Greetings to you
One of my tasks at my job involves handling e-mails and communicating with customers with that fashion. I use a thin form for my e-mails, a brief greeting, and a brief closing, which I have to type out by hand each time. I seem to miss, sometimes, as I just discovered a reply to one of my e-mails in my box, with my original e-mail in the reply, stating the following (name changed):
"Dar Amanda,"
Normally I notice things when I proofread before sending, so I don't know how I missed this. I'm not sure what 'dar' in this case would stand for, but Wikipedia's first suggestion is "Daughters of the American Revolution".
At least she didn't go Grammar Nazi on me for it.
Tags: internet spelling
The Zompire
[[image:02housing.190.jpg::center:0]]
The Zompire has risen. Zombies everywhere will no longer stand alone, will no longer be oppressed by the humans, vampyres, and demons, and will stand together to prove how powerful an undead force they are.
No longer will a zombie have to hide. No longer will a zombie be in fear of walking about, the ever-present threat of crowbars and shotguns present. No longer will they be passed off as simply another threat. They will stand firm, stand strong, and stand smelly.
As the Publicist for the Zompire, I advise you people that you should not resist, the Zompire will be taking over.
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Note: The above was the culmination of a humorous conversation that began with me accidentally combining the words "zombie" and "vampyre" together into the word "zompire", followed by Kyle misinterpreting it as a contraction of "zombie" and "empire".
Note 2: Yes, I spelled it "vampyre", I always spell it with a 'y'.
Tags: anecdote words
Dictate Anywhere
Since I got my new headphones with a microphone, I decided I would try out the Vista Speech Recognition. Unless I can't avoid it, this whole post is dictated.
The problem, though, is that it doesn't work naturally everywhere, and I can't just use it free form in whatever I want, I instead get this Correction panel come up every time to confirm what I said. 
As explained by a Microsoft blogger, it uses specific APIs for the speech box, and everything not using it can only be enabled by an option called "Dictate Anywhere", which gives the option to correct what was said, because the correction commands cannot be used in these forms. This, unfortunately, means that I cannot use it normally in either Firefox, and OpenOffice. Making it somewhat less than useful for my usual functions.
I have stopped dictating at this point and am typing the rest, because it is faster. I haven't trained the listener yet, so it won't have all my speech nuances down yet, but it is also having problems with my Utahn accents and the way I (don't) pronounce my 't's, and as I was writing this entry it was having a problem recognizing and entering "Dictate Anywhere", "Firefox", and, strangely enough, "Vista", and I had to type those both in by hand.
And further aggravating is I had do disable my Sound Blaster Audigy and go to my onboard audio to be able to use the microphone, because on my Audigy the line in and microphone jack are the same, and it didn't seem to know how to put the jack in a boosting mode so I had enough input level to be able to use the microphone.
Tags: programming software voice_recognition
Blogotubes
It is now the end of the year, and so its time to reflect over the last year, and make new year resolutions.
One thing I have noticed over the last year is my changing in my regular internet habits. More and more, I get my news from blog sites nowadays, rather than other news sources. Engadget for tech news, Joystiq and it's subsidiaries for gaming news, Phoronix for Linux and video card news, and a growing collection of MSDN Team Blogs for Windows and programming news. I rarely venture to the aggregate collections such as Google News anymore, I just continually watch blogs for news. I've also become more involved, with this blog here of course, intentions on making the AnacondaSoftware DevBlog possibly the bulk of the main site, and commenting a lot more on blogs for communication.
The face of the internet changes, and things move forward. Onwards to 2008!
Tags: anacondasoftware computer internet software video_games
Merry Christmas! I am tired!
Merry Christmas! I'm in the giving mood, so I posted an update to Skewed as a present, after so long without anything but talk about it on here.
And it's an hour and a half past when I usually go to bed, so I will leave it at that for now, and comment more on it tomorrow.
Tags: personal skewed