Daniel T Lavelle

Unplanned Happiness

 

Speech recognition for the masses

It has taken me quite a bit of time to teach Microsoft's Speech Recognition enough medical vocabulary to enable me to use it to dictate office visit notes. I have on occasion used it to dictate long emails, but for the most part, it serves a very limited role and it is not enough of a reason for me to remain in Windows instead of switching to Linux on my dual boot netbook. Don't get me wrong, I am grateful that I have it working. In fact, it is probably Microsoft's greatest recent failing in not developing it further. They have had it available for years—hidden from view.

Now that Google has voice recognition built into Chrome, it will be but a short time before they enable it everywhere, not just for searching. It seems to work surprisingly well for dictating one sentence at a time—perfect for searching on Google. Currently, speech recognition in Chrome is annoying for dictating paragraphs at a time. But knowing how methodical Google is as a company in bringing out new technology, I am sure it will not be long before it is incorporated into GMail and Google Docs. In five years it may seem unnatural to type an email. Microsoft will probably loose yet another area to Google where they could have capitalized their market if the product were fully developed.

 

Lubuntu 12.10 on my Acer Aspire One 722 works nearly flawlessly

I continue to love my little netbook, the Acer Aspire One 722. I upgraded to Lubuntu 12.10 from 12.04 with again zero problems. Well, I still have not gotten the microphone to work, but I have not tried too hard to figure it out either. I am using the 64bit version—it runs great on the lowly AMD C-60 processor. I still have approximately 5 hours of battery time. Wonderful!

 

It has been a long year

I am not quite done with my first year of residency, but I can honestly say that it has been one of the hardest years of my life for me and my family. I can look at my kids and recognize that they have grown and matured, but the actual time encompassing this year feels like one big blur. It is a feeling that is hard to describe with words. Between work and family there is precious little time for sleep and even less for research or programming. I had hoped to continue projects from my PhD work, but progress has severely slowed to a proverbial crawl. I did read one book on Clojure ( The Joy of Clojure ) and I am still enamored with the concept of the language even though I have yet to implement anything in it. I am much more comfortable using Perl and R, but I know that I need to implement projects in Clojure to really learn the language. Time will tell whether I can ever take the next step. I hope so.

I continue to love my little netbook, the Acer Aspire One 722. I upgraded to Lubuntu 12.04 from 11.10 with zero problems. I am using the 64bit version of Lubuntu that seems to run fine even on the lowly AMD C-60 processor. I have approximately 5 hours of battery time. How did I ever do with less? I use the Citrix client within Lubuntu to connect with the servers at work with no issues. It works as well or better than the dedicated wired machines running windows. The wireless connection from within Linux seems much more robust than the wireless connection from within Windows 7 even though it obviously uses the same hardware. The only application that I find in Windows that is lacking in Lubuntu/Linux is Speech Recognition that comes standard in Windows 7. Although not quite up to the standards as provided by Dragon, Microsoft's Speech Recognition is fairly powerful. I have been able to train it to recognize a considerable amount of medical vocabulary as well. I sometimes wonder what Microsoft could do with their existing technology if they had decent management.

 

A New Year

I am going to try a new distribution of Linux. I bought a netbook to carry around the clinic and on the floors. I wanted a netbook with more than 4 hours of battery time, with an 11 inch screen, and with a weight of about 3 lbs. I did not want to spend more than $300. My "perfect" work netbook turned out to be an Acer Aspire One 722 with an AMD Dual-Core C-60 Processor. Inexpensive enough that if something happens I will not be crushed and fast enough not to kill me on a daily basis. The keyboard is the only thing right out of the box that I am not thrilled with. The biggest surprise was working on a nearly silent computer. Amazing! After too many years to count, for this netbook I am switching from Mandriva to Lubuntu. I could only find my 1 gig old crucial USB stick when I was trying out new live distributions. Lubuntu fit on the stick and booted with wireless access up and running. I only need to get audio working. I have not given up completely on Mandriva. I always liked Mandriva for its well thought out installations and support for many different desktops. Before I ran Openbox, I used to run Blackbox and Fluxbox on my old pentium before I upgraded it to a lightning fast 400Mhz AMD K6-III. I have been running Mandriva for a long time. But, it looks like many of their developers left forming mageia and Mandriva will only fully support KDE with their upcoming releases. My only disappointment with Lubuntu (ubuntu) so far is the default decision to ship it with a firewall initially disabled. This seems ridiculous to me. So far I am really impressed with the little AMD C-60 processor. It does everything I need to do including Perl and R scripting. I still need to get Clojure and ClojureScript installed :)

 

Time for updates

When I started my blog, I knew it would be hard to make updates on a regular basis. Now I know it is nearly impossible to make updates while working as a resident with a family. Life happens! Since my last blog entry, I now have a new addition to the family, graduated from medical school, moved from Virginia to New York, and embarked on my new career as a combined internal medicine and pediatrics resident. Intern year is hard. It is not an issue of time, but an issue of time management—something that I was not exposed to as a medical student. Do I still think I made the right decision entering residency instead of pursuing an academic career in research? Absolutely. However, it is hard to balance my time with family, friends, and normal activities like grocery shopping. I have made only minimal progress on research that I want to complete for myself and in collaboration with others. I find that there is something exhilarating when learning something new; however, my progress in learning Clojure has stalled. I have not implemented one line of Clojure in a meaningful project. I have moved the site to a new hosting service. Hopefully, everything will work out well, but I do not expect to update this blog regularly.

