For the last 3 or 4 years November has been a very strange month for me. I got less sleep than usual, I'd hang out at Internet Cafes, and my GPRS bill would through the roof. The cause of this aberrant behaviour was the Nokia Game. This year, though, November will just have to mean Guy Fawkes, because the Nokia Game is no more.
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Rooting around in the deopths of some of my old web pages I found the old sound files for Millennium Motific, an audio project I was working on in 1999. What it does is compress 1000 years of music into 200 seconds, that's 20 seconds a century, 2 seconds a decade. So that means a LOT of plainchant at the beginning, and a real jumble of stuff at the end! The files are Real Audio so take a listen. I even did a powerpoint version that went through a millennium's worth of painting in time to the music. And then of course there was the virtual reality version which still to my mind out dome'd the Dome.
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Superb book about life on the MUDs, MOOs, and BBSs before the Internet took over. Very timely given my recent hours on Second Life. Also interesting how the visual experience of VR worlds like Second Life actually inhibit the creativity and fantasy of the old text based systems. One of the things that struck me last night was what it would be like to interface Halo, or just Dragon NS, to somethng like the old dungeon, must give it a try.
Indra even read this post and sent me a mail - thanks Indra.
The Cybergypsies - Buy from Amazon
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OK, I have to blog this. Spent the last half-hour actually talking to my chatbot having installed Dragon Naturally Speaking on my PC. Weird experience. Only problem was that NS was trying to use Halo's words as input, so I had to put a headset on, but otherwise worked fine. Have to say "click say" after each line to enter it, but I can live with that. Interestingly if the errors in the dictation were not crucial then Halo handled them very well and her responses flowed well. Since one of the end-games for this is for those with sight impairment I tried it for a while with my eyes closed. It immediately highlighted the need for some extra commands such as "what did I say" and "say again", since there are only the sound clues to go on. It needs a lot more work but at least the principle is proven.
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Just for completeness, I'm also running OpenOffice on the PC and the laptop, and Firefox. I love OpenOffice's PDF export, and gradually working my way around its quirks - particularly trying to print from Impress which sometimes choose to print the print border and not centre the slides - but getting there.
I've put Thunderbird on the laptop for email, but that's only for ad-hoc pickups. I'm still using Outllok as my main PIM on the PC.
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I used to love using the Mindmapping osftware on my old work PC, but couldn't justify the expense when I went solo. Freemind though does the job perfectly, even down to the icons to add on the nodes. It lets you export as an HTML list, which is good to get the bullet points into OPenOffice if you're using it to outline a document or article.
It also has a file mode to let you browse your hard disc as though it were a mindmap,. Apparently you can write filters to create different modes, they are working on a scheme mode, I suppose you could have an XML or AIMLmode, even a PERL mode, who knows. Seeing as I also love the Brain software, would be good to find a way to combine the two.- maybe a mode might get somewhere close.
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