Product Review: Best Electric Shave I've Ever Had

For the last 15 years (i.e. my entire shaving life), I have used Norelco shavers. When the battery on my last one would no longer hold a charge, I decided to try something new, and purchase the Panasonic ES8043SC Pro-Curve Pivot Action Linear Wet/Dry Shaver. Materials in the box caution users to "Please Stick With It. It's Worth it." They say my skin and beard need 30 days to adjust. Okay. Expectations duly lowered, I turned the shaver on, was momentarily surprised by the high frequency buzz that comes with 13,000 oscillations a minute, and ran the shaver down my cheek.

WOW.

Folks, this shaver has produced an EXTREMELY close shave, with no irritation at all, and no uncomfortable pulling sensation that Norelco's "lift and cut" method sometimes produces. This rivals a straight blade in terms of closeness-of-shave, and is without a doubt the best shave I've ever gotten from an electric shaver -- and I'm sure it will produce even better results as my skin and beard "adjust." (I haven't even tried it with shaving cream and water yet -- and I'm told that produces an even closer shave.)

I was hesitant to switch from the trusty Norelco 3-headed shavers to this foil shaver. But I'm SO glad I did. And you can bet I'm going to tell my family about this. It was my dad who introduced me to Norelcos all those years ago. It's about time I introduce him to the Panasonic. :-)

Initial Test of MacSpeech Dictate -- This program is the new Messiah

This is a test. I am one of the only people I know who owns a bird. I am a 2006 graduate of Georgetown University Law Center, and I hold a bachelor of arts from the University of Michigan. I am a very striking redhead who sings in a powerful tenor.

The preceding paragraph was my first test of the new MacSpeech Dictate software. The program made zero mistakes. I did not have to correct anything. The accuracy of the software is leaps and bounds ahead of iListen, it frustrated me to no end.

In the past two paragraphs, the only mistake the program made was inserting the word "it" instead of the word "which" in the last sentence. I have been speaking at a perfectly normal conversational pace, the same way I would to a friend. I have not overly enunciated anything. This program is, without a doubt, miraculous.

I want to make it very clear that the only training I have completed was the initial five-minute training session in which I read 10 or so paragraphs. I am already achieving near 100% accuracy, with essentially no training whatsoever. This is in comparison to iListen, which, after several months of training, was never able to afford any more than 90% accuracy at best.

In the past several paragraphs, the voice recognition software has made only two minor errors which did not actually affect the meaning of the sentence. (The second error was the word "any" at the end of the last paragraph.) I will play around with the software a lot more over the next couple of days, and post a full review at that point, but I can already say that this is absolutely amazing. I am simply blown away. I had high hopes, but I never dreamed that the program would work this well right out of the box.

Let the next Great American Novel begin!

Crave is the Worst Energy Drink in the History of Mankind

Several months ago I was browsing the Interwebs when I came across a site offering free samples of a new energy drink to anyone who wanted to be an "exclusive tester" and sample a new drink before it came to market. The drink, Crave, promised a sweet and pleasant taste, very few calories, and hours of energy with no crash afterward. Needless to say, I was intrigued, and I requested a free sample.

This was a bad idea. In retrospect, I suppose I should have been suspicious... honestly, who in their right mind would drink something that arrived in the mail from a random company found on the Internet? What good ever comes out of something offered free of charge? And so on.

Long story short, I finally had a chance to taste Crave. The experience was NOT a positive one.

My trepidation began upon pouring the bright green powder into a chilled bottle of water: When I shook the bottle to mix up the drink, the powder would not entirely dissolve. No matter how hard or long I shook, I was left with a light-green colored liquid filled with several small green clumps. Since most of these were congregated around the bottom, I decided I could take a sip.

I untwisted the cap and sniffed. I was answered by a highly chemical smell that was not pleasant. Trepidatious, I closed my eyes and took a sip...

OH, THE HORROR!

Disgusting! The package describes the drink as "pleasant tasting," which leads me to believe that whoever designed the package is either a pathological liar or has never actually tasted the drink for himself. It tastes like drinking liquid plastic with a touch of fake sweetener. It is as if a mad chemist got drunk one night and started pouring random beakers of chemicals into a glass jar and then wrote "ENERGY" on the side. After swallowing half of one sip, my face involuntarily contorted into a grimace and I felt an overwhelming urge to spit out the vile, nasty concoction that remained in my mouth.

Having feared this reaction, I was prepared. I had brought a can of Bawls with me in case the need arose to chase down the Crave energy powder drink. Now, I frantically opened the can and took a large swig of Bawls, my highly-caffeinated guarana-infused energy drink of choice, Now and Forever.

Crave is, without a doubt, the worst energy drink I have ever tasted in my life. More than that, it is actually far nastier than most medicines I have tasted. I would never, in a million years, pay for the privilege of swallowing this vile potion. I would not even drink it if someone else paid me. I am pouring out the rest of the bottle into a gutter somewhere, and I will never take a sip of Crave ever again, and I will encourage anyone who asks to avoid it at all costs. It is inferior to every other energy drink on the market, and some part of me thinks that it might be slightly poisonous, and that the company may be trying to kill people under the guise of a "free sample."