 

Tragedy in Tucson

I spent the day oblivious to any news as I walked a few miles shopping to replenish my spent supplies on the interview trail. In the meantime the tragedy unfolded in Tucson. We know little information about the presumed shooter. The accused has a recent history of disruptive behavior in both the classroom and the library requiring campus police on at least one occasion. The NY Times reports that the community college had suspended him. He later withdrew from the college. His writings as posted on YouTube seem for the most part to be nonsensical. It seems like his friends did notice these changes and began to avoid him and this probably increased his isolation. One can only imagine what his parents are going through now. The political debate is focused on whether the political climate has become too confrontational. The debate really should be focused on what we can do to enable people to seek out mental health resources. Sadly, the tragedy seems so similar to the shootings at Virginia Tech.

 

Happy Belated New Year

The holiday season flew by this year for me. It is amazing to me how life allows one to relive aspects from a different viewpoint. Some of my least favorite memories when sick as a child were due to the dreaded "stomach flu." I can remember a few Christmases that were rescheduled due to everyone being sick. Well, I can now say that gastroenteritis is even more painful when experienced as a parent with a sick child than as a child with the illness. Luckily, this holiday season only one child was ill. Ironically, after staying up most of the night with the sick child I was later blessed with experiencing the illness first hand, again. It seems that I was unable to escape the bug even with diligent hand washing and many applications of bleach. This year we were still able to celebrate Christmas on time. I was a little less enthusiastic about food, but happy about returning to normal life. We celebrated the new year with friends — no easy feat given 2 young kids. Happy Belated New Year!

 

Happy Thanksgiving

I had not flown for quite some time, but that has now changed with the interview season in full swing. From the media reports it would seem that the airports were jammed at security check points due to full-body scans and pat-downs. So far, I have seen but one of the full-body scanners and it remained unused while I was in line. Is it a hassle to remove my laptop, belt, shoes, jacket, and metal objects for scanning? Yes. But, I have found the TSA staff to be professional and fairly efficient. Early this morning during the security check, my belt made its way from my tray to another passenger's tray during the X-ray scanning. The passenger behind me in line alerted me—who knows, I may have left the security check point without it. All in all, travel this interview/holiday season has been full of people being both kind and courteous. Of course this has been largely unreported by the media. I know I have much to be grateful for this Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Updates

I know it has been a long time since I have posted anything new, but I have been busy adding a few hidden features to the web site. I write this blog using JD's wonderful Emacs package muse-blog that not only publishes an HTML page using the Emacs package muse, but also publishes an XML RSS feed. However, I am using javascript at the end of each blog entry to allow readers (if there are any) the ability to email me their comments. This javascript when left unfiltered makes for some really nasty looking RSS output. Using some git magic, I can keep using any updates that JD makes to the master repository of muse-blog while also re-basing my edits into a branch where I have added a new function to strip away any one-line scripts from the XML formatted RSS feed. I do not program in LISP, but making the function was fairly straightforward. I have also changed the RSS feed to use slightly less restrictive author tags that do not require full email addresses for valid RSS output. Although I find the RSS 2.0 output provided by JD's muse-blog to be cleaner, with my additions the RSS validators no longer complain about the output. I will also make a link on the front page for those who would like to subscribe to the RSS feed. Even after more than 50 years, LISP remains a viable language and those that know it, seem to swear by it. It may be time for me to take the plunge.

 

Passing of someone special

The betterment to one's soul that another human being imparts can be obtained from surprisingly short interactions in time. I had the pleasure of working with Dr. R. Pryor Baird III — a warm hearted and incredibly funny man who loved teaching would-be doctors about the art of patient interaction. I remember him recalling how on one day the students were interviewing and performing a preset examination on an elderly gentleman-actor who was portraying the part of someone having palpitations. Dr. Baird had real concerns for the well-being of his elderly actor that only a few students were able to recognize and account for in their predetermined examinations. Those students were verbally encouraged and rewarded. There was an honesty in character about Dr. Baird that always surrounded him even though he never let on to any of his personal struggles with cancer. He continued to drink his NestlĂ© Nesquik strawberry milks as though they were his chemotherapy. On every occasion that I met him he was concerned with how I was doing. He was encouraging on my path back to running. He was always worried about my car not working especially before the hot Summer months. On my last meeting with him, I suggested that he go see a doctor. I was concerned. He otherwise had so much energy that it was easy to overlook the battle his body was losing. I am thankful that I introduced him to my daughter as I happened to run into him while walking to Kroger one weekend. Life is fleeting. I will miss him and forever laugh about the nonsense we often talked about.


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