So, I downloaded the App Engine SDK, and then realized that I need to install Python – which I promptly did. Then I configured all the App Engine Started variables, and tried to churn out Hello World. First road-block, I didn’t have a Python IDE. So, I started coding this in NotePad++. Everything was smooth sailing till I started using some of the App Engine libraries, and had to start typing out long code sentences. For a guy who has done much of the coding on Visual Studio, you can imagine how I would be missing nice IDE features such as auto-complete and auto-suggest.

That is when I read somewhere that I can use Eclipse for Python development, and it will do some of those nifty IDE things that I was sorely missing. So, I downloaded Eclipse, and ‘installed’ it. And then I used the nice “Marketplace” feature to locate the PyDev plugin to install it (by the way, I am sure you already realize that to code in Python on eclipse you need a plugin such as PyDev since Eclipse doesn’t support Python out of the box).

So, here I was following a nice tutorial on how to configure PyDev to work with Eclipse, and after the first installation step, the tutorial asked me to go to the Window menu, and then click on the Preferences menu item; in the dialog that opens up, it asked me to find the PyDev. Here’s the problem – no PyDev settings were to be seen anywhere? I looked and looked. I uninstalled and reinstalled. I followed various methods to do this.

I was running Windows 7 64 bit, and I had downloaded the latest version of Eclipse (Helios), and I tried downloading the PyDev plugin directly from their site instead of the marketplace and install it. Nothing worked. Well, a lot of head scratching did reveal the problem eventually.

But first I curse the Eclipse developers to not show a proper error message when the plugin installation actually failed. The culprit was our old friend from Vista – UAC. When I launch Eclipse normally, the program doesn’t run at an elevated permission level. So, for some reason (I am newbie at Eclipse) the installation fails.

My solution was to run Eclipse as an administrator before installing the plugin. Guess what, worked like a charm. Now I go and see what more I can do with the App Engine (which is a whole different story altogether).

But in Win 7, I just can’t find that setting in the Control Panel, under the Network and Internet option (as you can see below):

So, what do I do? I didn’t know what to do and was getting very irritated day by day. Then I just tried doing one thing: I pressed the start key, and typed “Network Connections”, and voila, what do I see on top of the list? Here, see for yourself:

Well, then it was a matter of clicking “View Network Connections”, and then deleting the dial up connection from the window which shows up. Phew, no more pop-ups.

The Standard

The idea behind this standard is to have built-in capability in every cell phone such that all features can be turned-on/off by an external device which communicates with the cell phones through a standardized interface. These features can be:

• Ringer profile – allowing the cell phone to be put on a silent/vibrate profile, and restoring it to an earlier profile.
• Camera – allowing the cell phone’s camera feature to be turned on/off.
• Voice recorder – allowing the cell phone’s voice recording features to be turned on/off.
• Internet – allowing internet access to be turned on and off.
• Wireless networks – turning off access to various wireless features – cell phone network, wi-fi, Bluetooth, etc.
• Power – turning the device on/off.

This is just a small list, but if let’s suppose that all the cell phone devices that adhere to this standard have hardware level support for providing control over the above mentioned features. Further let’s assume that, there are control devices which can control various cell phones within their area of effect (each control device would have a presumably finite area of effect).

Under these assumptions, what good would such a standard be? Here are some problems (big and small) that can be solved, and the benefits that are gained by them.

Some benefits

• Onboard an airplane – Every airline can install one control device which turns off the power during takeoff and landing; and disables radio functions (cell phone network, wi-fi, Bluetooth, etc.) during flight for all the cell phones on board. The advantage is that in increases convenience of customers and at the same time increases compliance of airline security measures (whether real or imaginary).
• Meeting rooms, presentations, museums, libraries, movie theaters – there are so many places on the planet, where a ringing phone is most unwelcome. Control devices setup in such areas can be configured to switch every phone in their range to silent or vibrate modes. The benefit is that you won’t have to remind people to have to do this.
• Examination rooms, embassies, secure areas on airports, etc. – these are places where one is not allowed typically use a cell phone. Control devices installed here can be used to turn off any cell phones in range. Once again, this improves compliance, as well as allows people to hang on to their devices (for example, some examination or embassy scenarios ask you to surrender your cell phones to gain access).
• Corporate information security – once again, in a corporate setup, you can turn off the Bluetooth, camera, USB, and Internet features on the cell phones to prevent sensitive information to be captured and transferred through these channels. I have been to facilities which have asked me to leave my phone at the entrance for fears of espionage.

