Last weekend I ran out of space on my primary computer hard drive.  My computer is a laptop and its about 18 months old.  When I purchased it, it was not quite the latest model, but it had a 120 gigabyte hard drive and a centrino duo processor and was fast enough for what I was doing at the time. 

It came with 1 gig of ram and the hard drive spun at 5400 rpms, which was slower than my previous laptop, which I had upgraded to 7200 rpms.  I always meant to upgrade the hard drive but just never had the time or extra few bucks to get to it.

Well, last weekend, my computer finally hit the 111 gigabytes full level and the computer wasn’t running right in my Dock-Office (Dockffice) because temperatures here are in the 90’s.

I’ve been doing more and more video work and that just fills up hard drive space very fast.  I hit the road and headed to Office Depot when I picked up a flyer offering a clearance deal before they reset for back to school stuff at twice the price.

I made it there and picked up a new router and wireless card.  Its a 1 gigabyte linksys router and card.  Then I headed to Best Buy where I picked up a 7200 rpm 200 gigabyte replacement drive for my laptop along with a 1 terabyte external western digital hard drive.  I intended to get the networkable drive from western digital but opted for the $140 cheaper drive that plugs in via usb. 

Next time the networkable drives drop in price, I’ll buy a 1 or 2 terabyte drive and then connect my existing 1 terabyte drive to that future drive and have 2 or 3 terabytes of space on my network.

I also picked up a high speed laptop cooling base station thing, to keep my laptop cool while it runs in my dockffice desktop (essentially a high top stocked bar).

All said and told I have a great deal more capacity and even more speed than I had before, which is definitely helping me get and keep things organized while I work more efficie ntly and effectively.

It has been a long time since I was impressed with a hardware buy ( I seem to recall with awe buying a 100 megabyte hard drive about 12 years ago thinking that was amazing). 

Now I have more space on my computer arrangement than I my entire company had working in a high rise in Atlanta including 30 some laptops and 3 servers running a $100 million dollar distribution business (owned by crooks in China that I turned into the IRS but that’s another story . . . .  ;)  ).

I’m sure this space will seem like a drop in the bucket after my video production moves to hi definition and I start working with multiple video inputs plugged in to a HDMI switch output to god knows what.  Maybe I’ll have to rent an exobyte (no idea how to even spell that ) from Google located in their new server room on the dark side of the moon operating at close to absolute zero temperatures or something.

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Over the last few months, I have fully embraced Skype.  I have been using it for years, but largely just for chat and the occasional phone call.  But a couple months back when my primary phone (cell phone- a treo 700 with Verizon) became completely unreliable, I started using Skype heavily until I could switch back to T-Mobile.

During that time I came to like Skype a great deal more, especially the video call capability.

However, it has also been a little problematic.  I sometimes lose sound or video for no reason and feel like I have to live in the Skype Options box, to keep the thing running properly.

The point that I am trying to make is that Skype is fantastic (and cheap) but it is only as good as your computer acts on your computer’s worst day.  That means that if you want to live by Skype, you have to be prepared to die by skype whenever and where every your computer might take a dump on you.

Rant Follows

I do not know why but for some insane reason, my computer likes to automatically change my microphone to mute from time to time without telling me.  It also likes to lose track of my video camera input as well.  Its one of those asinine problems that is about as fun to deal with as going to your doctors office and reading an obscure medical journal on lipovox reviews or something else almost useless for your day to day life.

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My work recoding the primary Softduit website has been slightly stalled for over a week.  The work initially stalled as I took on several important customer projects, was extended as I worked to finish up some personal projects for my wife’s new business, and then extended yet again as I wrapped up new customer projects this week.

Yet, I am hopeful that I will be able to reinitiate my work with the site and finish the new site before too much more time passes.  I have actually had several good weeks back-to-back so my spirits are high due to the progress I have made for others, but somewhat dampened in that I have not made progress for myself.

This might seem like a bit of a contradiction as the work I am doing is for the customers of my business.  However, the subtlety here lies in the fact that once I finish the site upgrade, I will be able to support more customers and support all of them more effectively.  So essentially, much of the work I am doing today is being done with more difficulty than would be needed had I finished my upgrade.

