Ruth, Kaarel, Sara and Annie.
It has been nearly four months since my tendinitis began. Things seem to have been improving much more quickly in the past few weeks, which is encouraging.
Recent triumphs: I can...
- Hold a glass of water in my right hand.
- Usually turn pages in a novel without pain.
- Push buttons on a remote control or automatic teller machine without pain.
- Do up the fly of my jeans without pain (yay, I'm no longer restricted to wearing only items of clothing with elastic waistbands!).
- Write a very short note by hand without pain. Using a Wacom Artpad is still too tricky for me right now, however.
I continue to have a love-hate relationship with ViaVoice. On the one hand, I would rather have ViaVoice than not be able to write at all. On the other hand, I have found the software to be very buggy and customer service reluctant to admit there are any problems. Writing anything is a slow and laborious process, especially if it involves any kind of editing, cutting and pasting, and switching between applications. Keeping up with e-mail is impossible these days. I tried to plow through as many as I can every day, but more come in than I can handle.
I currently have over 700 e-mail messages in my in-box, not including the already filtered spam, and most of these are still unopened. :-( I rely heavily on the subject headers and the sender name to help me figure out which ones I need it to open first. Answering e-mail is still difficult since I have to keep switching between SpeakPad and Eudora if I want to include excerpts from the sender's e-mail to establish context.
Gaming on Friday night.
There is also the problem of privacy. Even with my office door closed, anyone sitting in the living room can hear everything I am dictating unless I talk quietly, in which case ViaVoice has more trouble understanding me. I have to save my files frequently, often several times a minute, since I have found that things can go wrong very quickly and unexpectedly.
If I have the contents of SpeakPad selected for a few seconds before transferring it to another application, for example, and the phone rings or I cough, ViaVoice replaces everything in the file with its interpretation of the new sound. Most times this is only a minor hassle (I have to manually access the undo command with the mouse or keyboard), but if I am dictating ahead of the ViaVoice processor, sometimes things screw up. I recently spent about 45 minutes laboriously editing three paragraphs, for example, and ViaVoice misinterpreted something I said at the end to mean "replace everything in this file with a nonsense word and then save the file".
I was not a happy camper.
On the positive side, things seem to be improving much more quickly during the past few weeks. I played about a minute of flute on the weekend with no ill side effects. In fact, IT FELT WONDERFUL TO BE MAKING MUSIC AGAIN. :-) I plan to play a little every day as long as there is no pain. I'm hoping to recover enough to play at least a little flute in open filk at Concertino, but I am being super-careful not to push it.
(This entry was written with ViaVoice, a voice recognition program, which sometimes has its own sense of humor. Please forgive any spelling or grammar quirks which Debbie has missed while editing. Thank you. )
Monday, June 23, 2003 at 5:25PM 
