The loneliest road: A nickname for US Highway 50, which extends across the United States from Sacramento, CA to Ocean City, MD. Actually, nowadays it’s interrupted in several places by more modern highways. I’ve driven many segments, including Sacramento to Salina, UT. Parts of Nevada were so lonesome you could drive for nearly 100 miles and not even see a house.

OUUUUUUCH! I couldn’t stop reading, no matter how painful. No, don’t!

As much as I love eagles, this would still have been interesting to watch.

Assaf turned me on to RSpec: “a framework for practicing Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) in Ruby”. Outstanding.

Speaking of Ruby, DNA supports mixin modules! Thanks, Paul.

Jessica Hagy connects the dots on the seven deadly sins.

Here’s a good example of what can happen when PR controls the “conversation”.

How can a black hat get Vista to hand over control of the desktop? Just say the magic word.

TDavid had a post today on speech recognition. Thought that I would give this a try and make today’s blog entry using a microphone into Microsoft Word and then pull it into BlogDesk. Let’s see how well the speech recognition engine works. So far it looks pretty good, except of course that it got TDavid’s name as “the David”. Not too bad, still going to require some manual edits…tending to agree with TDavid’s assessment that speech recognition is not the fastest way to create a document. Typing in, at least for someone to whom it has become natural, is much quicker.

OK, that required a lot more edits than I thought it would while I was speaking. Here’s the original as captured by the microphone and interpreted by the speech engine:

The David had a post today on a speech recognition such that I would give this a try and make do this block the entry using a microphone into Microsoft word and then pull it into one of us let’s see how well the speech recognition engine works so far it looks pretty good except of course that a guide to David’s name as the David Gunn too bad still going to require some manual and it’s selecting to agree with the David’s assessment that speech recognition is not the fastest way to create a document typing in at least for someone who has come naturally is much quicker had

No punctuation at all. Quite a few incorrectly recognized words. Interesting that it knew to capitalize “Microsoft”, but not “Word” immediately following “Microsoft”. I had to edit every sentence. Not sure what that final “had” was supposed to be. There is no way I would use this for anything except creating a quick reminder list of what I wanted to say when a keyboard is available. I was using Office 2003 on Windows XP SP2, so maybe this will be improved in Vista and Office 2007. I’m not holding my breath.

TDavid was just talking about voice recognition yesterday and the state of the “art” of software’s understanding of human verbiage. Later, I had to call Qwest because I recently switched back to them for land-line (I never really liked Qwest, but they swear they have improved service, and for a $100 savings per month I’ll let them back up that claim), but my toll-free number was still being billed by my previous carrier. So I call the business customer help line, and of course a speech-recognition engine answers the phone, using the voice of a twenty-something male with slightly over-regulated testosterone.

“Welcome to Qwest.”

At which point a Spanish-speaking lady jumps in and informs me (in Spanish) that I should press 9 to hear everything in Spanish.

The young male takes the helm again, “What’s the number you’re calling about? Or..” at which point I interrupt him by keying in the number. He repeats it (very naturally speaking, compared to earlier implementations I’ve encountered), and asks me if that’s correct. I guess I have to say “Yes”, because there’s no option given for a button to push. But, he understands “Yes”.

He continues, “OK, in a few words, tell me why you’re calling today. It can be something like ‘I’d like to pay my bill.’ So, how can I help you?”

Let’s test his limits, thinks I. “My toll-free number needs to get moved over.”

“It sounds like you’re calling to report unwanted phone calls. Is that right?”

“NO.”

“Sorry, my mistake. Let’s try that again.”

“HELP.”

“It sounds like you’d like technical support. Is that right?”

“NO.”

He then apologizes again, and runs down a list of possible options, the last one being “other”.

“OTHER.”

This finally puts me in a queue to talk to a human. Even though my automated triage representative spoke English pretty well, we finally understood each other when I started speaking Computer. I’d say this technology has a ways to go yet.