There can be tons of examples and applications if you just sit and think about it. Of course, the practicality of this approach is suspect, and a number of issues have to be resolved, but several times a day I think that if this kind of system was available, lives would be much simpler.

There are two things that I do, depending on whether I have already started typing the email to which I have to attach the documents, or if I haven’t yet started. If I already have started typing this email, then I simply select the files that I need to attach to the email (by select, I mean select them in Explorer) and drag them to the Outlook message window that I am typing my email in (and drop them). This of course adds them to the message as attachments.

If I haven’t yet started typing out the email, I can do two things. I can select the files I want to attach into the email message and right click them and choose “Send to”, and then “Mail Recipient” from the context menu. This opens up a new message window with the files as added as attachments. This, however, has the undesirable (perhaps not) side effect of text being added to the new message window (see picture below):

Another drawback of this method is that the new message window that opens is modal (for some reason). This means that till I close this Window, I can’t access Outlook anymore. This makes it not very usable for me. Since I am often doing multiple things at a give time.

So another method in this scenario is to select the files in your Explorer view, and then simply drag and drop them on the main Outlook window. What this does is that it creates a new message, and attaches the files to this message. This message doesn’t have any additional text, nor does it open a modal window, so you can access Outlook without closing the new message window.

Small tip, but it saves seconds several times a day.

Let me explain.

I use TwitterFeed to publish new posts I make on this blog to my Twitter account as tweets. In order to do so, I have to provide TwitterFeed with my RSS feed (which is already burned on FeedBurner), and then add my Twitter account on it (TwitterFeed initially did not support OAuth), and then I can configure my feed with various options such as how frequently should it check the feed for new updates, and how many tweets it should publish to my timeline, plus other things such as which URL service to use to shorten the link, and what text to prefix or suffix to the tweet.

What Google Socialize does is pretty much the same. It lets me connect my FeedBurner feed to my Twitter account through OAuth, and then lets me setup similar parameters. Both support more or less the same configuration options (except that Google also supports inserting hashtags based on post category).

One advantage that TwitterFeed has is that it allows you to publish to more than just Twitter (it supports Facebook, Ping.fm, etc), but to me that doesn’t matter – all I care about is Twitter.

The biggest advantage that FeedBurner has on the other hand is that it doesn’t ask you for a polling frequency. As long as your blogging setup is wired to ping their server via XML-RPC (which is how mine is, and most people who use FeedBurner have that), the tweet is sent out as soon as the post is made.

Actually, to me even that is not the biggest advantage. The biggest advantage to me is that it reduces the number of services that I have to deal with by One. I no longer have to deal with TwitterFeed, and as a result I have deleted my feed from there. When I post this article, and you see it in your Twitter Timeline, it will be courtesy FeedBurner’s socialize feature, and not TwitterFeed.

Here’s the post by Google about Socialize.

I noticed today that on that blog, there is a rating widget below every comic, through which the users can rate the comic on a scale of 1 to 5. I thought, I would use the widget to tell Saad if I like his comic or not. I am guessing that the purpose of that rating widget is for him to get feedback on what type of comic is more fun to his readers, although I am not entirely sure he would care – since the premise is that he has this comic for his own entertainment, and everyone else’s entertainment is collateral gain.

Anyway, back to the rating widget. When I went to rate a comic, the options that it gave me for rating were:

• 1 – OKish
• 2 – Not crap
• 3 – Nice!
• 4 – Totally Great !!
• 5 – OMG! F***ing Excellent!!

So, now here’s my dilemma. Why is it that there are no options on the lower scale such as: boring, sucks, crap, not good at all, and so on. I am not saying that was the rating that I wanted to give, but still.

Typically, I would imagine a scale to cover both sides of an argument. So, what is Saad doing here? Is he asking his readers a Loaded Question? As per Wikipedia, a loaded question is a type of a fallacy, which is often asked such that:

“the question limits direct replies to be those that serve the questioner’s agenda.”

The rating scale, then, looks like a pretty good example of this. With these choices, at worst his comics would be rated OKish – which is not bad at all; for example, for movie reviews, OKish movies are good enough for a one-time watch – on this page the reviewer is calling SRK’s six pack abs in Dard-e-disco as OKish, or a commenter on this page rates the music of Slumdog Millionaire as OKish.

So, is Saad asking a loaded question by limiting the spectrum of choices, so that even the worst choice is actually not that bad?

