Emma: Not just no…
… but Hell no.
Usually Emma Dog goes outside when I get out of bed and stays out all day (for some reason she won’t stay out if I’m not up, at least in the daytime.) She does her business, gets fed, explores, lies in the sun, all those outdoorsy dog activities. Today she started whimpering to get in after maybe half an hour. So I let her inside.
A few minutes ago, a little after 1:30 PM here in the Mountain West, Emma got up off her fleece on the couch and went to the back door. Which I’ve got propped open for ventilation. At the screen she stopped and stared out a few moments. It’s a standard way she petitions to go outside.
Then she turned, went back to her couch, and curled back up to go to sleep.
The reason’s not hard to divine: today really blows. Literally.
It’s our second day running of nasty wind. Today it hasn’t got up to really scary winds, which we attained around 5 PM yesterday. But its bad enough.
Today’s redeeming feature is that it’s a cool wind. It’s actually effectively aerating my house, which for some reason has the ventilation characteristics of a sealed bank vault even with all windows and doors wide open. I don’t even have the ceiling fan on in the living room, where I sit on the (other) couch - yes, it’s got an Emma Fleece too - writing this with the Cubs-Brewers game on in the background. (Oh, good. The Brew Crew just tied it on a home run.) Yesterday it just blew hot air everywhere. It was the very sort of day which makes me much prefer Fall to Spring. They’re my two favorite seasons; Fall mostly omits the killer winds.
Another annoyance is that there’s nothing I want to do in my yard right now that the wind won’t render impossible. Or at least make prohibitively unpleasant.
Yesterday was a bit of a loss anyway. I’ve been readjusting my sleep patterns, which badly need it, as they’ve cost me both productivity and pleasure - and we can’t have that. One way or another I got myself so sleep-deprived that I had basically devolved into a sort of early-reptilian form, and could only creep around vaguely at a glacial pace. I did manage to finish getting my Dragon NaturallySpeaking
Reminds me, I need to call the Bike Co-op and see if they’ll overhaul my recumbent trike for me so I can start riding again before the weather turns too crematorial.
Anyway, the dictation software should expedite writing on both my current Annja book, which I want to finish in a couple weeks, and The Dinosaur Lords, which I’ve sworn to complete the first draft of by midsummer. Which, yikes, appears to be considered the summer solstice, which falls on June 20th this year.
(Which, by the way, makes way more sense than the bureaucrats’ insane contention that summer begins in late June.)
Of course, given that my major DinoLords protagonists have names like Karyl, Jaume, and Melodía, it’s gonna take some serious training to bring DNS up to speed. But it should be well worth it.
Tags: Dinosaur Lords, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Emma!, man in motion, Writing
May 5th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
I don’t know if I could do voice recognition. I don’t like to listen to myself played back and my accent seriously mucks up a voice-to-text option. we Californians put all sorts of extra syllables into things and tend to put emphasis on strange parts of words. Not to mention we speak damn quickly.
Do let me know how you were able to work in your specialy words with the software, I am ever so curious!
May 5th, 2008 at 11:59 pm
Hey, Sara!
You shouldn’t have much trouble using DNS for direct voice-to-text transcription, when you’re dictating directly into you PC using a microphone. You basically train it to recognize your own peculiar intonations and pronunciations. Also it seems to prefer it when one speaks quickly. So neither your speech speed nor your accent (I didn’t know you were from California) should cause difficulties. Nor do you have to listen to yourself in the normal course of dictation.
You can also train it by reading lists of unusual words you use in your writing. So far it’s doing fairly well even with my eccentric character names.
What I haven’t figured out is how to train it for when I dictate on my digital voice recorder. So far it’s proving relatively accurate. Still.
But that only becomes an issue if you’re trying to transcribe recorded dictation.
Also, that’s why I was listening to the MP3s of myself. On direct dictation you watch the words appear onscreen before your eyes. Any mistakes, you can tell it to correct instantly - which also improves the software’s recognition of your pronunciations.
That isn’t possible when you’re transcribing recorded files. Since there still are times when the transcription wanders pretty far afield, the way I figured to proof it was reading the text and listening to the sound files simultaneously.
May 6th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
A friend of mine had that when his wrist/eblow tendonitis got too bad for him to type. He liked it a lot, but I still get some pretty weird emails from him.
I think its pretty awesome that one can “train” a program.
As for my accent, you encounter me at con when I am on my best behavior and using my best on-stage diction.
“In the wild” I use a lot more dipthongs and funny vowels, and by this stage in my life have added a bit of a Southern drawl on top of the NorCal lilt with the occasional Wisconsinian /thing/ that creeps in. *shudders*
Just come find me when I have been drinking this year at Archon and you’ll get an earful I am sure! ^_^