Yesterday afternoon I was busy writing a new self-publishing blog post titled The Numbers Are In, about my current e-book sales on Amazon Kindle, and Miss Terry was baking some hamburger buns from scratch for dinner. When the basement air conditioner in our Winnebago motorhome came on, we both commented at about the same time that a week ago, we had the furnace on and were complaining about the cold! What a difference a week makes! 🙂
Except for a quick trip to the post office that I made yesterday afternoon to mail off some orders, we didn’t leave the motorhome all day long. I caught up on a lot of e-mails, wrote the blog post mentioned above, and did some research on Dragon speech to text software, that allows the user to speak into a microphone attached to a computer, or a digital recorder, and it converts it into text on the computer. Some writers seem to love it, and others are not as complimentary. Do any of you use this or another type of speech to text software? If so, I’d appreciate your feedback.
On my way out to the post office, I stopped to say hello to Clair Glossner, a Gypsy Journal subscriber who is spending the winter here at The Great Outdoors with his wife Billie. We had a nice visit, and when I left their site, I was flagged down by Nate and Ruth Burquist, faithful blog readers who are brand new fulltimers and were leaving today to head down to the Keys. I’m jealous, I want to go to the Keys too!
I always like talking to newbies, because their excitement and enthusiasm rubs off on me, and I get excited about fulltiming all over again. Not that it has gotten old for me. After 13 years, I love this lifestyle just as much as the day we left our hometown back in Arizona.
Reservations are starting to pick up for our Arizona Gypsy Journal Rally, and a lot of people seem to like the idea of the different roundtable discussions we will be having on topics like diesel pushers, fifth wheel trailers, traveling in small RVs, solo RVing, RVing grandparents, working on the road, and volunteering. The format will give folks an opportunity to not only learn from others, but also to share their knowledge and experiences.
Of course, we’ll also have a lot of regular seminars on all kinds of topics of interest to RVers. And we are thrilled to have Mac McCoy back with us in Yuma to present his RV Fire Safety seminars. RV fires do happen, and they can be horrible things. We had two fires in our bus conversion, and thanks to the skills she learned in Mac’s classes, Terry was able to put them out both times before any damage was done.
Today, if I can drag Miss Terry away from her bookwork and other chores, we may do some sightseeing, and maybe chase down a geocache or two. This area is loaded with them, and I picked up a Travel Bug when we were up in Indiana that needs to be dropped off somewhere.
Thought For The Day – It is better to have an enemy who honestly says they hate you than to have a friend who secretly stabs you in the back.
Nick Russell
World-Famous, New York Times Best Selling Author, and All-Around Nice Guy!
Gee, while we were in Cottonwood we ran the heater in the morning & the AC in the afternoon.
Donna, I live in a suburb of Phoenix and am living with your experience these days. Our nights are very chilly, requiring heat, and by afternoon it’s hot and in need of some AC. Supposed to have a huge dust storm tomorrow which will last most of the day and into the night.
I see that a cold front has followed you into Florida and is making it’s way southward! I hope you didn’t bring that rain cloud thats been following you around for months.
Haven’t used the speech to text software for several years, so I’m sure that it has been improved. It took some “teaching” the software to recognize your speech patterns. I use the voice recognition feature on my Droid smartphone all the time and it is great.
I’m a programmer that works with electronic medical records systems and we have several doctors that use Dragon and like it very much. On the other hand, most doctors don’t want to even try it both because they feel the learning curve is too steep. In most cases where it is accepted the doctor is able to work without a medical transcriber working for them. It may mean one less person employed but it also means there will be less “human error.”
As a retired medical transcriptionist I know how many times the doctor misspeaks and I always had to be thinking and made the correction. Things like left rather than right, toe rather than finger, wrong vertebral level, etc. Boy, am I glad I am retired!