I’ve spent the last couple of days plugging away at my new book, Big Lake Ranger, which I had hoped to have out by the end of the month. But I am way behind schedule and I’m not going to make that goal. At least maybe I’ll have it done by the end of the month, but it will still be going through the proofreading and formatting process.
Part of the problem is because I’ve been goofing off, running around to doctors and things like that, but another part of the problem is that I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make my dictation program work better and how to get more performance out of my computer. Unfortunately, the reality is that all I have done is slow my progress instead of increasing anything.
I came to a realization yesterday, but I’m not technical enough to know if it has anything to do with my problem or not. When I had this Dell computer built for me a couple of years ago, I included 32 gigabytes of RAM and a 1.8 terabyte solid-state hard drive. But I also took the mechanical hard drive out of an old computer that I had a tremendous amount of data on and put it in an external case and plugged it into a USB port on this computer.
The plan was to use that external hard drive to back everything up, but I realized yesterday that the solid-state hard drive has absolutely nothing on it because everything has been going into the old mechanical hard drive, which is almost full. So now I’m wondering if that old hard drive is slowing me down and not giving me the benefits of the speed that was supposedly built into this computer. I know so little about computers that I’m going to do some research into it or pick someone’s brain who does.
Meanwhile, Judy Rinehimer, one of my proofreaders, has just returned from an extended cruise in the Mediterranean. Friday evening, I sent her the manuscript to date to have her go through it, even though Roberta and Terry already have. She found some things wrong, which doesn’t surprise me because gremlins always sneak in at night and change things, and when she returned it to me yesterday morning, she said she was hooked already. That’s a good sign!
I probably won’t get much writing done again today because it is our friend Jennifer’s birthday, and we’re going to spend some time with her hitting some local antique shops and then taking her to dinner. And if her guy Jesse plays his cards right, we might let him ride along, too.
And finally, here’s a chuckle to start your day from the collection of funny signs we see in our travels and that our readers share with us.
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Thought For The Day – I am writing a diary full of lies. I want my loved ones to read it after I die and be like “wait, what?”
Nick Russell
World-Famous, New York Times Best Selling Author, and All-Around Nice Guy!
Nick, regarding your external hard drive vs. your solid state drive, the solid state drive will transfer data significantly faster than a regular hard drive. You should be able to create folders on the solid state drive and transfer data over to those new folders. The first time you open a document, you will have to look for it in the new location, but after that the documents should save back to the solid state drive.
Your settings need to be changed. Everything should be saved in the SSD, and backed up from there. It sounds like the computer is trying to work off the back up drive. That should not be.
I seriously don’t think your computer is the problem
My uneducated guess it will/Probably be your voice namely your dialect
Do a weird test take a Half of a page from your book and read it into your microphone send that to your printer and print it out
Have your good neighbor read the same half page an print that out
then ask Miss Terry to read the same paragraph from that book then print it out and And compare the miss spellings to the 3 papers
Then take your radio to a talk station and record the dictation for about a paragraph and then compare and see if there’s any misspellings in that
I have a very heavy New England accent if I don’t pronounce my words correctly or I speak too fast or I’m tired you wouldn’t understand what’s being printed
The text below is what I get on my Apple Computer Voice to text without any corrections. This is why I don’t think the computer is the fault . I think it has to do with our Voice speed and speech / dialect
My uneducated guess it will probably be your voice namely your dialect do a weird test take a half a page from your book and read it into your microphone set it to your printer and print it out have you a goodneighbor read the same half page and print that out then ask Miss Terry to read the same paragraph from that book then print it out and compare the misspellings to the three pages Then take your radio talk station and record the dictation from the boat a paragraph and then compare that to see if there’s any misspellings in that I have a very heavy New England accent if I don’t pronounce my words correctly or I speak too fast or I’m tired you wouldn’t understand what’s being printed
Nick, don’t stress on the book! Stuff happens, especially medical. My wife and I were going to be traveling in the 5er this winter, but medical stuff happened and we, sadly, covered it for the NH winter just today. Keep calm and stay healthy; we can wait.
As far as your PC, yes I agree Paul Z and Mr. Ed. I wis we were wintering in Crescent City this year; I’m a retired EE, I’d be glad to take a look at your setup. If you are storing to your external hard drive, yes that will be slow especially over USB. I hope somebody can check that out for you.
Finally, Mr. Ed has a great idea having others try your dictation system and compare results. We’d all be interested in the outcome, after following your trials and tribulations over the last few months.
I actually gave up on a Kindle book today, because it wasn’t all that good and because. The formatting. Looked a lot like this I was thinking that that author used dictation too but nobody proofed it because the writing was so grammatically strange with either run run on sentences. Or strange. Sentence fragments. LOL! Let us know how you make out, and don’t stress.
Their are those who have backed up their data and those who have not lost all their data yet.
You are running on an old drive via USB with no backup.
Immediately get some assistance in transferring the data from your HD to your SSD.
When that is complete, you should arrange to have an offsite cloud based backup.