Wednesday, October 11, 2006
More Backfill
Friday's Noon Time Notes
Eating at Dairy Queen today. I had hoped that it would have WiFi, but no. I took the time to train the handwriting recognition and it works much better now. I'll probably use it more often than the touch-screen keyboard, but it still could use a lot of improvement. Erk, I just had to go back to using the keyboard because the handwriting suddenly went totally bonkers. I have yet to use the larger keyboard designed for thumb-texting. I may have to invest in a portable keyboard to be truly happy with my new toy.
The manager just came over to see what I'm up to; it seems he owns this restaurant and the QUIZNOS I ate at yesterday, he told me that he has everything needed to make this location a WiFi hotspot, but can't get DSL here in Savoy. I suggested he go cable modem if Insight doesn't charge too much for a business location. I also suggested he offer to put a sign on his door that Insight provides the internet access in exchange for a much lower monthly bill. As easy as it to go WiFi by just hanging a wireless router off of your cable modem I'm surprised I don't see more locations offering WiFi here. I would think it would be in Insight's interests to aggressively promote its adoption in business locations in exchange for just this kind of advertising.
Incidentally I connected at home to my router without doing anything to the configuration. I have probably been providing free WiFi to my neighbors for over two years. I really need to fix that. I wonder if I've been jotted down as a hotspot by some war-drivers?
Sunday's Noon Time Notes
A couple of days later, I'm eating at McDonald's and studying for the GRE. I decided to try the handwriting recognition again and it seems to be working much better today. I'm still waiting for each letter to complete so I'm still not writing at full speed yet, but it is probably very close to using the touch-screen keyboard in speed. My speed and skill will probably improve with time. Actually I just tried Something new starting on the last line, which is to write ahead one word at a time. It seems to do a pretty reasonable job when used this way, but it often gets the capitalization wrong, which is odd because I have auto-capitalization correction on. It is also odd that auto-word completion doesn't more aggressively try to guess when you have only entered one letter. For instance guessing "the", "this", or "that" when you type "t" or "or", "on", "only" or "our" when you type "o", and guessing "you" on "y" would certainly be a time savers, since you pick from a list of guesses there seems to be no reason not to guess. It also seems to completely refuse to guess when there is only one letter left forcing you to enter the whole word and space regardless that there aren't any other choices and you'd like the spelling confirmed.
Despite these nits it works well enough for a mobile device, but I hope to see some improvements with the next OS release.
Back to work now, as always, more later.
Wednesday's (Today's) Noon Time Notes
51 miles in five days!
My old personal best was 50 miles in seven days.
48 miles of that was stair-machine vs. 3 miles treadmill, but I assure you the per mile effort is comparable and my workout Thursday should bring this week's total effort to well more than the exertion of running two marathons in a week.
Now if only the scale reflected my attempts at loosing weight with similar advanded progress.
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OK, from here on we'll try to keep things a little more on track. If I jot some blog notes down at noon, I'll try to get them off to the net as soon as I get back to work. Maybe not all of this was worth posting, but having blogged for years now it has become a compulsion to finish each and every post started. Maybe I just hate wasting keystrokes.
