking out of the window, it does not feel as if I am “talking to” the computer. The great thing is that I can speak at more or less a conversational pace and it is accurate upwards of 95% of the time, provided I enunciate clearly. In fact, it is much quicker for me now — one week in — to dictate than to touch type because the program is so much more accurate than my typing e.g. it doesn’t transpose letters or hit two keys at the same time!

I think to make the best use of this program, it is a good idea to have an outline in your mind of the structure and flow of your article, blog post or e-mail so that you do not have to spend much time afterwards editing and/or moving text around. Normally, I would have to do some minimal editing and rewriting just to tidy up anything that I have typed anyway, so having to do that at the end of a dictated text isn’t such a big problem — it only becomes a pain if you have to do substantial rewriting on your dictated text.

Being able to dictate text easily and accurately has really made blogging and e-mailing so much more fluid and less physically tiring. I am also more inclined to flesh out my e-mails to my friends because it doesn’t involve tiresome typing. As for blogging, it is helping me stay prolific and engaged.

So, if you are tempted to try Dragon Naturally Speaking, please do come back and let me know how you get on. (I have no association with the program or company and get no benefit from this review.)

A little while back, I tried an experiment to go shelfless — this was an attempt to reduce the number of physical books that I had in my house so that I could either have fewer shelves or use the shelf space for other things e.g. ornaments and photographs. This meant seeing if I could compile a library consisting of only e-books or audio books. I explored the various websites offering the books and also the various e-book technologies and initially, it all looked quite hopeful. I also discovered an audio books site, audible.com, where you can download audiobooks as MP3s and I was quite excited because I really do enjoy listening to audiobooks — I like being able to do something else while I am being read to.

Unfortunately, the experiment did not go as well as I had hoped. The current state of the e-book landscape is that there are very many file formats and you need different types of e-book readers in order to be able to read a particular format. I downloaded the Mobipocket application as it seemed to have a lot of functionality, including the ability to annotate the E book text. And then I found that some of the books that I wanted to read were not available in that format and I had to download other applications in order to enjoy them. Also, there are not yet enough books being published in electronic format so there were of course some books that I wanted to read which were not yet available electronically.

I was doing all this on my computer and/or laptop that I was also keeping an eye on the dedicated e-book readers that have been coming onto the market e.g. the Amazon Kindle (currently available in the US only) and the Sony Reader. These devices are pretty expensive although sleekly designed — and all they can do is read the books. You can load hundreds of e-book onto them and that is the main advantage. For now, I was not prepared to spend £200 or more on these gadgets so I was stuck with reading books sitting up at my desktop computer or half lying down on the sofa with a hot laptop on my lap.

It all got too complicated, too cumbersome and too irritating so while I am still an advocate for e-books in theory — because of the space saving aspect as well as all the digital advantages such as being able to search and add annotations — at this stage in the game, I have given up on e-books until they sort out the “e-Babel” mess. Having said that, the one device where I have a number of the books still loaded on which I access consistently is my mobile phone: I have an English-French dictionary which is very handy when I visit France and also a book that I am reading very slowly when I am waiting at a bus stop or out and about and have nothing else with me to read.

As for audiobooks, because I live in the UK the audible.com website, which is a US site, would not allow me to sign on and sent me to be UK version of the site. The US version has over 40,000 titles but the UK site has around 20,000 — and the UK titles tend to be the kind of books that you would find in the large print or audiobooks section in your local library i.e. the modern-day equivalent of Catherine Cookson and lightweight titles. The US site has a lot of current affairs and non-fiction titles that are up-to-date with the top seller lists e.g. Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and Fareed Zakaria’s The Post American World. I found myself meandering listlessly around the UK site half-heartedly choosing audiobooks that I did not really want just because I was desperate to download a book to listen to. After several months, I gave up and cancelled my account at audible.co.uk. If they increased the selection of titles to the equivalent of the US site, I would certainly consider signing up again.

