Phone, Phone on the Range

So it's time for another post again. The cell phone. Do people actually buy cell phones and change them? Keep on updating them?

I have an old-fashioned cell phone. The fact that I have a cell phone at all, is a rather big deal. I don't go much away from where I am, and have very little need to be contacted when I'm out in the street. Although I was one of the first to have a home computer many many years ago, I was one of the last to have a cell phone. Well I wouldn't say one of the last in the country. Because who knows? Neither did I take a poll nor do I know what other people have.

But I finally did get one, and it was the rather bulky type. So now I am looking for something a little bit more streamlined that would fit easily in my pocket. I don't need many fancy bells and whistles. I don't need net connections, 3-D iPod type movies, or to read my Gmail or news articles.

But I would like a camera. I would like a phone that has camera capabilities built-in. But I sure don't want to pay for it. And I have a contract already so I'm not looking to change.

I am stuck with what I have.

Life goes on.

The age of memories

The creeping fear of age has a way of creeping up on all of us. I just don't have the same sprightly step that I used to have years ago. I'm sure that could be expected. But I really don't know where my life is headed. And the problem is as time continues to disappear, there's less and less left to live.

Yesterday I purchased a lottery ticket for about $50 million. Well, the ticket cost the buck. No real expectation that I would win the thing. But they have that fantastic cliché, "you never know," so every once in a while I allow myself to indulge in my fantasies and I actually pay the dollar. Someplace in my be full thoughts, I consider that maybe there's something patriotic in supporting the lottery. The money goes to build bridges isn't that so?

For a dollar I indulge in a dollars worth of fantasy thought to approximately a minute or two. You know the spiel, what kind of house I would purchase, what country I would live in, what I would do with the remainder of the money. But of course at the end of the day my numbers were not picked and I did not win.

I wasn't upset. I couldn't expect otherwise. If I won $50 million somehow I don't think I'd know what to do with it. Yes, of course I'm ready to try.

We live in a certain dull circle of boredom and inertia, living our own dismal lives of quiet desperation, preparing, no, waiting for the big grand reaper to come and take us away.

I wish I could say that some grandiose events occurred in my life that made my life outstanding. Well, I did get to witness many grandiose events even though I was not really a cause of any of them. Perhaps one of the most significant was that I lived through the computer revolution. I had a brother-in-law that was a computer programmer on the old IBM of the 50s and 60s. The machine was as big as a room and all it would do was read numbers off a punch card.

In 1982 I purchased my first home computer -- a TI-99/4A Texas Instrument home computer. I'm not going to tell you how primitive it was, do a google on it and you'll see for yourself.

Today I sit by a computer that is powerful enough to run a nuclear power plant, and yet it sits on my desk with plenty of room to spare.

And I've seen the evolution of dictation software. Today I can speak and all of my words are transcribed. Or videotaped. Except we don't use tape anymore.

Time In

So there hasn't been an entry here for a long time. In a way that's criminal. Well, not really criminal because a blog after all is not an obligation but a choice. No one is forced to dictate to blog. It's an option we have and perhaps an option we use.

Having said that, I could not withhold from placing an entry here regarding the phenomenal upgrading of Dragon. Version 10 in my opinion is so much more superior to version 9 and all the other previous versions. Now maybe that's just the luck of the Irish. But I find that version 10 runs a much more smoothly, the words simply roll onto the screen much faster, and the accuracy -- the accuracy!-without even doing much training, is astounding.

I don't know what else I can tell you. I know that this program comes with more features than the previous versions. But I'm not really that concerned with them at the moment. Some of them let you browse the web verbally. I am going to explore those features in the future. But what impresses me most right now is simply the fact that the dictation is much smoother

I like it!