For several months now you’ve been listening to me reading some of my words about Dragon Naturally Speaking Preferred 9. In the early days I took a typing test of Dragon NaturallySpeaking just a few days after I’d taken it out of the box. At the time I attempted to take that typing test under fairly good conditions.

There wasn’t much background noise, no distractions and everything was just about right. The computer was nice and cool and freshly rebooted there weren’t a lot of other programs running either. Well today I wanted to test it again under tougher conditions.

So I took my laptop outside, where was about 94° outside. I was standing immediately underneath a ceiling fan blazing on high, there are lots of external noises around kids playing outside dogs barking and various other items. I had a mess of programs open on my desktop including Firefox which had been running all day and is a notorious memory hog.

So I went and found my infamous British typing tests. These are a PHP-based typing test. It’s not java like many other online typing tests, and it allows me to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking to read the words of the test and have a transcription automatically created in a box that is then checked for accuracy and speed.

Typing tests in general are set up in a way that forces typers to try and use all of their fingers on many different keys. So they tend to use atypical words with atypical sentence structure. For the test I took, the words in the sentence structure, were very unfamiliar to me.

In fact you could say they were foreign to me in most cases. Some some of those words may have been old English, or possibly Scottish or Yiddish for all I know. but they definitely weren’t easy!

So here’s the video I put together to show you how this all transpired and how well it worked. As I warmed up to the typing test, I eventually hit a top speed that was higher than I’d seen before.

168 words per minute with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 Preferred!

but wait until you see the other issues I ran into . . .

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Here’s a quick little video tutorial on how to export an e-mail from Outlook into MindManager Pro 7. I originally started making this video attempting to re-create a potential bug that was identified in the MindManager Yahoo group.

I never had any problems with either Outlook nor with MindManager, the book just wasn’t apparent to me and based on other feedback in the form it may not be a MindManager bug at all. Or maybe I just don’t have the right configuration to trigger the bug.

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I wanted to follow up on a point I made earlier in a different post. When you do a lot of mind mapping, or when you are actively involved in a number of meetings, a projector is usually present in your home office. I’m referring to your main office not necessarily the office in your actual home.

Sometimes you have to travel and you can always take those projectors with you. Sometimes you’re traveling for off-site meetings with customers and sometimes it’s with your own team just in a different setting. Sometimes it’s for personal reasons.

I have known executives to take a company projector home to use it for personal reasons. I wouldn’t advise this, however you could rent your own projector for personal reasons. For example a few years ago I use my own personal projector that I own for my company, to show a movie for my son’s birthday party. We set up a screen outside, and we displayed the movie on the screen like a dark. I used a computer surround sound system for the sound of the movie.

It worked great and it made for a good theme for the birthday party too.

Sometimes is not entertainment, but you may need a projector to deal with family meetings are complex discussions with your own family members. In these cases you can use tools like MindManager and other planning software and display the plans upon a blank white wall with a projector. Now if you didn’t happen to bring a projector with you when you went to see your family a detail of a long ways away, you can turn to Projector123.com.

They provide projectors around the country, and are recently branching out into new areas such as their Denver projector rental offices, or their Colorado Springs projector rental options, or even their Salt Lake City projector rental programs.

Regardless there is no reason why you shouldn’t be only use the skills and talents and technologies that you’ve learned to use in the office in many situations outside of the office without having to invest the money that your office did in that equipment.

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