So the upshot of this sad, sorry tale is that I am back to having very little shelf space while my physical book collection steadily increases! I suspect that this is because we are still in the early days of e-book technology and that once the cost of e-book readers comes down and the different formats and platforms resolve themselves, it will be a lot easier to enjoy electronic books. As for audiobooks, the problem seems to be international copyright issues — given that this is a fraught area of law, who knows when those issues will be resolved! Also, I expect UK listeners’ taste for audiobooks being different from US listeners’ tastes - my sense is that a lot of of US listeners listen to audiobooks in the car during long commutes wearers this habit is not so entrenched in the UK so it is likely that I will had to wait quite a while to be able to access interesting audiobooks in the UK.

What is your experience with the books and/or audiobooks? Are you not surprised by my experience or have you had better luck? Do add a comment and let me know.

Photo: thanks to Muskingum College Library from flickr.com (CCL)

I love blogging but I have to confess, sometimes I really do not feel like sitting down at the computer to write a blog post. Do you ever feel like that? Usually it’s because I am too tired or I have spent the whole day at work sitting at the computer and I just don’t feel like staring at pixels anymore. Or I just don’t feel very inspired at all. So what is to be done to keep the momentum going?

Regular commitment

It can be very tempting to say, I’ll just skip it this week — maybe next week I’ll be more inspired or I’ll have more energy or I’ll have more time: then I will blog, I’ll blog next week. But I know myself too well — next week will come along and I will feel the same way and say to myself: next week, next week. So I try and make a commitment to myself to blog at least once a week — that’s manageable for me as a minimum and if the spirit moves me to blog more than that, then that’s a bonus. I also think of it as a commitment to my readers — rather like any relationship, it’s all about making a connection regularly. So I decide on a day each week that will be my “blog publication day” and I try to stick to that schedule. So far, it seems to be working.

Jot down ideas

I also keep a notebook to hand — or at least a scrap of paper or a post-it note — so that whenever I have an idea that would make a good blog post, I jot it down immediately. Even if I have an idea that is not so great, I jot it down. Keeping all these blog post ideas together in one place means that when I am not feeling very inspired, I can look through them - and more often than not, these notes can prompt me to explore more deeply something that inspired me some time ago. This means that even though I may be feeling a bit flat at that very moment, my old inspirations can still spark and rekindle my energy for blogging.

Try a different way of doing it

I have also been trying alternative methods of blogging. As you can see from my efforts over the last year, I have tried audio blogging and video blogging as well as the usual written texts. Occasionally, I write a blog post on my mobile phone while I am at a cafe waiting for a friend or sitting out in the garden so that blogging does not trap me at my computer. My latest experiment is with speech-to-text technology (I have recently installed Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 10) so that I can dictate e-mails, letters, blog posts and — who knows — maybe even my next novel or book project. I am dictating this blog post while standing at the window in my living room, looking out at the autumn colours in my garden!

How do you keep the momentum going when it comes to blogging? I hope you will add a comment and share your tips and tricks as well!

Photo: Death Valley Marathon - thanks to El Hombre on flickr.com (CCL)

Like many people, I have been keeping track of the financial news regularly throughout the day. I tried to catch the TV news all the radio bulletins if I am at home. Otherwise, I check out the newspaper websites online. The press reports talk about a “rollercoaster ride” and indeed, there are developments every hour with share prices plummeting and then recovering, up and down, throughout the day.

Back in the days of print, newspapers would have found it difficult to compete with the broadcast media in terms of delivering up-to-the-minute dispatches. However, moving online has enabled publications like the Guardian and the Times etc to bring updated news easily and quickly to their readers in almost the same way as broadcast news bulletins. In particular, I am following the Guardian’s live blog of the financial crisis .

At times the Guardian’s live blog updates every 15 minutes or so. Where it does not have any hard news, it brings commentary from web and blog sources so it is quite a good site to keep an eye on for a very few on the credit crunch developments.

