After a week on the other side of the world, I’ve now had a long weekend to play with all my new software and techno toys.

The good news is that I can talk at the itty bitty Olympus digital voice recorder, then plug the sucker into my USB port and have Dragon Naturally Speaking (ver 10, Preferred) make sufficient sense of my noises that I can go on to edit it to a clean draft.

On the path to this achievement, I’ve decided I very much love Ubuntu (which unfortunately can’t run Dragon) and I very much dislike Windows XP (which unfortunately is required for Dragon).

Total cash outlay:

Computer equipment – free to me
Ubuntu – free to me
Open Office – $35 for 3 year registration
Internet – already “own”
XP – $76 off eBay
Dragon – $89 off eBay
Digital Voice Recorder – $32 off eBay

So $232 all told (includes shipping) plus a lot of time I probably wouldn’t have spent writing anyway.

Ah, the time outlay. Did I mention that I very much dislike Windows XP?

But there it is. I am now without excuses. I even did a lot towards outlining my historical fiction novels – the basic shell is there in both cases with 85% or more of the amazing complications that make my characters very unhappy (and me very happy).

In completely unrelated news, my girlies (10 and 12) both were video-taped for upcoming episodes of Astrocast.TV . Sometime in the future you and your star-loving friends around the globe will be able to see said girlies asking 1) the age of Jupiter and 2) when will the sun subsume the orbit of the earth, along with the answers from GMU’s Dr. Harold Geller.