Monthly Archives: October 2005

KALX Fundraiser

By | October 27, 2005

Once again, it’s that time of the year when you open your wallet and make a large donation to the best college radio station in the country, KALX. Okay, so I’m a little bit biased because my wife is the general manager of the station, but they really are awesome. And speaking of awesome, this… Read More »

Nuance Conversations

By | October 19, 2005

Next week October 23-25 I will be in Phoenix for the ScanSoft/Nuance Conversations 2005 conference. ScanSoft formally changed their name to Nuance yesterday. During most of the time the Solutions Showcase area is open, you’ll be able to find me in the Voxify booth. If you’re also going to be at the conference, please stop… Read More »

Life Hackers and Interruptions

By | October 16, 2005

Via Boing Boing I found this NYT article on Life Hackers and interruptions. It’s an excellent update on efforts to reduce the deleterious impacts of interruptions on people who spend lots of time on computers trying to accomplish many things in a short period of time. Well, at least it’s an excellent update on what… Read More »

Speech Business Consolidation

By | October 13, 2005

Perhaps the speech recognition platform and application business has reached a new level of maturity, as a sudden wave of consolidation has begun to sweep through the industry. The biggest recent move was at the most basic level, i.e., the automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech engine level. While ScanSoft/SpeechWorks has been buying up ASR and… Read More »

Onshore Casinos Coming to Mississippi

By | October 12, 2005

In a move that probably should have happened from the beginning, it looks like Mississippi is finally going to allow casinos to be built up to 800 feet onshore. The legal change has been approved by the Legislature, and is now just waiting on the Governor’s approval. The owner of the Treasure Bay Casino is… Read More »

Free and Open Source Software

By | October 7, 2005

If you’re not heavily involved in the development or use of free and open source software, I imagine it can be very hard to understand the subtleties and the importance of free (as in liberty and speech) software versus open software that you can use for free (as in gratis and beer). For most software… Read More »

Blue Roof Group

By | October 7, 2005

Although it took a month after Hurricane Katrina hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast, my mother has finally gotten someone to come out and put a tarp on her roof. The hurricane had ripped enough shingles from her roof to cause leaks in several places. She had signed a Right of Entry form several weeks ago… Read More »