The Diary of Antoine Roquentin

I went to sleep yesterday at about 7 PM. Notwithstanding my mother calling and waking me up two or three times, I just totally zonked out until next morning at 9 a.m. It was incredibly strange. I didn’t even feel very rested. I’m still exhausted.

I’ve just been looking over the speech-recognition solutions available for Macs. The results are quite dismal. Unfortunately it looks like I’m going to be stuck with Windoze forever. There is one bit of software that is under development, and I have yet to see any reviews of it. However, it is basically assumed as a matter of course that Dragon NaturallySpeaking running on a slow, older PC is vastly superior to the ones engineered specifically for Macs. So basically I think I’m going to be using my PC for a while. I’ve decided to buy myself a new computer around my birthday, because that’s about when I started work on building my current computer. Perhaps by then they will have dual processor iMacs that support multiple displays. I still can’t exactly buy my new computer, because a certain peripheral that is necessary for using my surroundsound system hasn’t been released yet.

So basically I’m trapped in Windoze. I regret how little I’m blogging, but with this whole situation where I can’t type, it becomes such a chore. Before, I could just log onto Blogger.com, hit create new post, and just type to my heart’s content. Now, I have to do that and launch Dragon NaturallySpeaking and dictate into a text document because Dragon doesn’t know how to interface with Firefox correctly. But the good news is I asked my boss for a new ergonomic keyboard. The business manager is supposed to research it and get back to us. Tomorrow I’m going to have a bunch of work to do that I have sort of put off since my wrists were hurting yesterday. I did, however, do this one task that I had been dreading for weeks (mostly because the deadline was tomorrow).

Let’s see… what else has been going on. Oh yeah, I went to the river yesterday! It was incredibly fun, even though all of my friends were working and couldn’t come with me. Unfortunately the river was way too high to swim in. It was running too fast to get in much further than one’s waist. But I had fun anyway, lounging on the sand and listening to my MP3 player. I called Joe to ask if he wanted to go, but he had to work. I said I’d call him later, but with my impromptu 12 hour plus nap I didn’t get around to it. I should today. Maybe.

Today Martin invited me up to see his new cat (it’s really Adrian’s, but he’s indulging himself in the fiction of it being his). I don’t know about going up there. It’s always just Adrian and Katie playing with the ferret and me standing around in silence. Jane is a good social lubricant for that milieu, but I don’t know if she will be there. Katie says that no one talks in that house, and after being over there a few times I can certainly believe that.

My life has been really boring this week. I’m basically just waiting until my new check card arrives. It had better be soon, I need to pay my taxes, my Internet bill, and my insurance. I get paid Tuesday. Hopefully I will be a little bit ahead so I can stash some more away towards the new computer I will eventually get.

I changed some of my settings on my computer to favor better performance, as someone said to do on a message board to increase Dragon NaturallySpeaking’s performance, and I think it is working. I’m not sure though. Perhaps I always get recognition this good.

I think I’m going to lay down for a bit or go outside or something. I can’t be using the computer all day, this chair is uncomfortable.