Friday 19:56
Last night, I took a pizza and chips from the freezer, but then decided to go healthy and cook a stir-fry, but unfortunately that ended up as a total disaster. So tonight, I have played it safe and gone for the pizza and chips. This will make this a short session, especially as I will have to turn the chips halfway through, but that is an easy excuse to just mess around online whilst I’m waiting. Spending 20 minutes on random websites would be no great loss, especially considering how much time I wasted in bed this morning, but I have a momentum from when I came back from my job and I really want to keep this going. I said that I would start to promote this blog when it got to 100 posts, and I’m up to 34 now, so that’s halfway there — sorry, no it isn’t, it’s one third of the way, but as I’m doing this with voice recognition, I’m not going to go back and correct that!
I said I was apprehensive about doing the London to Paris bike ride, so instead I decided to start small and sign up for a bike ride in the Peak District with the British Heart Foundation. This is only 29 miles, but the registration fee is just £10, and there is no minimum requirement for sponsorship. My pizza and chips might not be all that healthy, but at least I’m keeping my sugar intake down tonight with a Diet Coke, but I really do hate the stuff. I think I bought it on some ridiculous special offer where it was cheaper to buy two multipacks that was to buy just the one, so I guess I’ll be lumbered with it for a while. In the meantime, I’ll be back to the regular stuff tomorrow.
Now, where was I? There goes the first alarm, off to turn the chips, back in a minute. [20:05]
20:07
Well, those chips really do smell good (voice recognition took that down as smouldered, I hope that isn’t a premonition for me allowing them to burn by getting the timing settings wrong, or concentrating so hard on the computer that I don’t hear the oven alarm in the background!). I remember going to a chippy in Warwick used to regularly tell me that fish and chips were at least the most healthy takeaway food, or should that be the least unhealthy takeaway food? I would go out to the local chippy — I’m sure fish is much more healthy than pizza, with all those omega-3 oils, but their standards have really gone down lately, and the other one is a 15 minute walk away, and I don’t have the car any more (voice recognition says avocado, is it trying to give me a health hint?) more to drive there.
Back to the notebook:
(20:13) I’m sure that alarm would go off any moment now, but before I been given a chance to get going, NaturallySpeaking tells me that I’m up to the limit of what it is able to recognise in one session. This must be total nonsense — I have barely done a quarter of an hour worth of dictation, and even now I just pasted in a few notes from a previous block of text, there is no way that they should take things over the limit. Reminder to myself — see if I can adjust voice recognition settings to allow for longer dictation time. Anyway, there goes the alarm (20:14)\\.
//(20:42) Just before I left for dinner, the microphone stand started coming apart, but I have put it back together again, and I hope that with a bit of tightening it won’t trouble me again. The microphone itself has proved to be extremely resilient, having been dropped several times. That’s what I expect from quality German engineering — I’m not sure where the stand came from, but I won’t make any pre-judgements there. Voice recognition certainly has its trials and tribulations, but once you get used to it, it is way more efficient than typing, and there’s no way I would even consider doing a blog like this if it wasn’t for voice recognition software. In many ways, this whole thing feels like a bit of a one-way conversation with a completely unknown audience, but I do like the fact that I can essentially just ramble along and say what I think, and I hope that this makes enough sense to keep future readers interested. Now as I said before, back to the notebook:
I have a growing list of people to get back in touch with Facebook — the idea of meeting up with one Facebook contact each day that I mentioned earlier on a week would certainly keep me really busy, but I don’t think I’d have enough time left to get any serious work done. I’d love to see if somebody else has tried a similar project. Anyway, A is for Aldo, Ankit — and that’s just in east London, so now I can see my diary getting very busy once I actually pin people down to a meeting. Maybe I could interview people for this blog — I know that most Internet entrepreneurs have a very interesting take on personal development issues, it is only natural that people who don’t fit in to a normal office environment will end up running their own businesses, and what better way to do this than to run your own website in your own time?
Well, that’s about it for this particular session — I have made loads of other notes, but they all qualify for posts in their own right, some here, some elsewhere. Here’s the titles I plan to add on this blog:
• Preparing the house for an exercise mentality.
• Is it best to share ideas or keep them to yourself?
• Where did it all go wrong on Thursday? / general notebook update for Wednesday evening and Thursday
• Food swings
• Trainers or concert tickets — which is a better way to spend £75?
• Thought about twitter
• The diverse world of Internet publishing.
• ’Linkansen’
• Thoughts on Top 30 revenue earning websites and ‘I’m following the dream’ type blogs.
• A one-way conversation with who?
Right, that’s quite a good list. Potentially 10 more posts this evening, but I think I’ll also end up moving off into other arenas, and maybe having a bit of a drawing session. I know that I need to update the template for this blog, but my other two blogs could be neatened up quite a bit as well. I think it’s finally time to get our logo sorted, that’s one that I’ve been procrastinating on for years.
Well, I might as well start at the top: (tbc – next post)