Living the Digital Life
September 27, 2006
Both of my daughters are now taking dance classes near the University. My younger daughter’s class takes place on Saturday, and I do our weekly grocery shopping while she’s in class. The other class takes place at the end of the day on Wednesday, leaving me with not much to do for an hour.
Ukrop’s to the rescue! The grocery store at the Village Shopping Center has a wireless network. They set it up in their café, and the best part is that wireless access is free.
This past Wednesday was the first time that I brought my computer to Ukrop’s. I set up in the café only to find that while I was able to connect to the wireless network I wasn’t able to access any web site or service. Since I work in IT I thought this would be something I could troubleshoot but I seemed to get stuck when I tried to release and renew my DHCP settings. Nothing happened.
Seeking help, I went to the customer service desk at the front of the store. The person behind the desk didn’t seem to know much about the network. One of the area managers came over and I asked him if he knew anything that might help. He knew about it but wasn’t able to offer any assistance.
Depressed, I went down to the local Starbucks. Many Starbucks have a wireless environment and while I was pretty sure it costs money to use, I thought I’d at least find out. It turns out it’s $9.95 to have a single day of access, or $29.95 a month to have ongoing access.
Since I’m going to have dance class twice a week from now through May I decided Ukrop’s would be worth a second try. I brought my Mac back to Ukrop’s for Saturday’s grocery shopping trip. Once again I found myself on their wireless network but unable to access the Internet.
I went to the service desk determined to be more persistent this time. As before the person behind the counter had no real understanding of the wireless network, but one of the cashiers who is standing by mentioned that the wireless network had been down for some time. It turns out that the cash register station in the café uses the wireless network too. Another manager wandered by and listened to my story. He didn’t seem to know what to do but he suggested that the customer service person page another manager. Two managers were paged, and after a moderate amount of time neither of them showed up. After waiting for some time, the manager who had listened to my story reappeared and told me that he had unplugged and plugged back in their modem.
Sure enough, when I went back to the café the wireless network appeared and I was on the Internet at last.
Wireless is a new service at Ukrop’s as it is in many places. Creating a wireless network in a store creates the opportunity for the community to come together. It’s also a nice way to make some money. But I think many stores are like Ukrop’s, offering a service without having anyone on hand who knows how to manage it. In this time before wireless networking becomes ubiquitous, those of us who wish to use the services may find ourselves providing the technical support that these establishments need.
For now I’m simply looking forward to the next dance class and a the opportunity to get some work done in Ukrop’s Café.
Technorati Tags: computing, wireless
NaturallySpeaking and iListen
September 19, 2006
For more than eight years I’ve been working with dictation software in one way or another. Mostly I’ve been working with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, but I’ve given ViaVoice and more recently MacSpeech iListen a try.
Dragon is without question the standard against which all the rest are measured. I’m currently on version 8 (David Pogue indicated that version 9 wasn’t worth the upgrade if you have 8 ), and it’s just about perfect. I do have corrections but they are few, and I’m surprised by how accurate the program is even when I’m speaking quickly.
My only complaint about Dragon is that it’s a Windows application. As anyone in the liaison group can tell you, I live on my Mac. I don’t have anything in particular against Windows - some of my best friends use Windows. Actually there are three things I can only do on a PC:
- Schedule a meeting with a room as a Resource in Outlook/Exchange
- Convert my laptop to tablet mode to read and annotate PDF documents
- Dictation
Someday I hope Microsoft makes Entourage work with Exchange. Someday I hope Apple makes a tablet. Someday I hope someone makes dictation software that works as well on a Mac as Dragon NaturallySpeaking does on my tablet.
Recently I purchased iListen from MacSpeech. If I could have a reliable speech-to-text program on my Mac, I could avoid bringing two computers home most weekends.
I’ve had plenty of luck finding applications on the Mac. OmniGraffle takes the place of Visio, BBEdit replaces Visual SlickEdit, Pages beats Publisher, Keynote beats PowerPoint, and so on.
David Pogue at the New York Times recently wrote about iListen as a side note in his review of NaturallySpeaking 9. He’s a dedicated Mac user - if you haven’t seen his TEDTalks presentation about Microsoft, Apple and design, you should. But David has stuck with Dragon over the years because it’s better than anything else.
As Pogue notes, iListen isn’t nearly as accurate or as elegant as NaturallySpeaking. I’ve done more than 30 minutes of training and I continue to have errors in almost every sentence. I haven’t given up, though. I correct what needs correcting, despite a correction interface that is not intuitive. Even with corrections I continue to have accuracy problems.
What’s most frustrating is that iListen essentially requires you to use your headset or the mouse, but not both. The program tries to remember where the cursor is in the document as it works. That makes no sense to me. Ultimately I get to a point in every document where I find i have to reach for the mouse to fix an error that I can’t get the program to select, thus ending my voice transcription attempt.
I’m not giving up! In some ways I feel as if iListen performs today as NaturallySpeaking did five or six years ago. Given time, I hope to see MacSpeech develop iListen into a truly useable application.
Or perhaps if I’m lucky, the makers of NaturallySpeaking will create a Mac version now that the hardware is Intel-based.
Technorati Tags: iListen, Mac, NaturallySpeaking, Windows
