Stephan Miller

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Okay, I broke my rule about always have at least two services to compare when I decide to say something is the next best thing since sliced bread. Because I have to say, why didn’t someone think of this earlier.

I spent about a half an hour this Sunday training Vista to transcribe my voice. It was actually pretty easy and relatively accurate. The last time I tried this was with Dragon Voice about 4 years ago. I gave up that time. I sort of used it like William S. Burroughs would, as a cutup machine. Speak whatever you want into it and you will never know what it types.

I have also been trying to use Twitter with my phone with zero success. Confirming my cell phone never happened. I tried three times. Entering stuff in the phone browser never worked. It looked like it did. But once I checked my account online, nothing I wrote from my phone showed up. I gave up.

Then today, I found Jott which took care of both of these issues.

First, you sign up for free. Then you set up the services that Jott can access and here are a few:

• Twitter
• Yahoo Groups
• Haiku
• Zillow
• 30Boxes
• Blogger
• Live Journal
• TypePad
• Wordpress
• Tumbler
• Remember the Milk
• Xpenser
• Gumiyo
• Trapster
• Mosio
• Vitalist
• Google Calendar
• Recommendr
• Toodledo
• Nozbe
• Mentat
• Keep up
• BackPack
• Heap
• 43Actions
• Kwiry

Or you can set up your own using the API.

After you set these up, you call Jott via a toll-free number and using specific terms to choose which service you are going to use, you can post to these services. Jott turns your voice into text and posts it.

I have set up my Twitter account and my BackPack account. And it works. A few of my tweets today were sent via Jott.

No typing on the cell phone. Yay. I still haven’t got the point of text messaging. It’s a phone damnit. If you want to call me, do so. If you type something to me on my phone, I don’t have the time to fit my fat fingers between the damn keys.

No using a voice recorder that I never check to keep ideas. I can send them to BackPack, email them to myself or write a draft on my blog. All through a toll-free number. All with only my voice.

It’s about time someone put voice recognition over the phone to a use that actually benefits the normal guy instead of just pissing him off because the corporation he’s calling doesn’t believe in customer service and would rather lose customers than put another human on the phone.

And, to wrap it up. If you want to go backwards and convert your blog posts into audio, check these services out:

• Talkr
• Odiogo

A full speech-to-test post one day? Maybe a draft as I go to work, who knows.

I have had issues with Wordpress upgrades in the past. Nothing makes my day like going through the upgrade process, refreshing the page and getting a nice clean white screen. And then activating the plugins one at a time to find the culprit.
But with 2.5, I’ve had no issues yet. Of course, I’ve not upgraded on my two my main blogs yet. But the upgrade went through without a hitch on three other sites. I use the same set of plugins and only activate as needed on new sites. My plugin folder is about 12 MB in size. If [...] Continue Reading…

Traveling Detail Light
When studying a new technology, I plunge in headfirst. I have read a lot of books and from experience, despite what I learned from books, I still had to have a picture of what I was trying to learn on my own.
Up to that point, I was basically following directions, hoping that the steps would give me a clue as to the reasons behind the process. Because once you have the reasons things are done and the reasons why they are done the way they are, you can travel lightly.
When studying SEO, I learned a lot of [...] Continue Reading…

Dealing with Incomplete Information
I learned in a De Bono thinking course that for some things, you will just never have complete information. So there is some point where you have to stop learning and researching and you have to move on to doing. You could research for the rest of your life and never come up with the complete answer.
Right now, without the book in front of me, I can’t exactly remember how you discover that point. But I am calling it now.
I have learned a lot of things online. The process usually goes like this:

[...] Continue Reading…

Habits are hard to break. Habits are hard to create. Any productivity book I have read that doesn’t state those two points clearly goes in one ear and out the other. I liked Zen to Done because it’s simplicity states that. Go ahead, give 450 rules and I might as well not start.
But even in simplicity, the complexity can be deceiving. Sometimes it takes rereading just to revisit the initial spark that set you off on the course.
Zen Handbook for Life comes in when I get to the habit breaking part of the issue. The habit I am currently [...] Continue Reading…

If you only have one site that you can access the stats to, the recent Alexa change probably freaked you out. But I can tell you from running multiple sites, with stats on all of them that Alexa was wrong before. And guess what, Alexa is still wrong now.
In fact, if you advertise based on Alexa numbers, you are still shooting in the dark. All you have really done is given yourself a justification to throw away your money when you chose to.
It used to be, if you were marketing products in the internet marketing, SEO, web development and [...] Continue Reading…

Celebrity grizzly Rocky mauls trainer Stephan Miller to death - Times Online
I realized I was getting above normal hits to my site today. It crashed this site about 9 am. Then I found out why. The link to the story is above.
This Stephan Miller actually commented a couple of times on my blog. Really strange.
I remember seeing his name in the credits of movies.
It would be different if my name were John Smith.
But I had to put something here.
R.I.P.

 
Repeating Myself
Now let’s see if I can write this post without repeating myself. Or I will have to start calling my blog 101 ways to look at productivity. But I guess that’s the way it goes. If I looked at the concept of productivity I held a few months ago I would have to laugh. And if I wrote about it and you read it, you think I am the most wishy washy person around.
But I can afford to be. It doesn’t hurt anyone. The whole reason many people read 50 productivity books and never become productive is that [...] Continue Reading…

I started carrying my camera on Friday this week. Trying to make it a habit to be more observant.

A lawn mower as a mode of transportation.

The tea is called Kombucha Tea. It has been around since 250 B.C. It is tea that is fermented with a specific blend of yeasts and bacteria that happen to live very well together. Similar to the way trees produce oxygen as waste, the waste products of this process includes amino acids, B vitamins, and beneficial acids and live cultures. I’m not a vegetarian or natural foods person. The first time I drank this [...] Continue Reading…

In some freakish accident about 48 hours ago, the Alexa ranks were shuffled. As a result, my other blog now has a higher ranking with Alexa than this one.
I wondered how this would effect the Top 100 Make Money Online Blogs which Ryan Shamus painstakingly went through one by one and described recently. It’s well worth a look. As far as the list goes, I see a lot of same names, just in different places. I dropped about four places.
Also today would have been the day that Marcus Hochstadt’s Blog broke the Alexa 50,000 barrier. He was going to [...] Continue Reading…