The Diary of Antoine Roquentin

This is the first post that I have written using the new MacSpeech Dictate. I am dictating directly into the Firefox window, no pesky dictating inside of a virtual machine and copying and pasting.

After the first few sentences, I am very surprised at the absolutely fantastic recognition accuracy. I’m not even using an approved microphone, and it hasn’t made a mistake yet.

I have been waiting for this application for probably two years… ever since I got my Mac Mini. I’m blown away. I have absolutely no excuse to not write.

Thank the Mac gods.

I can now dictate instant messages too… goodbye carpal tunnel!

Goodbye wrist pain.

well, now that I have unlimited writing skills and such, I don’t have a whole lot to say.

I got off of work and went down to naked lounge. I keep expecting to meet somebody there, but I never do. I did, however, run into Annie. I was driving down L Street and I saw her waiting for the bus, so I pulled over and said hi. I gave her my number, I guess she has a new phone.

Last night was rather fun, Susan, Zero and Titan and I went out for drinks. The plan in the beginning was to go out for sake, but after we went to the first place (Mikuni) we walked down to Luigi’s and got pizza. After venturing across the street to get a Sacramento News & Review, we went through the entire paper and there was nothing going on. So, plan B was to go down the Kasbah and have absinthe. it turned out to be really great absinthe too, some French variety of it.

Susan got this drink that she loved, I forgot what it was called, and Titan got an Irish Car Bomb. We had been planning to flip a coin to determine where we were going next, so we flipped the coin (we had added L and R to each side). Left, left, right, left, left, and we were officially nearing the Projects near Broadway…so we vetoed the coin and made a new one with arrows. Around this time, it was about one o’clock in the morning, so we kind of decided to call it a night as we were so out of the grid and the only thing open would be bars.

at the very beginning of the night, I gave Zero his birthday present, which he loved (it was a CosaNostra Pizza shirt from ThinkGeek). On the drive home, we blasted the Labyrinth soundtrack and talked about going to this thing called Jareth’s Ball, which sounds fun.

Work was okay, I completely rewrote the sidebar using conditional PHP statements… which was rather awesome, but a thankless task. There is absolutely nobody online… I should check my phone. Maybe somebody loves me. Nope. No missed calls, no text messages.

Andrew is ignoring me for some reason… I asked some earlier in the week if he wanted to hang out on Friday and he never gave me an answer, which is an implicit “no.”

Also, that random guy with a mohawk didn’t seem amenable. Zero invited me to go hang out with him and Mari, but I’m not a fan of karaoke. I have nothing against it really, but my mother dragged me to it for so many years I just can’t go of my own volition.

I was so angry today because Sprint delayed their wimax network indefinitely… I just felt like the entire technology industry was in some kind of a somnambulant trance, but this voice recognition thing really renews my faith in technology. I’m very surprised at its accuracy… it’s much better than Dragon NaturallySpeaking, even though it uses the same engine. Not running the program in a virtualized operating system probably does a lot to improve performance.

It does lack some necessary features, like a correction mechanism, but they say they are going to add that in the next version. It’s weird to say this, but it doesn’t make enough mistakes for the lack of a correction mechanism to be important.

One thing’s for sure, I definitely need a new headset. The program only gave me two out of five stars for signal-to-noise ratio… that and there are some shorts in the USB cable.

So I camped out at naked lounge for about three hours hoping something would happen, but it didn’t. Brian called me, Sam called me, my mom called me, but nothing materialized. I was going to stop by Brian’s work, but my back was killing me.

I guess something is going on with Johnny, but I am incapable of caring at this juncture. it’s doomed. We all know it. I hear Brian telling me things I told him when I was dating Terry. Yeah, bad signs.

Also, did you guys like my April fools post? I didn’t get any comments, but that comment spam plugin is so damn janky. I’m going to just send the moderation queue to a special folder so that it doesn’t fill up my inbox with spam (which pissed me off).

I don’t know what’s going on with Andrew. We had this really awesome time in the last time we saw each other…maybe ’cause I’d been drinking all night and he downed a bottle of Jägermeister.

We have this whole past and everything… but I don’t know whether that’s good or a liability. I just don’t have the energy to meet new people these days. I got into this awkward conversation with this woman at the downtown Washington Mutual who also had a Vespa. She asked me what my FSM bumpersticker thing was, and I told her it was the Flying Spaghetti Monster. she didn’t know anything about it and was preparing to leave, so I kind of gave up on explaining it and went in to deposit my check.

after I got home, I started watching American Dad… the most recent seasons are actually funny, season one was really disappointing and had only like one funny joke an episode, but I was laughing all the way through this recent episode about George Clooney.

Oh, I forgot to mention Hulu. It was NBC and CBS and all of those networks getting together and realizing they needed something to compete with YouTube (they are not dropping the copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube, just to clarify). it’s pretty cool… there is a lot of stuff that they got out of their vaults for this. It was in beta for forever, and it actually has content.

Also, all the South Park episodes are online on the official site too. All my reasons for getting cable are gone. I only wanted it for South Park, family Guy, and the Daily Show.

My dad is supposedly coming down next week, but I’ve been hearing that for months so I’m not particularly optimistic. I’m glad that I got him a birthday card… and I just remembered my other grandma’s birthday and I was supposed to send her card. It’s like Saturday or something…fuck, I suck as a grandson.

Also, in my mailbox this week was an invitation to Phi Theta Kappa, which was rather awesome. I guess I have been getting pretty good grades… I can’t remember the last time I got anything lower than a B. I wonder what my final GPA will be.

I really need to do some math homework tonight… let me just finish this episode and I will. :)

And, for Molly, here’s some NYPC lovin’. Here’s the video for The Bomb, more stuff can be found on their MySpace. Of course, their quintessential song is “Ice Cream.”