Diary of a Mad Scientist

Today I tried something new. I’m still at square one with my right hand injury, and typing really aggravates it. I have been fooling around with the left-handed typing using the ‘Dvorak for left-hand’ layout, which is one of the options installed on Windows machines. Of course it doesn’t work so well with a laptop – the touchpad mouse gets in the way because that is where your hand wants a palm rest. It does feel a lot like learning to play a new musical instrument, something that I’ve been through several times. I’m starting to get marginally better at the typing. Because I’m a fast touch typist with two hands, it’s very difficult to go back to looking at the keyboard, which have to do while learning the left-hand layout.

However, right now, I am actually using a voice recognition program instead of typing at all. A friend who cannot type worth a damn gave me his copy of Dragon software, this being version 4 or something very ancient. It works well enough – you train it for half an hour to recognize yourself reading various words (in fact it gave me 2001 a space Odyssey to read), then give it some of your own writing samples so it can figure out what the hell you’re saying more easily. In my case, I gave it the entire text of my homebrewing book to read. It now recognizes the word “carboy” flawlessly, which makes me laugh. It was amusing seeing what exactly it thought ’strange’ about my vocabulary after it had analyzed my book for weird words.

I like it well enough that I went ahead and ordered a copy of the most recent version, which is several years newer, as I have heard that it has improved greatly.

It’s even more amusing when the microphone comes on by accident when I’m on the phone. The program allows you use voice commands to browse around documents, and to execute various commands. I had a document open when a long phone call came on, and something in what I was saying triggered the program’s own microphone to come back on in the middle of the conversation. It turned my document into gibberish, and of course you can’t laugh while using it or it writes more gibberish trying to interpret your laugh.

having spent just a very short time training the program, and getting myself used to using it, on extremely impressed with what a useful tool this is. All you non typists, this is worth trying.