In the absence of any decent coffee in my office, I’ve resorted to drinking my latest creation of necessity: the “laboccino”:
Not great, but better than nothing.
I arrive at work this morning under-caffeinated and realize that I’ve forgot to bring my recently imported tea to work again. No matter, I will settle for the stock Lipton in the office. As I walk towards the kitchen, my grip on the Cafe Du Monde mug (a memento from New Orleans) loosens and it falls a seeming short distance to the carpeted floor.
The distance, however, was not short enough to prevent the handle from breaking off. My first instinct is to throw it in the trash, but I quickly recover it: who needs the handle anyway?
I brew the tea and return to my desk, satisfied that I have triumphed over a minor inconvenience when I notice a red spot on my keyboard. Apparently the fractured ends of the handle that remain are a little sharper than I had anticipated…
Speech recognition always seems to be on the verge of having a big impact, only to recede into the shadows after each breakthrough. The latest arrival is the latest update to the Google app for the iPhone which adds voice search capabilities. The idea is quite promising and seems to be reasonable well designed. After launching the app, you lift the phone to your ear. The accelerometers in the iPhone sense the movement and the phone starts listening to your speech. You speak your search words and Google translates it into a text search.
This morning I was in a conference about pancreas transplantation and had a few lingering questions, so I decided to give it a try with the search words “pancreas transplantation”.
My first attempt yielded “sexy costumes.” Not exactly what I was looking for. Yes, I am sure I want to delete my search history.
With a second try, I got “transportation.” Close, but not quite.
The third and fourth attempts failed completely.
With the fifth, Google returned “Michigan”.
To be fair to Google, all this was done while I was walking to my office, but I spoke clearly and slowly.
Finally, I tried again in the calm of my office. The first attempt couldn’t be processed by Google, but another try finally got the correct results.
The speech recognition is supposed to get better as more people use it, but so far I’m not terribly impressed.
My trusty Reneka Techno semi-professional espresso machine has served me well for years, but recently started tripping the GFCI outlet on my wall. Hoping that it was the outlet’s fault, I tried to see what would happen when I used a regular outlet. The results aren’t pretty.
Looks like it’s back to drip coffee for a while..
Google Flu Trends: “We’ve found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional systems.”
Nice use of Google’s power…
Calibrating your computer’s battery for best performance: “The battery has an internal microprocessor that provides an estimate of the amount of energy in the battery as it charges and discharges. The battery needs to be recalibrated from time to time to keep the onscreen battery time and percent display accurate.”
After the death of my MacBook’s battery, the Apple folks pointed me to this helpful article.