Mumbling to myself

Yay!  Here is an neat program that was developed internally at Microsoft - which I have (at times) come to rely upon - and now it is finally available to the public, so I can actually talk about it.

Windows Speech Recognition Macros (available here: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=fad62198-220c-4717-b044-829ae4f7c125&displaylang=en) is a nice little tool that allows you to create a variety of "macros" for Vista's built in speech recognition.  What this specifically means is that you can set it up to simulate a series of key strokes, or run a program, in response to a specific phrase.

I have used this at times for nice little time-savers like "Insert my hotmail address" and "Insert my street address" - which is much faster than trying to dictate those items manually.

But my bigger use has been combining it with my SmartNav (http://www.naturalpoint.com/smartnav/).  SmartNav comes with a built-in "keyboard to click the mouse" function - and by augmenting this with voice macros for commands like "click mouse", "double click mouse", "right click mouse", etc...  I have been able to use all aspects of a computer without needing to use my hands at all.

Cheers,
Ben

Lately I have been reading "Ramona" books to Isaac and Elizabeth at night.  Personally, I do not particularly like these books - but the children seem to enjoy them.  More interestingly - as the follow the life of Ramona, who reminds of Elizabeth a lot at times, from age 4 to age 10 - they do provide for some interesting conversations with my children.

Last night I read a section where a 5 year old Ramona was upset at her family and declared that she was going to say a "bad word" and then had her family burst out laughing when the word was "guts".  After reading this - I started to say good night to the children, but had Isaac pipe up and say "I know a worse word than 'guts'!"

I immediately had a moments hesitation as I thought to myself: I never swear around the kids, so he shouldn't know any *really* bad words - I wonder what he has heard at school?

Eventually I responded "Really?  And what word would that be?".

Much to my relief his response, after a moment of hesitation on his behalf, was "Poop!"

To which I was able to smile and say "Yes, that is not a nice word - I hope you do not say that at school."

Cheers,
Ben

Normally when I get home and ask Isaac what he has done that day - I am met by complete confusion from him.  He knows that he went to kindergarten - but much beyond that he cannot tell me what he did or what he liked.  As such I was very surprised when I got home last night, asked Isaac how his day had been, and he responded that he had played with puzzles at kindergarten - and that he had particularly liked doing the United States puzzle.

It appears that my son is finally starting to develop the ability to be able to talk about his day - hopefully this will make it much easier to find out what is going on inside his head!

Cheers,
Ben

I appear to have a new allergy - but I do not know what it is.  Over the last couple of weekends I have been having incredible stomach aches and gastro problems.  Each time we have been able to trace it down to a new food that I had tried - but in each case there was nothing that I know I am allergic to in any of the foods.

So - it is time for me to head off to the allergist to get tested again - and it looks like I will need to avoid any new foods in the meantime.

Cheers,
Ben

A couple of days ago my iPod Nano stopped powering on for me,  a bit of poking around showed that I had most likely crunched it under something and broken some internal components, and nothing I could do would bring it back.

Funnily enough I was quite happy about this - as I finally have a reason to go out and buy a Zune.  I have a number of friends with Zunes, and I think they are quite nice (plus I work for Microsoft), but I could not bring myself to buy one while I had a working iPod.

Before rushing out to buy a Zune I thought I would use my Creative Zen as my interim music player - but after syncing up my music I found that the Zen wouldn't play them.  After a couple of minutes of resetting and replacing batteries the Zen started coming up with a nice "send me back to the manufacturer" display.

Grrr....

So until I get a Zune my music player at the moment is my PSP - which is far from an ideal music solution - but it is better than nothing.

Cheers,
Ben