Or maybe, it is Confidence. He is supremely confident that anything that his creative mind puts out is good, and even on a bad day, it will still be OKish. Well, his success certainly backs this up, and his popularity on Twitter probably also helps this mindset. Maybe, that is it; maybe, he thinks:

Anything that I create will at least be OKish!

I don’t know him personally, never met him, so I have no idea what his mindset is like. So, it is possible that it is neither of the two options above because of which the rating scale is skewed. Could be something else all together?

Anyway, I think the ratings scale should offer a balanced set of choices. And as I wrote this, something just occurred to me – maybe an OKish rating for Saad is as horrible as “this is crap”, and so in his mind the scale is balanced. Maybe that’s it.

Anyway, back to the topic. It looks like Google Wave is getting desperate for adoption.

I am a user of EtherPad which Google purchased sometime ago. For those of you who don’t know what EtherPad is, it is a web-based word processor that allows for people to work on a single document in “really real-time” and it really does work in real time like you wouldn’t believe it. Their real time technology is of course interesting for Google Wave.

Anyway, today I got an email from EtherPad:

The email contains an invite to join Google Wave (I don’t need it because I already am on Google Wave). Could it be that they are not getting enough traction so now they are trying to get people who already are used to working with real time collaboration applications (such as EtherNet) to use their product?

By the way, here’s a very interesting re-tweet making the rounds about Google Wave:

Google Wave was built to show younger people how older people feel when they try to use the internet.

Not sure who is the original person who made it. Anyway, if someone can explain to me how to use Google Wave to do something useful, I will start right away.

I have never used one of these extensions (never even tried it). The whole idea repulses me. Why, you may ask? Well, let’s examine this why. I go to the book store to buy a book and I am willing to pay money because I recognize the value that the author has created in the book through their talent. Notice, I buy and I pay.

Now, when I am on the Internet, almost everything is free. Having said that, some ‘author’ is creating this content. And since you at least consider reading this content when you visit a web page, it is of some value to you. When you repeatedly go to an author’s page, then you definitely get value out of the content that they are writing.

Are you paying for this content? Not directly. Is the author expecting payment for it? Not directly. However, if the author has put advertising on their website, they are expecting to make money on the value that they are providing through the content that they put up. And by blocking advertisements using such plugins, you are denying them this payment.

To me, that is the equivalent of stealing. It is like breaking the honor system. Imagine picking up that watermelon in the photo and walking on without placing the 2 dollars in the jar. If enough people did that, then the farmer will have to stop selling water melons this way. And whose loss will that be? Everyone’s.

Once again, I can’t repeat it enough: using adblock or similar is THE SAME AS STEALING.

I monetize my website, and my aim is to make enough from advertising so that I can pay for the hosting costs. That is it. I don’t have a world famous blog, and I probably don’t add that much value, but I still get some people once in a while who thank me for the content that they have put up. But imagine people who use their online properties as a way to make a living. They spend their entire waking hours writing content so that the readers can get some value out of it (I am not even talking about mega sites which have people that they pay for creating content). When you deny them their advertising dollars, you are basically slowly putting them out of work.

I would be interested in knowing why people thing that it is a good idea to use these plugins. You are welcome to leave comments explaining. Else, I simply request that you do not use these plugins at all.

“the excellent photo shown above was taken from Lisa B’s photostream on Flickr and is usable under Creative Commons”

UPDATE:

Kiran on Twitter pointed me towards this post on “approach to fair ad blocking” and there being a need for a middle ground. There is one basic problem with the entire argument in the post – he says that the control for this should be with the users. Well, control always has been with the users – you can control yourself NOT to view a particular website whose advertisement flavor you don’t like. Simple.

Saying that the user should be able to choose when they want to block ads on a site, is the same as saying, when the price is too high, lets steal, else lets pay. If the webmaster thinks that their content is valuable enough such that they can monetize it in an annoying manner, and still people will visit, then why not let them. They added that value to the content, and thus they should be allowed to make money of it.

IMO, if you do want to use an ad-block type plugin, and want to be fair, then the plugin should support a <nofreeview> tag which the webmaster should be able to put in their pages. If this tag is present, then the plugin should disallow the user to view that web page completely, unless ad blocking is turned off. Let’s see how many webmasters allow free viewing when such a tag is available.

A middle ground doesn’t make sense, since as a content producer it should be up to me to put a price on it. And as a consumer, if you don’t like the price, then don’t use it. But don’t steal my content, just because you don’t like the price.