Social media tools such as blogging are excellent for fast, up-to-the-minute updates. You do not need to be a major news organisation to use blogging and other such tools to keep your readers informed at regular intervals — this is especially handy for businesses and other organisations at those times when it may be critical to keep your customers, clients and other stakeholders updated. For example, it can be reassuring for your customers not just to be told that “it’s business as usual” on your main website but to be refferred to your blog for regular updates about a developing situation that affects your enterprise.

It goes without saying that if you promise regular updates on your blog, then you must follow through and deliver those regular updates — ideally, you should set out minimum timescales e.g. at least once a day, or every hour or at least three times a day etc. And when you are going to wind down those regular updates, it makes sense to say that on your blog as well.

Of course, you may not be able to reveal confidential or sensitive business information about that developing situation affecting your enterprise on a minute by minute basis. However, if there is information that can be sensibly released, then it is worth considering doing so as part of your regular updates. Also, it may be sufficiently reassuring for people to know that the situation is being attended to and that more information will be provided at such and such a time in the future. It’s like when you are stuck on a train that isn’t moving, it’s helpful when the driver comes on and tells you that it’s due to signal failure and even though he may not know when it will be resolved, he will keep you updated from time to time — you still have to wait the same amount of time whether he says so or not but somehow, it feels reassuring and less stressful and frustrating.

Photo: of “The writing on the wall” thanks to Overseas Development Institute from flickr.com (CCL)

The Dulwich Picture Gallery is running an exhibition on the theme of What Are You Like?, based on a Victorian parlor game where you create an image of yourself based on a number of your favorite things e.g. your favorite book, animal, music, place etc. Some friends were telling me about it the other evening and someone said, “The modern equivalent is Facebook, isnt it?” - which started me thinking…

On social networks like Facebook and MySpace, you can show off to the world your favourite music, movies, books and interests as well as who your friends are. On MySpace in particular, you can redesign the look of your page with wallpaper that reflects your personality and you can play actual music that plays when your visit to comes to your page. On both social networks, you can add a picture of yourselfand people often change this photo to reflect their current mood or status. Some people use a photo of their dog or a cartoon image of themselves. All of it is a way of saying to the world: this is who I am.

It seems to me that this is a very human instinct going back beyond the Victorians playing their parlour games to time immemorial. Wherever we humans have been, we have wanted others to know us. Perhaps those ancient hand prints and paintings of buffalo in dark primeval caves are no more than a prehistoric people’s way of saying, “This is who we are. This is what we are like.” Archaelogist usually interpret these markings as religious symbols or cultural totems but perhaps they might be no more than the graffiti of a Neanderthal teenager who might have been trying to impress a girl… (”Me, I like bison, you like too? Look, me have big hands, you - hands so small and sweet.”)

We tell each other what we are like when we first meet as friends or when we go on a date. We want to find common interests and we want the other person to like us. We often present ourselves in the best light or at least, in light of that we think will appeal to the other person. I guess this is what we are doing on Facebook and MySpace when we share our music and favourite things online for our friends and also the world to see. On the Indian marriage and dating site Shaadi.com, users can include information about themselves such as their hobbies, interests and also there Indian astrological signs. They can also add photos and videos, and in fact the more information they include in their profile of the more helpful this is to the “eMatchmaker” that will be searching the database to find mutual matches for them. So, In the same way that the Victorians bonded with their friends - and perhaps grew closer to potential love matches - during the fun and flirtation of their evening parlour games, these days we find friends and modern day love matches via the pixels of online digital parlours.

So, lets see - what I would put on my Facebook or MySpace profile ( if I ever got round to filling those boxes in):

• My favourite animal - hmm, the problem is I dont really like animals.
• My favourite clothes - a pair of old, comfy jeans.
• My favourite place - home.
• My favourite pastime - writing and blogging.

Picture: thanks to mrnizz.blogspot.com

For background to the project, read my post about our involvement in Dulwich OnView