Category Archives: Review

Bond, the new Bond

Today I went to see Casino Royale at the AMC in the Mall of America. What an awesome movie. From the moment it began to the end it was an edge of the seat thrill ride. The action scenes at the beginning of the movie were incredible and I didn’t really miss all the gadgets. There were also some great nods to previous Bond movies. Daniel Craig did a superb job as Bond. He played Bond less of a character and more of a person, if that makes sense. He was a much more real Bond than we have seen before. Very different from all the rest but when he said he was Bond, James Bond I believed the heck out of it. Yep, Bond is back and in a big way. I really enjoyed this movie and I think that if you are an action movie fan / James Bond fan you will love this movie.

I am part of the AMC Movie Watcher’s club and if I wanted I could have gotten as many $1.00 hot dogs as I wanted because I bought one of the popcorn packages. And when I bought my ticket I got a coupon for a bag of M&M’s for $1.00 if I made any other purchase. If you go to AMC movie theatres it is worth signing up for the club.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking

Today I’m training a new product, it is called Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I am learning how to speak to the computer so that recognizes each thing that I say. I can open documents, I can close documents, I can save documents, all with the sound of my voice. Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a pretty interesting software product it understands most of what I say, especially what I speak clearly. It is funny to be talking to the computer and telling it to put in commas and periods. What is also interesting is that it cannot differentiate between me telling you to add a ‘,’ or’.’, and asking for the word comma or period. So if I want the computer spell out the word ‘,’ or ‘.’ I have to say commas or periods and then remove the ‘s’.

So this is my first blog entry, funny it knew the word for blog, (I needed to teach it the word lycanthrope) that I am entering with the help of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The reason that I taught it the word lycanthrope, was that I was reading a book to practice my dictation.

Eventually I will be using this Dragon NaturallySpeaking as a demonstration tool for our pathology product. God I hope that while I’m doing a presentation that word doesn’t come up. Although during my most recent formal demo I was typing the name Stan, one of the folks participating in the demo, and I ended up typing Satan, so I can always type something worse, I guess.

It is actually pretty fun to use this. Hanging out in the conference room, with the headset, talking to myself. And lucky for me I got a conference room with windows on four sides. So now everybody can watch be talk to my computer.

I actually don’t need to talk very loud but I need to speak clearly. Which as you know, I don’t always do very well. I tend to get a little mumbly at times.