Despite the horrid reviews on Amazon, I just bought Dragon Professional Individual for Mac V6 mostly due to a minor but recurring finger pain. I have mostly been having issues with my right hand, particularly my thumb and pointer finger. I sometimes notice it when I have been clicking a lot, so perhaps typing is not really the problem. I briefly looked at Dragon software in the past but got turned off by all the negative reviews, particularly for the Mac version of the software. I figured I should be able to do most of what I want to do with Google voice, or even Syria on Mac OS, but I have had pretty bad experiences with both. My Mac seems to freeze anytime I trigger dictation, and my phone, the Galaxy S8, basically does not allow me to use Google dictation since Samsung wants me to use Bixby.

I can already tell it’s going to be difficult to control rambling sentences, but I will make an exception for this entry since it is slated to be “personal”, and thus only for me. I might as well take the opportunity to see a bunch of random stuff about recent events since I have not journaled much lately. :-)

The biggest writing task I have neglected is my Burning Man journal. I have finally almost finished posting my photos to the Facebook album despite completing most of the editing within a week or two of burning man. I intended to spread the photos a bit but was not thinking several months! In case I don’t write about it later, for the record, it was quite a strange year at Burning Man. When tickets went on sale, it seemed nearly impossible and almost nobody got tickets. That apparently killed a lot of people’s ambitions for going this year; many people I considered regulars did not go. For that reason, perhaps a little bit of the excitement did not materialize. I tend not to get particularly excited for things before they start, though, anyway. It was clear going in the weather would be very hot. Still, many people managed to not bring enough water. I did not have high hopes for the 50K race both because of my lack of training and the heat situation. It turned out all right, though. Not my best time, but not my worst. Someone ran into the fire Saturday night and died, which rounded out a strange week rather strangely. I hope he found what he sought; I hope we all do.

I have been focusing on the job search since Burning Man. I was supposed to have started earlier, but I only talked to one company beforehand. Once back, I threw myself into the hired.com ring and spent the next two months juggling interview requests from about 15 companies and doing the interview process with half a dozen of them through on-site interviews. I will write more accurate details in another post I hope. The point is it was exhausting, but I now have a job officially. My mini retirement is now over!

My roommate and severe crush, Yida, decided shortly after I returned from Burning Man move out. I was very sad all over again, although I did get to welcome my friend and camp mate Steven to live with me. I decided to move into Yida’s old room so Steven could have the cheaper room I built in what was the living room. That involved approximately doubling my rent, but did give me my own bathroom and the back deck and access to the backyard. The room size is about the same, but because I need to the walkways to the bathroom in the back door open, it actually feels smaller, but I like it. It only recently stopped constantly reminding me of Yida, but I do still think of him all the time.

Yida’s best friend and my current roommate, Ben, is also supposedly moving out sometime so he can get a place with his cousin who is moving to the United States for school. I have been trying to convince him to stay and find a way to make this work, especially because of how expensive apartments are in San Francisco. I’m not sure what will happen, but I have been absorbed into the new job not able to think about it anyway.

My Dvorak typing skills have been finally improving thanks to forcing myself use it at work and not constantly switching back to the QWERTY layout when I have to type fast. I did switch back the other day on a phone call, but it’s rare. I hoped I would be better new layout by now, but I am just about fast enough to be useful at work. The main problem I still have is getting my bearings quickly when I have not been typing but need to type something, especially when someone is looking over my shoulder! It is even more pronounced when I am programming (typing punctuation) and doing command line stuff where I have to think carefully about what I am typing in addition to how to actually type!

Okay, I have some other stuff to do tonight, but perhaps, perhaps!, I will actually start writing about my day now. I am obviously new to Dragon, but I have to say typing this was less painful than I imagined it would be. The program only strangely froze a few times, and I’m pretty sure it saved my fingers even if it didn’t save any time. We will see!