On a functional and service offering standpoint, I don’t need to really talk about anything, because the founder of OpenDNS already has excellent thoughts on this topic. But he doesn’t talk about the most important metric of all, which is performance. I was curious about how the two compare on pure performance terms. So, sitting in India, I decided to run a quick test myself to measure the performance between the two.

The method is the same as I used when I compared OpenDNS with Airtel, my local ISP in India. I basically measured lookup times of 100 random domains and compared the two DNS on that metric. Here are my findings.

The graph below plots the query response time for both the DNS services for 100 random domains. What we can see from the graph already is that neither one is clearly faster than the other.

Here’s another graph which gives clarity on which one is faster more often:

As we can see, they are almost the same. So, how do we know which is better or faster?

I took a look at the average of the measurements for the two services, and this is what I found:

• OpenDNS – 0.38
• Google Public DNS – 0.41

This means that on average, OpenDNS is slightly faster than Google. However, as we can see there are 3 spikes in the Google Data, and one in the OpenDNS data. When I remove those, the average for the two is almost the same (with OpenDNS being marginally slower).

Another thing worth noting however is the Standard Deviation – the measure which tells us how often will the measurement fall close to the average performance. This can even be surmised by the first graph. With the complete measurements, the Standard Deviation of Google was about 3 times that of OpenDNS, and even with the spikes removes, the standard deviation of Google was twice that of OpenDNS. Which means that OpenDNS on the whole is more consistent in its operation.

This means that when Google is deviating on the faster side, it will be much faster than OpenDNS, but when it deviates on the slower side, it will be much slower than OpenDNS (on average).

At this stage, I will have to say that I cannot conclude, though I would like to think that OpenDNS is a better performer for providing consistent performance, as compared to Google Public DNS. But with Google’s muscle, I am sure that it will eventually surpass OpenDNS on these parameters. Who knows, maybe Google will buy OpenDNS (although I am not sure if they will be selling).

Well, one of the things that Flickr does is that it ranks your photos by something it calls as “Interestingness”. I thought I would share the 5 most interesting photos that I posted as described by Flickr. Two of these photos even appeared within the top 500 most interesting photos on Flickr before being pushed out by better photographs.

Without further ado, here they are (and yes I know that some of these have featured on this blog before):

Waiting for my flight

This photo was taken at Frankfurt airport while I was waiting for my flight. The sky was crazy that day, and any number of photos would have been insufficient, but somehow this one came out to be my most favorite of all the photos I took that day.

Mehndi

This photo is that of a very good friend. This was taken at her marriage, and it came out very well. I love this photo.

Natural Fireworks

This photo was taken a long time ago during a storm in Gurgaon. I stayed up all night and took hundreds of photos, and this one was the best of that lot. Again one of my more favorite shots. This has been featured on this blog before here.

I didn’t break it

This photo was taken on one of many trips to the Sultanpur Bird Sanctuary near Gurgaon.

Emotional Dog

This is another favorite of mine. Its of my dog Peach when she was just a puppy. She is as naughty today as she was then.

I hope you all enjoyed this little post of self-praise. But, I just love to share my work. All comments are welcome. And please visit my Flickr page if you would like to look at other photos that I have posted.

In this post, I will be present the method that I am using to ensure what is referred to as Inbox Zero. Inbox Zero starts with the premise that at steady state, there should be zero emails in your inbox, and if that is not the case, work needs to be carried out to achieve that steady state.

I have been using a method for almost a month now, with an Inbox Zero almost everyday.

Let me begin by describing how I have setup my Outlook (which is what I use as my email program).

The Setup

First of all, I setup my Outlook as following:

• Create 3 PSTs (Outlook Data Files): one called Main to receive email, another called Processed to keep email that already have been worked upon, and a third called Secondary to store emails that don’t require active attention.
• Main PST – of the three PSTs, this is the one that is holding the Inbox which is supposed to be Inbox Zero.
• Processed PST – this is the PST where you will be manually moving a lot of your email as you process your inbox. Feel free to setup a folder structure in this PST to your liking. You can leave it to be one folder, or create folders for people, projects, etc.
• Secondary PST – this is where a lot of the mails will be moved through automatically processing using Outlook Rules. Again feel free to create whatever folder structure that you want.
• Take a look at your incoming email from the past month, and start identifying patterns. A lot of email is received as FYI information because you are part of a mailing list. This email can usually be looked at over a weekend, or skimmed once during the day. For each such category, create an Outlook rule which automatically moves these emails to a folder in the Secondary PST.

