Kevin B. Carpenter

Vista Speech Recognition, The Good and The Bad

Perhaps it’s because Windows 7 is set to come out, or perhaps it’s the release of service pack two, or maybe as just because I really needed to upgrade my voice recognition software.  Either way a week ago I decided to upgrade to Vista.  So far it’s been worthwhile.

My primary deciding factor was everything that I’ve read about the voice recognition upgrades and Microsoft Vista.  All in all they have been well founded.  With the addition of the windows speech recognition macros I am very excited about the future possibilities.  As my hands get worse tools like this provide me hope.  At least hope to be able to continue working and providing for my family.

All of this entry as been done using voice recognition.  This last section which will be a collection of links and resources will be more a conglomeration of copying and pasting been speaking out a group of URLs.  However whether it’s correcting misunderstood words, or the command options for manipulating the operating system I am over all impressed with the new upgrade.  Its not perfect but it’s better than the voice system that was provided with Microsoft Office 2003.

Resources

Robs Rhapsody - A blog dedicated to speech recognition and the new speech recognition macros.
ChuckOp - All the cool developers use speech APIs, a blog from Charles Oppermann a program manager at Microsoft.
WSR Macros - A code gallery site holding many of the macros from rob’s blog.
MS-Speech - A Yahoo forum on Microsoft’s speech recognition.
Speech @ Microsoft - Microsoft’s blog about speech recognition.

Finally an excellent set of information on speech recognition has been produced by a gentleman name Itamar Even-Zohar from Tel Aviv.  They are unbiased and provide an excellent set of straightforward information not just from Windows but even some information for Macintosh as well.  If there is bad, you will find it covered there because from my point, its all good for now.

Skin Problems at Injection Sites

Early this morning when I woke up to do my daily duties, I was feeling my leg where I had performed an injection previously and felt a lump.  I have had similar in the past right after an injection; when injecting into spots in my arm the skin actually is lifted for a while as the medicine sits there working on dissipating.  Same with my stomach fat injections, but within four hours the medicine is used and gone mostly.

In this case it had been over 10 hours since my last injection and it wasn’t even in that location.  That lead me back to my PM Tracker to see when I had put that injection in and found it was over a day previous.  I had heard of fat hypertrophy (lipohypertrophy) but not experienced it yet.

A site called bddiabetes.com had some information about them that I felt was good.  Though I follow all their guidelines (never reuse needles, rotate injection sites, rotate body parts I inject into etc) I seems I might be having one of these lumps.  Although that site is more specific to diabetes and insulin, I have read and been told it happens with any type of regular injection.

After rubbing it a bit it seemed to reduce.  A couple hours after finding it, it had reduced to less then half and then I had a hard time finding it again.  Either way its just one more item that I will ask my doctor about on my next visit.  Even if it too has dissipated.

P2P Money, the new way to Borrow and Invest

Today while working I came across an interesting article at Net Banker (www.netbanker.com).  It was about Person to Person lending and the companies that where offering it, or trying too.  The first article I read about this was from 2007, now there is even more information coming about, and a startup supposed to open this month.

Net Banker has a better article on it then I can write, so I will just help their link popularity and say go check it out here.

Internet and the Rainy Season

I really love this time of year in Costa Rica.  We get a afternoon rain most every day, and sometimes they are real shows.  Thunder so close and loud you feel the static in your hair.  No I don’t care to be trying a bolt on for size, but having grown up in Washington State, here I get the best of both worlds; though I miss the snow.

The first time we lived here after 9/11/2001, I had to regress to dial-up from a high speed cable connection.  This time when we moved back in 2005, I was able to get cable modem in the house.  The speeds are not quite what we get in the states, however for reliability it was pretty much no problems for two years.

Working from home required a bit more bandwidth and so a few weeks ago I ordered an upgrade.  Its worked great for a couple weeks, but since last week we were lucky if we were online for two to four hours a day.  Worse sometimes that was only in the middle of the night.

The tech’s yesterday re-checked and calibrated the cables and connections through the switch and hopefully we are good to go.   Time will tell, however for the first time in a week I woke to see the cable modem still connected and running strong. 

Changes

I moved the server today due to a bug that a client had found the other week after an upgrade.  I used to offer hosting to a few people.  After digging and finding the error I realized just how valuable the little time I have is.   If I ever do hosting again lets just say the Terms of Service will be long but distinguished.