About a half hour after my sip, I experienced an uncomfortable moment of gastrointestinal distress. No doubt, this was because I had just consumed a little bit of poison, shortening my life by at least a few minutes. But rather than sue the company for intentional infliction of emotional distress, I shall simply think of this as a Life Lesson, and move on.

Let This Be a Lesson: Never drink something sent by a stranger, and NEVER EVER consume the Crave Energy Drink.

Software review: iListen voice recognition program by MacSpeech

I have been using a voice recognition program called iListen for several weeks. Overall, I am satisfied but it can be extremely frustrating at times.

First, the good part: it allows me to effectuate one of the main rules espoused by my legal writing instructor during the first year of law school. That rule is as follows: start writing. Just get something on paper. You see, my first year writing instructor was very similar to me. That is, he was a major procrastinator. And if there is one thing we procrastinators are good at, it is not starting to write when we should. The solution to that ailment is simply to start writing, even if you know nothing about the topic. This will accomplish two things: first, you learn that you did know something about the topic - more than you thought you knew. Second, more importantly, you will have started. And starting is half the battle. Procrastinators - chronic procrastinators - get that way because they become paralyzed by a feeling of dread.And has the deadline approaches, and nothing has yet been written, the dread only increases, as does the paralysis. By getting something on paper, even if you have to, as my instructors so colorfully put it, "vomit eight pages onto the screen," you now have something to work with. You now have a first draft. And it is much easier to revise and start tweaking when you have something already written. Even if it sucks.

Take, for instance, the letter that I wrote to the commissioners of the FCC. For the last two months, since my indecency paper was published, I had been intending to send a copy to each of the five commissioners of the Federal Communications Commission, along with a brief introductory letter explaining what this paper was about. Yes, I intended to write this letter every week. But the blank screen was staring at me, and even though I had just written and gotten published a 15,000 word essay, this simple 200 word letter was eluding me. There's something about hands on a keyboard, with a flashing cursor staring at me, that simply serves to clear my mind, like some sort of Zen-like trance.

The voice recognition software solves that problem. Yes, it makes simple mistakes, because it misunderstands the easiest words. But it gets most of the thought onto the screen. And I have found that speaking something aloud is far more natural and quick than trying to force my fingers to type the same thoughts. (I now see the appeal in dictating memos and letters!)

So, where it had taken two months and I had not written anything, with the help of the voice recognition software I now had a complete letter - personalized for each Commissioner - written in the time span of approximately half an hour. As I speak this entry, five copies of my article are sitting in a mail truck somewhere, and tomorrow they will be sitting on the desk of the commissioner (or at least the commissioner's assistant).

Now for the most frustrating part (other than the constant incorrect words): the vocabulary of this software program is simply not large enough. Friends, my vocabulary is not that sophisticated. I don't think I should have to teach the software what the word sneeze is. Or what all the derivations of the word are - sneeze, sneezed, sneezing, etc. This problem happens so frequently that I continue to spend several minutes during each dictation session teaching the software words that it simply has no excuse for not knowing. The programmers say that if they included all possible words, it would be harder to dictate correctly, because the computer we have so many more choices - so many more words to choose from. But folks, honestly, this is too much. Below is a list of the words that I have had to teach the computer during this blog entry alone:

• espoused
• procrastinators
• colorfully
• vomit
• eluding
• Zen-like (okay, this one I can understand not including in the Standard dictionary)
• misunderstands
• aloud
• sneeze
• sneezing

Honestly, there are more, but I have forgotten which ones I had to teach the computer. This happens all the time. Obviously, as I continue to use the software more frequently, my particular brand of language will be incorporated into the vocabulary database, and I will have to make these additions less frequently. Until then, it is incredibly frustrating.

And there is the fact that sometimes the program will be almost 100 percent accurate, and sometimes the accuracy will offer somewhere around 60 or 70 percent. The biggest variables that determine how accurate the software is all our position of the microphone, and background noise. Surprisingly, the program is still fairly accurate even when there is light music playing in the background. But move the microphone one inch away from the proper position, and watch out!

And then there are the smaller annoyances (edit: I just had to add the word "annoyances" to the dictionary! how ironic!) -- this software uses a special correct mode in order to fix incorrect transcriptions (edit: I just had to add the word "transcriptions" -- it had the singular but not the plural!). It gives you a list of words to choose from - alternate possibilities - and use select the correct word, and you hit done. Now, the way this software actually makes those corrections is by constantly keeping track of where the cursor is on the screen. However, this method does not work very well. Help files that come with the software remind us not to manually reposition the cursor at any point during the transcription or else problems will occur. However, I have been very careful to not manually move the cursor, and I still see frequent incorrect placements of the cursor when coming out of correct mode - either one space too far off, or one space too far back. The end result in is odd spacing on the final product, such as too many spaces or too few spaces between words or sometimes even inadvertently cutting off some leading or trailing characters.Simply put, you have to be very careful and attentive when using the transcription software. It is tempting to simply close your eyes and lean back and let out a stream of consciousness. But you may not be pleasantly surprised at the end of your beautiful stream.

Even with all of those caveats, I have found the voice transcription software very useful. I may just have to take the precaution that one of my communications law professors took: include as part of my e-mail signature a line that sense, "please excuse any odd errors caused by voice recognition software."

Now, if you will excuse me, I have been sitting here talking long enough. I am sorry for the inordinately long post, but voice recognition will tend to do that!