What is this place? These pages are where I hope to talk in general terms about my progress with speech recognition and working towards completion of a university degree. At least that’s the general idea, along the way I will probably get hijacked, lose focus, take another track, or generally get lost. That really wouldn’t surprise me!
A little about me. I am a mature aged gentleman of at least 60 years. I live in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, South Australia. I have been happily married since 1975 and have three grown-up children of which my eldest son still lives with us.
I have a disability called bipolar RSI, that is RSI in both shoulders arms and hands at times. Some people call this Type 2 or Voodoo RSI. Voodoo because I cannot tell or anticipate where exactly the pain will strike next, just as if a pin had been pushed into a voodoo doll that will be where and when it happens. My first diagnosis of RSI was in 1985 while I was working at the Booking Office in the Railway Station in Canberra, ACT. Since then there have been periods when I could and did work and periods when I cant do a thing to help myself. Some days I am fine for driving, other days I cant even hold a cup safely. It has basically changed my life around and messed up my family’s lifestyle too.
My RSI doesn’t always play up like most of these things but to aggravate it all I need to do is a lot of mousing or keyboarding or even writing, anything like that will annoy it. To get around that problem to do the work required for my new degree I have purchased and installed Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 Professional. This will be great for text-based tasks but when I get into graphic-based areas, well that is going to be some interesting times 😉
This blog will talk about some of that history about the disability, some on my early dabbling into the world of speech recognition, what others around the world are saying about RSI and about speech recognition and how all of this relates to me studying for my degree.
Update: from mid 2013 my aspirations to gain a university degree ended and I’ll no longer be following that path.
My present goal is to try to gain back the health and fitness that I lost earlier in the year.
Listen to me Write! 
Interesting reading Ian. Almost five years ago, I did volunteer work for the RSI Organisation in Canberra where I translated Dutch texts (articles from news letters and magazines printed in Holland) in to English for the RSI’s newsletter. It was fun and interesting and although I’m not Dutch, I can read and understand the language. P>S> I don’t say that RSI is fun but the translation work was.
Thanks Linda. I don’t think I was part of that organisation when I lived in Canberra, I didn’t get confirmation of the diagnosis till around November ’85 and we were moved back to South Australia in the 1st week of December ’85. I now get their newsletter and their information reference manual so I can now keep up to date on what is developing in that field.
How’s our dragon doing? Settling into his new home OK?
Hi Gillian, yes, he’s looking very comfortable up there listening to me so that he can do the writing.
Again I must say how very much I appreciate you painting him just for me. Amazing generosity and very much appreciated.