That sense of continued inefficiency is the aspect of this situation that troubles me a bit even when other things are going so well.  To put it into a bad analogy, it would be like a doctor prescribing Phentermine weight loss pills to a weight loss patient a week before providing liposuction surgery.

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	Andrew Ian Dodge is a 37 year old American expat living and working in London. He is a writer, author, novelist, blogger, political consultant  (his full time work) and the lyricist/frontman for Growing Old Disgracefully.
Website(s): www.andrewiandodge.com www.disgracefulmusic.com Profile: Andrew Ian Dodge on LinkedIn	He has been writing mythos stories for many years and has written an Idiots Guide to the Mythos.

Here are Andrew’s initial impressions of MacDictate along with some Screenshots of the User Interface

I have been asked to review MacDictate and use MacDictate to write my review . Now I bought MacDictate for my father but it is becoming rather useful for me as I am going through chemotherapy and have suffered from painful fingers. This affliction meant that I was unable to type anything longer than a sure I am chat. I was interested to see how easy it would be to use this sort of programme for someone who writes as much as I do.

I have been planning to buy MacDictate for my father who is not as good a typist and is rather sick of his hunt and pecking. I was surprised and pleased that MacDictate was so easy to set up. Now it might be rather unfair of me owing to the fact that I have both radio and podcasting experience. In fact I have been both behind and in front of the microphone many times. One learns very quickly to speak clearly if one is trying to get a point across on radio or television. It also may help that I have a so-called transatlantic accent which has a limited amount of regional dialect.

The package is quite an impressive one including a microphone headset and the software. The programme is rather easy to install and the training mechanism does not take too much effort to get right.

This does not need spending hours and hours training the software and you can get right to work fairly quickly.

My experience with such programmes goes back a few years and I’m impressed at the improvements made in MacDictate for the Macintosh with the Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition engine. Now I’ve only had it for a very few days and have yet to fully use all its varied abilities. However initial impressions bowled from installation and initial use a very good indeed. From these initial impressions I would recommend this to anyone in need of a decent piece of dictation software.

….

so there are some initial glimpses of MacDictate.  We hope to have some video capture of the program in action before too long.  We are also chasing down a story about video gamers using dictation to capture their moves, cheats, and conversations for publication when gaming on platforms such as the PS3 and XBox 360.

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Last winter when I went to the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas, I saw a technology that seemed impressive, but didn’t seem necessarily useful.

It was the Sling Box, and it basically lets you watch movies on your TiVo from anywhere in the world if you’re connected to the Internet. Back then I saw the technology I thought that it was executed very well and look pretty cool, but I couldn’t envision the practical use.

Sometimes you just have to let a technology sink in within your brain and give yourself time to envision a use for it. That’s kind of way it is for me with the Sling Box. More and more of my mobile computing is un-tethering myself or my office and for my home and I’m starting to see the uses of potentially having a connection to movies or news recordings on my TiVo.

In part this is probably due to the fact that I do a lot of work with news and media need to stay in touch with things. It definitely has something to do with the fact that I have a WiFi office on a fishing dock and also because I use an air card quite a bit these days as well.

Back in January I couldn’t envision watching TV for my computer very often. But now it seems like every time I turn around I think of a new use for such technology and it makes they consider or reconsider other technologies that I have rolled my eyes at in the past because I wasn’t quite wise enough to figure out a good use for it.

I haven’t purchased a Sling Box yet, so I’m not going to be putting it to the test probably before the summers out, but I have seen that the prices are coming down rapidly. If you take a look at the Sling Box on buy.com its featured in their weekly sale, you can see that the price is coming in under $200 now down from almost double that price not so long ago.

And consumer-electronics terms, that is a good sign that the product is popular with people and that they were buying enough of the product so that the overall cost of manufacturing can come down and the subsequent cost of sales of the product can come down as well.

It wouldn’t surprise me to see this product offered as part of a basic cable lineup package sometime next summer. Dish network already offers its as an accessory, but is not a standard item yet maybe someday and maybe then I’ll pick it up.

If I haven’t purchased at all ready.

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