Well, here I am, a considerable length of time since my last blog post. The reasons for the delay are many, varied, and I’m not even going to go into them. It’s just really too much to think about sometimes. Well, during this blog post I will not be dwelling on any of those reasons or touching base with any of them. Although on some of my other social media in the future there may be some appearing, but they’re not part of this blog post anyway.
Right now I’m in Malaysia and I have been for the last four months. It seems I almost have to confirm that by looking at the calendar. I don’t know if it’s a factor of age or what it is, but time just seems to be, wholly dingle, moving along and it’s really hard to keep up. Of course, when one is retired, the aspect of time has really shifted as well, it seems. In addition, while we are here, Kim is also functioning as retired, because she’s not working, and that puts it into a whole different area. I am sure that many of you have experienced this effect as well.
Something that is a factor of age is the process that we cannot seem to do now what we’ve been able to do for most of our lives and we get frustrated. For example, I have been a touch typist for basically all my life. Since high school. All during my military career and into several careers following, my touch typing was quick and accurate, no problem at all. My fingers went right where the keys are supposed to be and the words and letters came out. Everything was just great.
Now I am neither quick nor accurate. The frustration level becomes high and it seems I must resort to the hunt and peck method. I suspect that perhaps there is a conspiracy between my fingers and my laptop keyboard.
As a result, I am now moving to a new process, at least a new process for me. I am dictating to my computer what I want to say and hoping that the computer actually puts down the words that I use and that I can keep my brain in gear long enough to actually make sense.
I know that I am many sailings behind the majority of the world in doing this. But hopefully I can persevere, learn, get some skill, and maybe show once again that an old dog can learn new tricks.
I’m sure that it’s going to take a while, however. For many years I was pretty good at coordinating my thinking speed and my typing speed so that the words that I thought would flow off my fingers and I would form the paragraphs and whatever as I went along. Speaking to a computer is different than speaking to another person. As the computer does not speak back, so it’s not really a conversation. However, one of the rules, one of the basic rules of having a conversation, is to ensure that the brain is in gear before engaging the mouth.
I have had always in my mind for a considerable time the aspect of dictating to my computer. However, it was not really convenient for them to learn my voice and all of that stuff, the different applications that I saw and so I didn’t do it. However, just recently I was watching a video on TikTok and the person was talking about a feature that has been on Microsoft Windows for years and I was unaware of. So I thought I would try it out and basically you activate ability to dictate into a text box by using Windows “H”, the Windows key and the H key, and it works very well. I don’t have to do anything extra and I don’t have to do any training. Well, at least I don’t have to do any training for the computer. I have to do training for me, it seems.
Currently it’s not increasing the speed because I keep stopping and reading and thinking. However it is increasing the accuracy and taking the frustration level way, way down.
So I was working on my Wii Internet Empire newsletter and it popped into my head that maybe I should come over and just do a blog about this dictating to the computer thing. And so I’ve done that. Now I will wrap things up here, make sure it’s all good to go, and then I will head back over to the newsletter and get some more stuff done there. Because my loyal readers certainly deserve to get a newsletter. It’s been quite a while since they’ve had one.
As always, thank you for reading my blog. I do appreciate any comments or remarks that you may want to make or send along, any thoughts that you may have.
Richard's Ramblings 