Good Mornthing! [20190409]

[blissmorgan]

So, I am writing today's entry using the voice dictation capability found in a Google doc. I did not know that this was a thing, until I was posting on Facebook about what had happened to my hand and one of my friends said something about installing voice-to-text software on my computer I replied how great that would be and they messaged me privately to tell me how to activate the voice to text capability in Google Docs.

It has its ups and downs. It is really nice to be able to just talk clearly to my computer and see the words appearing on the screen in the way that I had dreamed of being able to do some 20 and 25 years ago when this sort of Technology was still either just a Daydream, or in process but extremely expensive to procure. And now, here it is. On my computer, for free, no big deal, just open the thing and turn it on and Away you go.

It has some Oddity to it in terms of what it decides to capitalize. I haven't exactly figured out what it's criteria are for when to capitalize a word in the middle of a sentence. Capitalizing Google Docs makes sense, of course - it is the name of the service I am using to create this text. However, technology daydream and Oddity as well as away are all just regular words and I'm not sure if they got capitalize due to Something in the way the program works or if it has something to do with my tone of voice ellipsis I just haven't figured it out yet.

It's weird trying to figure out what punctuation this can handle. Obviously, it handles commas and periods without a problem - it also inserts hyphens where I want them to. It's interesting to see that somehow my use of the names of those particular punctuation worked in such a way - maybe from the way I said it? - that for the purposes of that sentence I was able to talk about them in words as opposed to having them inserted. I haven't been able to get it to use quotation marks yet, and I don't know how to make it do a carriage return or how to backspace or delete a word or words. However, these are relatively minor quibbles that I still yet met figure out, and until then I am content to use the keyboard at least a little bit to make it happen.

For now, I am going to leave all this as written, with the odd capitalization and with whatever incorrect words the service has put in in place of my own words I I am wondering if it is learning software. That is, I am wondering if, the more I use it, the more it will train translating properly from my voice into the text what it is that I am actually saying.

for now, this is okay.

Anywho, the spawn are in school and hated, and I am basically ready for work. Showering with one hand is hard, but by the grace of curly hair and a stick of deodorant I have declared myself not in need of a shower today, and got dressed before I came down to get anyone up for school. This means that I have a little more time than usual before I need to go to work, and normally I would sit here, make this post, and then entertain myself for another half hour with personal Pursuits - be they online, physically creative, or both. However with my hand borked, there is not really a lot I can do in terms of creative Pursuits, and I'm getting really tired of sitting on my ass on my computer. Therefore, today I am going to exercise personal responsibility for my vehicle. I am going to stop at the car place down the street from my work, where they took care of my exhaust problem for $150 instead of several thousand dollars a couple months ago, and have them replace the bulb in one of my headlights. This is technically a problem that I could fix myself however I was not feeling super interested in doing it even before this flare up in my hand, and now I am really full of nope about it. I am hitting a point where I in my knowledge of how to do or fix things on my own, and picking certain things that I know on the list and finding it worthwhile to pay for someone else to do on my behalf. Clearly, All Things Considered, having somebody else do this thing for me is worth my money.

It is nice having enough money that paying someone else to do a relatively small vehicular repair for me is actually an option that does not require re juggling my entire budget for the next 3 months.

In other money-related news I got the texts yesterday from TurboTax that both my federal and my state return have been accepted by their respective agencies, and so now I am on deposit watch, waiting to see each of those drop in. I decided to throw them both directly into my savings. That is in itself kind of a weird feeling for me - not only is this the first time in basically a decade when I actually have a tax return that I needed to even do at all, but this is the first time I can remember ever where I have gotten a tax return and had not already mentally spent it on something - anyting - before it even showed up in my bank account. Not that it was very much in my early and mid-twenties, mind you. Those returns were always very small enough for a nice lunch and perhaps a pair of shoes, something like that. In my later twenties when I was married and filing with my husband our returns were bigger, and those returns always ended up going into bigger purchases such as a dining room set a living room set bunk beds for the children dot-dot-dot guitars... That kind of thing.

I really like being able to build up a savings, you guys. It's like every deposit I put in that account is rapping a sick blanket around the head of some tiny awful person who has always been in the back of my head screaming, and I don't think they'll ever stop screaming and I don't think they'll go away, but I don't have to hear them constantly all the time at least not right now. is this what people mean when they talk about finding peace? Maybe. I think this is what people mean when they argue that yes, money can, in fact, buy happiness. money buying happiness doesn't mean purchasing things. Money buying happiness means having enough to know that when things go wrong, it isn't going to ruin your entire life.

I just want you to know that this voice-to-text thing does not in fact translate sniffling noises into any kind of text, so that's cool.

I am still waiting for the ibuprofen to kick in this morning, but that is neither here nor there in terms of getting things done. I am going to go do the needful thing now, and then get myself to work, where I will continue to do my darndest to learn how to write left-handed. Happily, it is mostly just numbers plus a few brief letters that I really need to be able to write, so I think I am slowly improving bit by bit just through repetition. it would be a lot worse if I were supposed to be writing entire contiguous sentences.

Hello blisstopia.

 

Comments

[rokenford]

Sorry your hand is borked.

