19 November 2011
Son Miles came home last night. For supper en route to his friend George Courtauld who has kindly invited him for a day shooting. It was a fleeting visit and he left early this morning as the carers were attending to me but it was nice to see him as his next visit will not be until Christmas. How quickly the festive season has crept up on us with Christmas only a mere five weeks or so away.
This Dragon voice activation programme really is unbelievably sporadic. Yesterday I tried anything up to 15 or 20 times to get it to log on, without success. It would do so for several words and then freeze and I would have to go through the whole process once again. In the end I was so exhausted I gave up and began to think that I would have been able to do my daily entry. However waking up this morning I switched it on and it immediately logged on and I was able to do take the whole of yesterday’s blog and part of this one without any trouble whatsoever. In the meantime I had rung Ruben, the senior technician in the UK for Nuance, but he played his normal trick of passing a message through the person who answered the telephone saying he was busy at present but would ring me back in the afternoon, which ,of course, he did not do. I am curious to find out what he and his company’s reaction is to my official complaint to the Trade Standards Office.
Paul’ the computer’ came round this afternoon whilst Alice went to an art exhibition in Saffron Walden that. In between chatting about some of the latest amazing gadgets are being developed, about which he is terribly enthusiastic, I managed to pin him down to do some more work on my computer. He has one specific task left to do that is to log all the various media I’ve used todate so I know what is left and available for use in the future. When he’s finished that particular task I think we will have gone about as far as we can go and then it’s a question of who and how the remaining problems with Dragon get resolved. I believe the work he’s done already will have isolated some of the problems and are now beginning to to suspect that there is a faulty USB connection which may be adding to the confusion., Then being right up to date on our own laptop after taking off all of my data and programmes and reinstalling them, if they cannot then find the fault theln we may have no choice but to switch to a new computer if they cannot find the problem with this particular one.
Apart from the work that he is doing on my laptop, Paul has very generously brought me copies of a very exciting series, previously shown on television, some years ago, entitled, quite simply Lost. The storyline is all about a group of people stranded on an island after their scheduled airline had been blown off course and crash landed on a mysterious jungle like island. It becomes compulsive watching as our there are so many twists and turns in the plot. I believe there are six series altogether with about 20 episodes in each, and Paul has all except series 6, so that should keep me pleasantly occupied in my idle moments!
The reference to airline crashes prompted me to include this amazing video showing how quick thinking and nerves of steel combined with an incredible piece of flying skill adverted what could have been a major accident when the airliner’s landing gear failed! Click the link below and you will see what I mean.