The Method

Having created that basic setup, let me explain the method that I apply to achieve Inbox Zero. Each mail, that remains in the Inbox on arrival (remember that some are being moved automatically through rules), has to be categorized in one of the three categories of actions:

• Process – that you will work on it right away, without looking at any further emails. Usually these are smaller tasks that can be done quickly (like responding to an email).
• Delete – these are emails which can be junk that finds its way to the inbox, or any mail that you want to typically look at the subject or a line or two in the body, and just delete. A lot of times these emails are left unread in the inbox and cause clutter, causing some important emails to be lost.
• Defer – these are emails that you have to process but cannot right away.

I go through each email every day, and based on the category they fall in, I carry out the following actions:

• Processing – this requires carrying out whatever action that is needed to mark the email as processed and completed. It could be a response, it could be creation of a document, or anything. The main thing to remember when processing an email is that till the email is processed, it doesn’t leave the inbox. This is important, so I repeat: Till the email is processed, it doesn’t leave the inbox. This is important because one of the biggest reasons for dropping tasks is if you are in the process of doing one, and are interrupted for something else. You may forget to get back to it later. But by keeping the email in the inbox, you still need to take one of the three actions on it whenever you visit your inbox to bring it to steady state, which will allow you to get back to it.
• Delete – simply select it and press Delete.
• Defer – this requires putting the task associated with this email on hold with the understanding that you will carry it out later. I have a folder in the Main PST called deferred tasks, I move the email to this folder (notice I don’t move it to the other PSTs). However, before moving the deferred email to this folder, I create a task for it in Outlook, with a reminder date and time (a guess about when I will get to it). Sometimes, I put the task on my calendar, if I want to block off a time slot on my calendar for that task. Only after I have set myself a reminder for this task, do I move the email to the Deferred folder. When it comes time to work on the task, a similar rule for applies as for the processing mails – Till the task is processed, you should never mark it as complete or dismiss its reminder in Outlook. Again, it is important for the same reason. Once the email is processed (task completed), you can move the email from the deferred email a designated folder in the Processed PST.

For all the emails that I move to the Secondary folder, I go through them from time to time to see if there is anything that I need to read about, or possibly take action on. Usually this is done once a day.

This entire process is repeated till there are no more emails left in the Inbox. To me every time I hit that, it gives me a feeling of Nirvana .

A little more needs to be said about the deferred tasks/email:

• Never defer a task without assigning a reminder to it.
• Never close your reminder window (which will pop-up to remind you of your tasks), without either snoozing the tasks which it is showing (thus extending your own deadline) or dismissing the tasks (which means that you have completed the task and moved it to processed – as discussed above).
• Keep a personal limit of how overdue are you going to let a deferred task be.
• It is important to clear up the deferred tasks folder when you have free time every time you achieve Inbox Zero.

The Optimization

Of course nothing works perfectly from the word go. And a process has to be tweaked all the way to ensure that it stays successful. So far, I have added a lot of tweaks to my method to make it easier for me. Here they are to get your imagination rolling for what you can do to make it easier for you, if you attempt to go for an Inbox Zero approach.

• The Rules – I created a lot of complex rules for the automated movement of the emails. For example, even within the emails that get moved to secondary, I mark some of them as read mails, and others as unread based on which ones I want to give priorities to when I skim over the secondary folder. I added exceptions to the rules when mails were marked personally to me, and other such tweaks.
• Toolbar Buttons – I added a custom toolbar with two buttons to save me a few clicks – one “Add Reminder” button clicking which automatically creates a follow up task with a reminder that you can specify. Another to mark all emails in a folder as read “Mark Read”. These buttons save me a lot of clicks every day.
• Favorite Folders – Outlook has a feature which allows you to specify some favorite folders that show up on top of the left navigation window. I keep the most commonly used folders there to which I usually move my email out of my inbox. That helps me speed up the movement of the email out of the Inbox.
• Flag Colors – when adding a reminder to an email, you can usually choose the color you want to give the task. You can use the colors to specify priority within deferred tasks. This gives you a visual aid when you start tackling deferred tasks.

The Conclusion

Well, the best way to conclude is that it is working for me. And if you decide to adopt a similar methodology, and have questions, feel free to post them. Remember, you will have to customize it to whatever makes you feel most comfortable.

