I am very excited as I anticipate the launch of Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 from Nuance. I have been using version 9 since January of 2007, and I’m ready to see some new bells and whistles.

The new version is rumored to have a great deal more support for Blue Tooth devices and applications. I have not heard or seen any notes or rumors yet on increases in speed or accuracy.

I do not have a blue tooth connection on my own laptop yet, so for me to use that I’d have to pick up some USB blue tooth adapter probably. That said, I think I would really appreciate having the ability to use a wireless headset or microphone with Dragon Naturally Speaking. I like to pace just a bit when I’m thinking and composing and this could be a real boom to my work. Not to mention this could be useful for people that want to send off a few emails while working out on a tread mill or elliptical machine or something. All you need is a screen at a distance with the zoom set large enough to read from a distance.

These days with projectors and large flat panel monitors that is becoming easier and easier to set up all the time!

Sounds crazy, but I’ve tried it before and run into a few tangles (in the cord) so a wireless version might be kind of nice.  Who knows maybe by version 20, the program will be so good that it will be able to transcribe an infants ‘goos’ and ‘gas’ with microphones sewn in the crib bedding so that new parents can receive a text message letting them know that their little one is hungry or needs some fresh air.  Its not always easy to see where new technologies will take us, but it seems practical to always leave conceptual options open.

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Today, I am on the road. Almost literally, I’m a passenger in a van headed from North Carolina to Georgia on a 3 hour drive. I have my laptop and my air card and dramamine.

When I type on the computer while driving, especially on winding road, I sometimes get a little car sick. Not so much that I’d have to worry for the safety of my keyboard, but sick enough that I feel dizzy and need to pamper myself for an hour or so until my equilibrium returns.

So this trip, I’ve taken a dramamine and am hoping that this will help keep my physical human system running long enough to get some work done on my computing system. It’s a kind of silly thing, but at the essence of it, I am using dramamine as a performance enhancing drug. I do not do this regularly. In fact this is my first time ever.

I doubt that dramamine will prove to be a gateway drug for an expansion of performance enhancing drugs or procedures. I can not see myself taking drugs normally prescribed for ADD or ADHD like many executives do from time to time.

That said, I have had my eyes lasered several years ago and that was a bit of a performance enhancing procedure.

Last night I watched the All Star game and had pause to consider just how bad it is for ball players or athletes to really take performance enhancing drugs. Don’t get me wrong, some of those drugs are un-tested and have serious and dangerous side effects. I’m not suggesting that they should be used. However, maybe efforts to prevent the use of all performance enhancing drugs is off base. Maybe the emphasis should be on driving science and medicine to find safer performance enhancing drugs for both athletes as well as regular people.

I don’t think twice about boosting my performance by purchasing more RAM for my computer or picking up a faster system or better software. My brain and my body are the most important systems I have so why should we consider ways of improving their performance that include diet and exercise and the application of science to give us an assist from time to time.  I’m not a big fan of the concept of diet pills like Leptitrex that are essentially something like speed.  But all in all there just seems like there should be a better way out there awaiting discovery and application and possibly a shift in cultural attitude.

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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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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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Today I setup and configured my first 3G Wireless Broadband Router from Powerful Signal. This WiFi router from NexAira essentially connects to the internet via my Verizon Aircard (which looks like and functions simultaneously as a usb flash drive) and it then sets up a WiFi hotspot for multiple computers to access the internet with via just 1 aircard.

Listen to the audio above for more information, or check back soon for our complete review once we have had a chance to put this device through its paces!

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