I write a lot. I write for work. I write for school. As a result I spend a lot of time in front of the keyboard. Lately, my wrists had been giving me some problems. Ironically, most of my wrist problems don’t come from the keyboard but the mouse.

Regardless, I decided it was time to try something different. So I broke down and bought Dragon NaturallySpeaking, it’s pretty weird actually trying to get used to speaking instead of writing. It’s almost as if speaking engages a different part of my brain than writing does. Although the words come out faster, it takes me longer to think about exactly what I want to say. When I’m typing, it seems as though the words just naturally flow out of my fingertips.

I am pretty impressed with the accuracy of the speech recognition. After a short training session, NaturallySpeaking does a pretty good job of keeping up with my speech. It is a bit strange learning the command structure for corrections, but I’m sure that will come with time.

David Pogue was right about running NaturallySpeaking on the Mac. And yes, NaturallySpeaking actually got “David Pogue” right on the first try. Hmmm… I’d really like to get it running on my MacBook with Parallels. I installed NaturallySpeaking on my Windows partition, but was not able to get it working well with Parallels. So instead, I’m booting my machine into Windows with Boot Camp, and dictating in Windows applications natively. That really is not the way I would prefer to use the application, but since there is no Mac version I don’t really have a choice. Are you listening Nuance?

Another annoyance is the microphone comes with NaturallySpeaking. It’s pretty cheap. No, scratch that. It’s beyond cheap. In fact, when I first installed the application it kept telling me there were problems with the volume on my system and the sound quality. In the troubleshooting it suggested trying another microphone, which I did. The microphone I ended up using is a three dollar super cheapie I picked up at NewEgg for Skype when I was traveling. Seriously, it was $2.99. NaturallSpeaking didn’t have any problems with the three dollar, super cheap microphone, but continues to have accuracy issues with the microphone that was actually supplied by Nuance with the software. Again, are you listening, Nuance?

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the experience. It’s definitely going to take some getting used to, but I can see how it will be a productivity boost once l get used to speaking instead of typing and after I spend a little more time training the application better. But booting into Windows to use it on my Mac is going to suck. I may give iListen a try…

For now I’m giving it three out of five stars. Speech recognition is definitely more impressive than it used to be, but it’s still not the seamless experience it needs to be in order to really change the way that I work every day. And it should run on a Mac, too.

Pilot G2 “Gel Ink” (4) for $8.

Mont Blank Rollerball Refills (2) for $10.

Cut less than 1/8″ of plastic off the end of the Mont Blanc refill and replace the G2 cartridge.
Amazingly fine writing instrument for $7. Net savings of over $200.

I’ve been meaning to try this trick for a while, and tonight I finally did it. It took me longer to open the pen/refill packages than to do the hack.

Now, granted, the pen doesn’t have the same weight in your hand as a Mont Blank, which is part of what makes them such a pleasure to write with. But for the difference in price, I’ll take my mod-G2. It does write as smooth as glass. And if you’re a dork like me who is always losing pens anyway, it’s much better to lose a $7 “Mod Blanc” than a $200+ Mont Blanc.

Yes, I’m a pen nerd.

[Via Instructables]

Seth Godin has a good post today about positive markeing versus negative marketing with respect to Verizon’s attitude toward fighting the iPhone. This reminded me of an experience I had last year with a new system we were purchasing for work.

The system was an expensive hardware/software combination. But that isn’t important. What is important is that there were multiple vendors competing, each with different marketing approaches. Two sales teams stick in my mind from this experience: one was very positive, one very negative.

The positive team emphasized _their_ product’s strengths. They listened to our needs and they tailored every presentation to how their product’s features met our needs, or helped us solve a problem in a unique way. Aside from a brief comparison to the competition’s products in our initial meeting, I don’t think they mentioned their competition once.

The negative team spent nearly as much time denigrating (or attempting to) the competition’s products as much as they did promoting their own. They would talk up a feature for a few minutes and then waste our time and theirs telling us about which of the competitors didn’t have that same feature, or implemented it in an inferior way.

The problem with this approach–and I think this scales for big or small purchasing decisions–is that as an educated customer, I’m doing my own research. I’m talking to the competition. I’m seeing exactly what features they have and don’t have. So when you’re pitching your products to me, I don’t want to hear your opinion about the competition–I want to hear about your product.

It’s not hard to see which team was more pleasant to deal with. And ultimately, which team do you think won the contract? It was the team with the superior product, of course, whose features best met our needs. But do you suppose that if the negative team’s product really met our needs and was really best of class that they would have felt the need to spend so much time trying to cut down the competition?

My wife and I have a Samsung ML-2510 laser printer at home. It’s a nice little printer–definitely not high volume, but for the limited printing we do at home, it’s been great.

Well, recently, the toner has started to fade. No big deal, it just needs a new cartridge. So I go on-line to order a new cartridge, and I discover this deal to purchase a new printer for $59.99. How much for a new toner? $77.

I’ve been meaning to check out Delicious Library for a while, even more so after I went to the Evening at Adler last year.

Well, as usual, I kept putting it off. And then along came the MacHeist bundle which included Delicious Libary, and so I didn’t have any excuses anymore.

Holy crap. What a fantastic application. Wow. This application is exactly why I went back to using Macs (after quite a long hiatus). The concept is simple: catalog your CDs, DVDs, Books, and video games. It’s the execution that is brilliant.

What makes it brilliant is the leverage of the iSight. You see, there’s no typing in titles, song tracks, descriptions, and all that. You just fire up the iSight, and you get a video window “scanner” (complete with red laser lines across the window). Just hold up the bar code on the item and *blip* Delicious Library scans it, looks up the info for the item and imports it into your library.

All the info you could ask for is right there… title, tracks, descriptions, ratings (from Amazon, etc. You can add your own ratings, locations, notes. And best of all, it’s a great, straightfoward interface that takes virtually no time to learn.

Amazing.

This is the kind of application that makes computing a joy. My only regret is that I didn’t play around with it sooner. Now I’m going to go on a rampage, importing everything I own.