I should probably talk about all these people I know who fall into this category, but today’s post is about Dr. Manas Fuloria. Manas is a very dear friend and mentor to me. I have learned quite a bit from him in the duration that I have known him. Recently, he started a venture which educates young minds from all over India – he co-founded a business school.

While I knew that he was also taking some classes at this business school from time to time, I didn’t know that he had started blogging. He had started blogging about a variety of topics for the benefit of his students so that he can reach out to them even when not in the classroom. This blog allows him to discuss a variety of facets of life, without the structure of a classroom.

When I finally got to know about this blog (last week) I went and had a read. And what I read told me that its not just his MBA students who can benefit from what he writes. His articles are applicable to everyone. Even though the articles are written to address a very specific target audience, the concepts are universal.

So, I now go and read this blog regularly. Because, when smart people speak, one should listen.

Manas presents often visited topics with a very fresh viewpoint – his view point. And that itself opens up your mind quite a bit since you probably didn’t thing of those things before.

I highly recommend that you should go and read this blog once, and if you like it, then you can keep going back: http://drmanasblog.proton.in/. And of course, if you like it, you can recommend it to your friends, and then they can recommend it to their friends ad infinitum.

Here’s a screenshot of the error:

Now, I went and checked everything within my power to see why this error was occurring:

• double-triple checked the password.
• enabled-disabled firewall to make sure that was not the culprit – on both computers.
• checked the remote settings on the computer I was trying to connect to.
• and a number of other things.

Then I read the message carefully once. It said “In some cases, this error might also be caused by a large time discrepancy between the client and the server computers”. So, I told myself, that can’t be it. But just in case, I checked, and yes the laptop I was trying to connect to had a date which was behind by 4 years (no idea how). I fixed the date, and tried again. And it connected without any problem.

The uninitiated might say that I was dumb to not have listened to the error message to begin with. But here’s what I have to say to them – with Windows, you can never be sure that the error message is saying the right thing. And to prove that here is another error message that I got today itself.

I was trying to backup a file onto my external hard drive. It was a 5.5 GB file, and I had plenty of space on my external hard drive. Here’s the error message: “Cannot copy Outlook: There is not enough free disk space. Delete one or more files to free disk space, and then try again. To free space on this drive by deleting old or unnecessary files, click Disk Cleanup”.

And here’s the screen shot:

Once again, I was perplexed for a moment. I had enough space on the drive. I thought maybe it needs some space on the source drive so for some temp files or something (stupid though, I know), and so I promptly cleaned that up. Then it struck me. My external hard drive had a FAT32 file system (don’t ask me why, it came that way out of the box, and I never bothered checking). And of course, 5.5 GB is over the limit of what you can put per file on a FAT32 file system.

Now, why couldn’t it give me that as an error? Of course, the fix was simple. I backed up everything from my external drive, and then formatted it as NTFS. And the file copied without any problem.

So, when Windows gives you an error message, it mostly doesn’t mean what it says, but then sometimes, it does.

So, well I looked around for a few minutes, and sure enough I saw it sitting right there on the building next to where I was. Time to click photos I said, and here is what came out:

In the one above, the bird was about to regurgitate something. I didn’t catch what it was – maybe some food it didn’t like so much.In these two photos, the kingfisher finally got bored of sitting around and decided to fly away further and further; but not before I managed to catch these two shots. In the second one (the one below), it stopped by that planter to get a drink from within it (it must have been watered recently), and then proceeded to rub its beak against the side.

All in all, it was a fascinating experience.

Since this post is about photography, I think it makes sense to also let the reader know that I maintain a Flickr stream of my best photos: Vaibhav’s Photo Stream (which may not be all that good being the amateur that I am).

One of the things I noticed right away is that the speech recognition program inserts an extra space after each period. A similar thing happens when you try to insert new lines or new paragraphs; it inserts extra lines and paragraphs. I will have to figure out how to get rid of this behavior. It’s probably a setting somewhere.

The program is supposed to learn how I speak as I use it more and more. I will have to be patient initially so that I can teach it my speech and it learns how I say my words. Hopefully this will improve its accuracy rate and I will become more productive while using the speech recognition option for dictating my blog posts and for creating other documents in my work.

The only other thing that I will have to learn is how to tell it when I want to give a command versus when I want it to include it as text in what I’m typing. As I said, it was easier than I imagined it to be however it will require a lot of patience in the beginning.  To type out this post I had to spend almost 20 minutes because of all the corrections I had to make.

I will keep giving it a shot and see if it actually becomes worthwhile to use speech recognition in place of typing out the text.