Cheezhead

Yea I told Joel I would post on Xtra Cheezy every few weeks, and then under-delivered. All I can say is that if he had my name on a contract, he would have had my blovations each fortnight, which value conveniently does not change with quantity.

What motivated a post this afternoon was a three part combination of outrage, regret, and experimentation. The regret was simply my failure to blog with decent regularity for Joel. The outrage arose when I read the second of two news stories within a few days describing two tragedies of the same absurd nature; baking one’s child/dog/grandma to death in a sun-heated automobile. The story is the same, just the names and circumstances change.

If a closeted technical mind such as my own could perceive the simplicity of a temperature/carbon dioxide/mass detector arrangement to automatically open car windows on super hot days, imagine the brilliant solutions that Toyota, Honda, and GM could devise, had they the legal motivation to do so.

I dont like to get political in business space, but you have to think that the rites of pervasive deregulation are becoming threadbare. Sure, parents would pay more for a safer car, but for the fact that they would never be the dummies who forget their kids some sunny day.

But it can happen to any of us- it happened school principal in Ohio. Sometimes we have to have rules to help us all avoid the consequences of our human weaknesses- something lost over the past 30 years as we decided that the weak were not worth saving. Yea, hot cars are small issue in the scheme of things, but thats what had me cranked up today.

I have been ever so slowly gestating some blog post ideas that may be worth committing to wordpress. I’m heading to Northern Michigan for a week, where I plan to become a large lump of wrack with my laptop and broadband wireless connection.

By the way, the experimental motivation for this post was to see how well voice recognition software (built into Microsoft Vista) would perform with the wordpress edit window; it performs beautifully.

The voice recognition is not yet adequate to produce finished text, but there’s nothing like it for laying down whole sentence and paragraphs in short order, to be adjusted and finalized with the keyboard. I wrote this piece with a minimum of keystrokes. I notice quite a difference in my rhetorical style when writing by voice, rather than hand. If you do a lot of writing, I highly recommend a top-quality USB noise canceling microphone headset (I use a Plantronics) and learning to use the voice software. The voice recognition technology is mature and makes a big difference in my productivity.

Of course, I also perceive a change in my personality when I hold a cell phone to my right ear rather than my left (or use a headset). Righty Martin is a little (more?) confused and more emotionally connected . Headset Martin is easily distracted. If you try to sell me something, tell it to my right side.

hmmm identifying and categorizing personae changes based on input/output device choices……sounds like a new assessment start-up !!