So I just updated to the most recent version of MacSpeech Dictate. Version 1.5 is supposed to be way more advanced and with way better recognition capabilities. I’m not sure why, but the application seems way more responsive than the old version.
In the old version, when I would speak a paragraph or so it would kind of freeze for a little bit and the volume meter wouldn’t move it if I tried to turn off the microphone it wouldn’t do anything and then it would spit out a paragraph of 80% correct text.
Wow, this is fantastic. With my new expensive microphone and the new software, I’m getting no errors at all. Exciting.
We spent the past four days at my aunt’s house in South Jersey. Since I’ve been going to the gym the kids didn’t wear me out as much as they normally do, but I was completely unable to get any reading done. Even on the beach they never chilled out, always wanting to do something. It strikes me as odd that they never make sand castles or anything. Maybe it’s because they go to the beach like every other day.
I got a good tan, that’s for sure. It’s so nice to be home. I’m trying out this new backup service called SugarSync this week. It’s kind of like Dropbox, except for that it saves every version of a file that you are working on. For $99 a year, it also gives you this awesome web interface where you can basically browse your backed up files just like you are at your home computer along with every revision. I’m trying it out for a few months. I used to be so obsessed with backing things up, but when you don’t experience data loss for a long time you get complacent. Basically, if Gmail ever went down, I would be up shit creek.
Also, when I’m in college I can’t deal with the possibility of losing important files. With SugarSync, it even uploads the intermediate versions of documents as you are working on them.
I was never really gung-ho on online backup solutions because I used to be on such slow Internet and had such a massive volume of files to backup (I tried Mozy and CrashPlan), but with my FiOS, my 60GB allotment will have finished by the end of the week, if not sooner. We’ll see how good it is. I of course keep a local backup using Time Machine, but if my house explodes or something then all my files are gone. So yay for fiber to the home and yay for online backup.
I had this whole diatribe ready about how my cousins are being programmed to be served up for the war machine, but I just don’t have the patience. I feel like I’m the naïve one now to believe that we can have an informed citizenry. Alexis, after all, is only eight, but the endless barrage of advertising and branding I fear might be insurmountable. I try to put as many antiestablishment messages in, like:
Alexis: Don’t you like (insert thing marketed by Disney here)?
Me: I don’t watch television.
Alexis: Why not?
Me:I like to have my own thoughts. Don’t you like to have your own thoughts?
*no answer*
But even with my little digs at Disney and Burger King and McDonald’s and Chuck E. Cheese and Hannah Montana and 16 other Disney Channel shows that I can’t even remember the names to endlessly drumming in the message, my voice falls on deaf ears.
Consume. Consume. Consume. You will never be happy unless you consume. You will never feel good unless you consume. You must consume. Everyone else is doing it! You’ll be so happy if you just consume! Nobody likes the person that doesn’t consume. You don’t want to be them do you? So you’d better consume as much as you can right now!
Huxley is smiling in his grave.
And, of course, there are the bad behaviors that need to be worked on. Alexis, for example, will eat nothing. She only eats macaroni and like one other thing. We can’t get her to try anything she just doesn’t like it. She’s never had ketchup, yet she says she doesn’t like it.
Towards day number two, I got a bit fed up with it. It makes all of us a little angry, because she was just sitting there with one piece of fish on her plate with an expression like were asking her to eat hemlock to just have some fish before she has her pasta. So I said, “you know, there are a lot of children around here that would be overjoyed to have fish to eat. There’s a lot of children they can’t afford to have fish for dinner, they’re having grits or nothing to eat.” My grandma Jean started talking about how when she was a little girl her mother didn’t have very much food at all for the kids because they were very poor. The expression on Alexis’ face was priceless: she couldn’t even conceive of poverty.
Okay, small digression: they live near Rumson, which is basically the richest town in New Jersey. That whole area, Holmdel, Middletown, Long Branch are a social climber’s wet dream. The preschool that my other cousin Nicholas goes to, they won’t even talk to my aunt because she is not of the same “social class” as them.
I’m not saying they should have moved to South Central LA, but these kids are are living in a suburban bubble and are completely unexposed to reality. Still, they are great kids. Endearing, funny, and adorable as all heck, but they are setting themselves up to have the temperament of trust fund kids without the trust fund to back it up.
We had tons of fun while we were down there though. The first day we went to Point Pleasant and went on the rides with the kids. Alexis was thrilled to have somebody that would actually go on rides with her and my aunt had this huge book full of tickets for the rides, so it was basically unlimited fun.
Nick on the trucks.
Alexis making her ‘dragon face’ on the Spinny Dragons ride
The fam at the beach, LTR: My mom (the legs), Alexis, Grandma, my uncle Gary, Nicholas, uncle Jim, and aunt Gail.
My clothes are in the dryer and as soon as they are done I’m going down to the gym. I can’t believe we stayed there five days. I absolutely love my aunt and uncle and the kids, but I couldn’t work that whole week. That costs me a lot of money. Anyway, my mom and I were supposed to go to the city on Monday but I just can’t do it. I have to work every day I can this week, even though Drew is showing up on the 15th with his boyfriend.
Apparently the boyfriend has friends around here, so a part of me hopes I’m not going to be a full-time tour guide… although that would be tons of fun. I haven’t done any of the touristy things in the city for years. I think the last time I was on the Empire State building I was like 14. I meant to ask where they were staying, but it slipped my mind. We’ll see.
The good thing is I’ve made a major breakthrough in the redesign of my work site. Nearly all the work is conceptually done (I have the sketches and the CSS styles and all the PHP snippets, I just need to mash it all together with a consistent UI and make it work with the CMS.) That will be this week’s job, to have a working prototype by Friday.
I’m also kind of growing a beard-ish, mostly as Brooklyn camouflage.
Categories: Ennui