The new job has me busy.  My MFC and C++ is improving immensely, but look till December before you see anything on PM Tracker.  I have a lot of code to read between now and then.

Virtual Private Servers with VPSLink

With an uptime of over 220 days, this virtual private server of mine has been running like a champ for quite a while.  I must say that VPS Link as a hosting provider has been a solid stable company that I want to recommend.

If you need hosting you might find a little cheaper, but for stability and service I won’t move again.  VPS Link is more then adequate and they have very good prices.   To top it off if you use this code S9JJVH at their signup page they will give you a extra 10% off their prices for the lifetime of your account.

There purchase systems are fully automated.  When your server is provisioned, you get to choose from several different OS configurations to load.  They are excellent for testing with as if you mess up your configuration, resetting it to standard is easy as a re-choosing your OS.  I was up and running in minutes; not hours.

I was concerned at first about bandwidth and horse power, but for a 512MB virtual machine it more then does the job.  Likewise when running heavy database queries and comparing to resource usage over time I don’t see anyone else affecting my sites either.  The systems are well managed.

So, need a server, check out VPS Link and save 10% for life with S9JJVH.

Toy Fair 2008: Corgi’s H2Go Hydrogen-Powered Car - Gearlog

As far as toy’s go, I am pretty conservative now days.  There was a time when I just had to go out and get the latest item.  Now I am content with much less.

However if I had a wish list to add toy’s to this would certainly get my vote.  Now to see the larger scale version that holds people!

Toy Fair 2008: Corgi’s H2Go Hydrogen-Powered Car - Gearlog

Pain Management Tracker BETA 0.51 Released

After the note the other day I found a couple items I still needed to fix.  So I have fixed a couple of smaller bugs.  I also added a new feature to allow you to temporarily disable a Location from showing in the drop down or in the Suggested Location list.

When having to inject medicine over and over bruises and other skin issues sometimes happen.  Whether its something to worry about is between you and your doctor. However I have setup the program so it will skip that particular location simply by adding a - to the front of the location name in the Configuration.

As you can see in this small screen shot you simply add a hypen/minus sign to the front of the location.  Example:  -Stomach (09), or -Leg (01). 

This keeps the location set in the database, with the same location label versus deleting and re-adding a location later.  However it will disable it from showing in Suggested Locations or the Locations drop down.   Giving it time to heal/return to normal.

I know its not a huge item, but it was a necessity for me.  I don’t bruise often, but if a location hasn’t healed for me fully by my next cycle around I skip it.  This just helps me confirm that.

I have had a lot of interest from people about the software, though not a lot of complaints yet.  I am happy to hear any comments at ipmtracker at gmail dot com.  Or create an account and comment here.

Download the latest version here.

Two Hundred Entries Later…

I still use the Pain Management Tracking program daily, sometimes three to four times.  Today I was exporting the data to give to my doctor when I realized I had broke over 200 entries.  Not all of them are injections, a portion are simply notes, pain level recordings etc.

In the last two weeks I started revamping the database for PMT.  The current setup though quick and easy to enter data lack’s the necessary items to expand the program to provide more options (at least easily).  As I am doing much more with Document/View architecture now, I am starting to extend PMT that way.  Compared to adding a feature, this is a complete rewrite and will probably take a couple months.

If you have any errors or issues with PMT please let me know and I will work to fix them while I continue to work on the next release.

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Side note - if you use a Live Journal cross post plugin for WordPress and have upgraded to 2.6 make sure you upgrade your LJ_XP plugin too. Or like me you might find your last post on a sister site being from February.

Portable App’s and Pain Management Tracker

If you have a USB key and need portable software then portable.com is the place to go.  They have a wonderful set of tools that will install to a USB thumb drive.  When you plug the drive in it loads up its own portable start menu etc, and keeps all your data saved locally in the thumb drive.

In needing to keep my records with me I pasted a copy of the install directory on to the USB drive.  The next time I plugged the drive in it actually found Pain Management Tracker and added it to the Portable App’s start menu.

I wanted to make a version for Portable App’s but for now I believe I will continue to press on with features and stability.  If you need a version that is easy to use on the go, check out Portable App’s.  It gives a nice interface and then you can simply copy and paste the program from your hard drive after running the installer. 

Remember, Pain Management tracker’s only requirements are kept in the directory with the program.    Nothing is stored in registry everything is local with the EXE and files.