Latter-Day Christmas
It’s a bit like Christmas. A pile of new toys. Trying to figure out how they work without breaking them. Wanting to play with all of them at the same time, even though that’s impossible. For a few hours, feeling quite carried away, amazed that the cornucopia has dumped so many treats in one’s lap. Very slowly, getting used to them — and finding out the little things that are wrong with them (always so heartbreaking).
I have two new toys. The first is my second RoomGroove. the RoomGroove is a speaker system from Klipsch — the superior competitors of Bose — for the iPod. For as long as there have been iPods, I have been telling friends that I have outgrown personal stereo systems — the sort of thing that you walk around with, looking vaguely spaced out. The second person on my block to own a Walkman, I used to be quite excessive about having my own music on my person at all times, but I really did outgrow that. There came a time when I no longer wish to escape the world around me, and the insulation of a private wall of sound went from chic to annoying. And perhaps my hearing wasn’t so good, and I needed it — all of it — for ambient input.
A couple of occasions since I got my Nano, I’ve wondered outside and enjoyed what was playing, but for the most part I listen to this device at home where it serves as an unexpectedly agreeable update on the table radio of yore. The curious thing is that how completely different a table radio is from stereo system — I’ve known that since I was in my teens — but rather how nice it is to have a table radio again, after forty years. The difference is that this table radio plays only music that I really love, because, of course, I put it there. And now, it plays it in the two rooms where I spend most of my time.
I am using my other new toy to write this. It is called Dragon Naturally Speaking, and it seems to work pretty well, although I’m still slow at it. The Dragon, as I can’t help thinking of it, gets all the big words right, but it mixes up the everyday pronouns and prepositions, which all seem to sound alike. Such small words are hard to proof. Of course, I could type all of this much faster than I’ve dictated it, but I’m curious to see the different things that will come out of my mouth, things that would never come out of my fingers. My fingers are critical snobs incapable of saying, for example, “I read Blackwater Lightship this weekend and I really loved it!” At some point during the third week of prep school, I learned that it would be better to chop off my fingers than type such an insipid sentence. But I can still say it — as you can see.
The point of the dictation software is to capture for transcription the off-the-cuff remarks with which I intend to replace my not very competent readings of pages from Portico. (You see? I really do speak and write pretty much the same.) these new podcasts will require two computers for production, the desktop for recording my voice in the lap top for transcribing it. It is probably not beyond the capacity of either computer to do both jobs at the same time, but it is certainly beyond me to imagine how on earth did tell it how to do it. So: two computers. Two mikes, too.
Good heavens, I could go on and on. I already have!