Yes money can buy breathing room. This is something I've learned the last couple years as well. Le sigh...

I had a fever yesterday, doc suspected flu, but test came back negative. So huzzah mystery virus. Did some hardcore resting and back to work today. Can't tell if I'm still sore from being sick or of I just hurt from coughing.

[johncomic]

How can I convey to you my awe and admiration to behold the fluency and artistry with which you speak. Just when I think my smitten-ness can attain no higher highs nor deeper depths, you reveal new vistas and I scramble for new superlatives and a fresh supply of floatyhearts. <3 <3 <3

[wa_bob]

You have the imagination of a writer - You should use it sometime to write fiction or such! ;-)

The stress of the last 2 weeks seems to be winding down to normal stress now so that's a positive. Now I am getting the lawn tamed for the first time in 2019 and it's starting to feel like the year is moving on.

Be well and heal good lady!

[blissmorgan]

Huzzah for it not being the flu! Mystery viruses suck, though. When I was in the Urgent Care to get my hand checked out, one of the nurses made me laugh by referring to me as a medical mess, which was both hilarious and not inaccurate, All Things Considered.

Check this out! The Google Doc microphone thing taught me how to audibly tell it to make a new line in the thing I am dictating. It is a little creepy that that popped up right after I had used the thing to make an audible to text dictated post, but it also just might be that certain tooltips are offered early on when someone starts using it and is trying to figure these things out. I don't know.

I feel you on the having to be at work when you aren't one hundred percent problem. Do not push yourself too hard - like they say, the work will still be there tomorrow!

[blissmorgan]

Back when the general use internet was still relatively young, and social media was a very new thing, one of the places I had built a little home and network for myself was on livejournal. As with other social media since then, I made friends with people on there I had never met before, and then proceeded to meet some of them. One of these people with whom I am still friends although distantly, met up with me at the mall between our college has to see a movie and commented with a wonderful mix of delight, surprise, and confusion that I spoke in person exactly the way that I wrote my life journal entries.

I think a lot of it can be chalked up to how much I read when I was younger and the breadth of what I read. I did read a lot of young adult fiction geared toward dot-dot-dot well toward my age group. but I also read a lot of young adult fiction aimed at people who were young adults 10:20 even 30 years before I was born. I read the original Mary Poppins book cover to cover multiple times, as well as the sequel. I also read a bunch of things that were technically completely outside of my age group. I Read Moby Dick when I was 10. I read Gone With The Wind in sixth grade. We always had magazines coming to the house, too, and I know that magazines are not really considered “literature” as such, they still have distinct style and register and particular voices and vocabulary. Readers Digest, Good Housekeeping, boy's life, sassy, National Geographic. I read all of these a bunch when I was a kid and tween and teen as well.

Another thing that I think this can be chalked up to is the fact that for a long time I really refused to do any editing whatsoever. With the exception of maybe one to two papers and high school where in turning in subsequent draft with edits was a requirement for a particular project, think I ever did more than a single draft for an essay or paper until somewhere in college. It probably sounds ridiculous knowing how much I love editing things now, but even now still, I don't like editing my own work as much as I like editing other people's work. It can be more difficult to see the weak spots, the soft spaces, the things that need to be rearranged and short up in something that has come out of your own head. This is why it is so valuable for writers to have editors who understand their work and are able to address it in a positive way with an eye toward strengthening it through change. So, because of my refusal to do what seemed, to me then, to be extra work I really developed the Knack of thinking about where I wanted not just a sentence, but also the entire paragraph to go in terms of building an argument, and then where I wanted all of the paragraphs to go and how to put together the overall structure of the argument for the overall point of the paper. Therefore, I trained myself to think ahead and to develop carefully what I am trying to say so that by the time I am done speaking - or writing - I have managed to build up to a point in a way that has a clearly logical progression.

I'm glad you like it.<3

[blissmorgan]

I should totally use my imagination to write fiction! LOL I actually have been writing a bit more lately than I have for a while. It is for online play by post role-playing as opposed to Standalone fiction pieces, but right now it seems that that is what I need and it is very satisfying.

Hooray for normal stress! Wait, what?

Yay for getting the lawn tamed, though. Our lawn is a mess. The downstairs neighbors have two small children ages 5 and 3, and as one would expect of children of that age, they love to drag sticks out of the woods to play with and so there are little piles of sticks and logs, and little well not so little cains of rocks around the yard and the bottom of the driveway.

The healing is a process, and I am in it to win it. It is really frustrating though. I do not enjoy being slow and limited the way that I am, and it's even worse because I am doing it through pain. And the pain doesn't even bother to Be steady pain so that I can get used to it and ignore it. It comes and goes and it never goes completely away but when it comes man it really comes and the ibuprofen doesn't completely help. c'est la vie.

[markkrawec]

It's disproportionately amusing that it keeps capitalizing All Things Considered like it assumes you're always talking about the radio show.

[blissmorgan]

I noticed that while still in the midst of the dictation, and it tickled me to no end. I have listened to that radio show once or twice but never seem to be in the car while it is on, and I don't have a real regular radio in my house as such, which is kind of weird because that was always a staple thing present in several rooms of the house when I was a kid. I miss the giant stack speakers we had in the living room. Those were awesome.