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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
Praise for Daily Blah:
"It is fun to watch the author's navel-gazing joy." - Sunday Times (UK)
"It's really funny and informative." - Dave Eggers, author
"The Blah is becoming a daily destination for me." - Richard Marsh, Playwright
"I like it, and I don't." - Fiona Hogg, Teacher
"Better than Xanax." - Lessley Andersen, journalist
"Dude, lay off the crack pipe." - Souris Hong-Porretta, gamesmith
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Daily Blah for... Saturday, November 04, 2006
It Was a Dark, and, Um, Stormy Night: Novel-Writing by Word of Mouth
It's November, which means, of course, that National Novel Writing Month is upon us. I've never done a NaNoWriMo, as it's known, because the thought of writing 50,000 words in a month on top of my day job seems like more deadline-driven lunacy than even the greatest Gonzo journalist can handle. But this year I find it impossible to resist. That's because I have a review copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking 9, a brand new piece of critically-acclaimed speech recognition software, and the dumb-ass idea that I should write an entire novel without my fingers ever touching the keyboard. I've got myself convinced that it'll be far, far easier when I can hear the rythmn of the language, that I'm somehow placing myself in the vanguard of a grand, million-year-old tradition of storytelling. The words will just flow out of me as if I were a shaman telling stories to his grandchildren. I shall of course keep you updated on how that goes.
I finally got around to installing the Dragon NaturallySpeaking software yesterday, with a Blu Snowball USB mic -- my favorite kind, it's exactly what Ed Murrow would have used had he been using a USB mic -- plugged into my home Dell desktop. To set the software up, I had to choose from a list of reading options, which is how I ended up reading the first chapter of Alice in Wonderland to my computer, as if it required a bedtime story.
Then came the tutorial, and my first task: to speakwrite the words "Harriet, I heard you are starting a new job in San Francisco. Congratulations! Can we have lunch before you leave?" I brushed aside the geographical and chronological issues posed by such a statement -- surely I'd be lunching with her after she arrived in San Francisco? -- and obeyed the instructions. What came up on the screen was something disturbingly confessional:
Harriet, I hurt U.S. starting a job in San Francisco.
I laughed uproariously for five minutes, and wondered if the program was designed by Bill O'Reilly. Yes, I thought. By taking a job in San Francisco, I had hurt America.
Clearly, Alice in Wonderland had not been enough. If I spoke in an American accent, the program understood me about 85 percent of the time; giving it my natural (if California-tainted) English brought that down to about 65 percent, and I started to fear the program was sending me a message: stop hurting America. Talk like us.
So I tried giving the program a second sample of my voice by reading the next option, Kennedy's inaugural address. This seemed to work a lot better, even though I found myself accidentally straying into a Massachussets accent. The computer now recognized about 95 percent of what I was saying -- no matter how fast I was saying it -- in my normal accent.
I set about speakwriting the novel off the top of my head, and helping the computer to learn the other five percent. NaturallySpeaking is very good at this. For instance, it was repeatedly hearing my "can't" as "count." So all I had to say was "select 'count'", and it gave me a list of alternatives. A quick "select 'can't'", and I was prompted to say both words so it was crystal clear how they sounded.
Pretty soon I had the confidence that no matter how fast the words left my mouth, this net would catch them. In fifteen minutes, I had a thousand words written. It was almost too easy. Now, I'm not saying they were a thousand very good words. But that's the whole point of NaNoWriMo. Just write fast, and hang the quality.
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