Years ago when I was working away to college, I had a job doing data entry for the Postal Service.  I would go school all-day, and head to the to the Postal Service to type all night.  I do my homework in between breaks, and I listen to audio books all night long.  I learned how to perform mundane repetitive physical tasks while letting my mind engage in higher-level activities.

After he got out of school and went to work in the corporate world I rapidly put on about 20 pounds as I sat behind a desk and drove a keyboard full time (8 hours of meetings per day didn’t help either).  All that physical inactivity got me after a while and decreased by ability to enjoy the higher-level work was doing in the office.

Now I’m wondering if there might be some way to allow people to get the physical gratification of a little repetitive physical labor while they multitask at higher-level items.  Our brains are capable of quite a bit and so our bodies and the tech revolution in some ways has not allowed our bodies to keep up with what our brains are performing every day.  The evolution of the Wii gaming device takes a baby step in the direction of giving our bodies a little more action.

  But maybe our bodies don’t have to be engaged in the actual higher-level work.  I was watching a crazy video on YouTube the other day that gave me a peculiar thought. 

The video was of a news reporter performing an interview with a lady that stomps grapes for a living.  You can picture Lucille Ball in a famous episode where she’s stomping on grapes to make wine or something like that.  This YouTube videos is actuallyl famous because the news reporter gives it a try herself.  She tries to give the interview while she’s in a bucket of grapes stomping on them barefooted.

Unfortunately she has a little trouble multitasking and ends up stumbling out of the bucket of grapes and crashes several feet to the ground where from the noise of the YouTube video it appears that she is seriously injured possibly mortally wounded.

She wasn’t able to multitask an interview while grape stomping,  however, I suspect that a person working on the computer raised up to a counter top level could possibly drum out a few e-mails while they were stomping grapes. 

Now I suspect that there’s not a great deal of need for grape stompers throughout the world, but that’s not really the point.  The point is that people need a little bit more physical engagement while they’re working.  A simple solution might be to just dump everybody onto an elliptical machine or a treadmill or some sort of stationary bicycle device, however that’s not exactly improving productivity. 

So maybe those devices can be hooked up to some sort of electricity generating machine that helps the environment, or maybe they could even be tied to some form of production whether it’s creating wine or shucking corn or something.

Physically it needs to be something that doesn’t require a lot of brain power(like writing this blog doesn’t), and it can not be too dangerous either.  You wouldn’t want to break an ankle or cut off a finger or something like that while you’re typing an e-mail.  However if we can find someway to allow our bodies to catch up to our brains and at the same time increase productivity, our economy would be better, our worker satisfaction might increase along with possibly of our salaries.  Plus our physical well-being and overall sense of balance would likely benefit as well. 

Who knows, maybe I could move to Italy and rent me one of those spectacular Villas in Italy and set up shop as a web designing, blog writing, grape stomper!

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I have been riding a motorcycle since I was about 10 years old. Wearing good protective gear was not always on the top of my list until I learned how to fly (off the motorcycle at high speed when an object, called a car, lodged itself in the path of my motorcycle).

I’m a lot more careful these days and wear high quality protective gear to keep my hide in one piece. I highly encourage you to check out these motorcycle sunglasses and other products if you ride.

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I have a problem.  I have too much software.  I’m not talking about downloading too many freeware or shareware programs from download.com.  I’m talking about old boxes of software taking up too much space in my house.  Over the last 15 years or so I’ve collect a lot of software.  And I am a pack rat.

That’s a dangerous combination, it is resulted in a collection of many boxes of old software that I can’t use of a wanted to.  I’ve gotten many tab for Windows 95, and Visual Basic for Windows 98.  I’ll have a machine though run either of those programs, and I don’t even have a disk drive that will take the discs that came with it.  (I do have an old Acer laptop that runs on beta a version of Windows 95, but it’s 16 MB of RAM just won’t cut it for the program)

Now I’m a light shade of green myself, and this trait combined with my packrat-ism prevents me from throwing the box is a software in the garbage.  I also find eBay to be a bit of a pain in the neck and no one that attends my garage sales are interested in the old software either.

I’d like to recycle all that garbage but there’s nowhere to put it.  So probably end up having to bury it in a landfill, and my grandchildren’s grandchildren will probably have to figure out a way to save the planet from my excesses.  It’s unfortunate that when I bought that software could purchase some sort of software Funeral Insurance, something to take the software and the moral obligation off my shoulders.

Some things just weren’t meant to be . . .

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Sometimes Dragon NaturallySpeaking works so well that you become overconfidence capabilities.  I get a ton of use of this product now, however on occasion the program seems to take a nap or maybe a daydream is a better descriptor.

Sometimes I think the program does live up to its claims of 99% accuracy.  However there seems to be a few circumstances where it falls far short of this claim.

1. If you hibernate a PC or don’t shut down and restart on a regular basis, over time the program will definitely become less accurate.  I’m sure this has a lot to do with RAM utilization and number of other aspects, but as a user that doesn’t matter to me all I know is that the program stops working as well as it used to work.  This is problematic because you build up trust in the program and expect it to work, and when it starts to make substitutions for words you don’t catch it is easily as you might have if you didn’t trust the program.
2. Another problem occurs when you run it with many other programs that are RAM hogs.  You get the same result of slow down performance, and the same problem of potentially not catching a mistake as your expectations have risen.
3. Another problem is that on occasion when you start to speak after you haven’t use the tool for a few minutes or after you’ve just turned on the microphone, there is sometimes a delay.  Now the weird part is that DeLay sometimes results in the words actually been transcribed, only say 40-60 seconds after the fact, and sometimes it doesn’t transcribe it all.  So when you first start talking you need to make sure that the transcription has started with you and that the program is actually ready to write.  You turn the program on and it’s almost like you have to ask your computer, “Are you really paying attention to me?”
4. you also have to be very careful in two circumstances that seem to come up with often enough for me to note them.  One of those is the situation where you’re composing an e-mail, and a strange noise in the background (my dog barking at home for example) apparently sounds to the computer just like the command to send an e-mail.  This results in the unfortunate sending of e-mail before it’s really ready to go.  Another problem that occurs, happens during the use of several different WYSIWYG HTML editors (DNS nine actually got those last three words correct on the first try!).  In some HTML editors something goes a little screwy with DNS nine sometimes.  What I’m trying to write text with the transcription program it sometimes rates it and it HTML portion without the appropriate tags and sometimes it doesn’t.  I see this happen on a regular basis in Windows live writer and on an occasional basis in Macromedia’s Dreamweaver. 
5. Finally DNS nine also sometimes forgets to make the appropriate distinction between simple words like ‘in’ and ‘and’ making what appears to be random substitutions of those words throughout a given discourse.  This is definitely problematic and not something that pops up on spellcheck, and due to the nature of some training that I’ve received in speed-reading I don’t always catch it when I approve the document.  It’s important to note all of these issues and try and remain cognizant of them so that you don’t develop and overconfidence in the software.

At the end of the day it’s a great tool and say the significant amount of time.  You have to be wary of becoming overconfident, picture that guy in the cheesy Viagra commercials who has just received a new boost of confidence.  You need to be aware of these limitations such that you can look out for them and avoid them.  If you can maintain that the tool will definitely increase your productivity and improve your computing experience.

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