I Believe Two Things

For reasons that I shall leave ambiguous, I was perusing the (current) Boston Municipal Code yesterday. There’s some great stuff in there. For example, it’s illegal to manufacture or sell a mercury thermometer in the city of Boston, except by prescription.

Then there’s this restriction:

Whoever sells, or distributes, or imports, or loans, or possesses with the intent to sell … a book, pamphlet, ballad, printed paper, phonographic record, print, picture, figure, image, or description which depicts or describes … patently offensive representations or descriptions of ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated … shall be subject to a fine of fifty ($50.00) dollars….

Then there’s this regulation for street-railway cars (emphasis mine):

No person having control of the speed of a street-railway car passing in a street shall fail to keep a vigilant watch for all teams, carriages, and persons, especially children, nor shall such person fail to strike a bell several times in quick succession on approaching any team, carriage, or person, and no person shall, after such striking of a bell, delay or hinder the passage of the car.

That’s a point to me: my city built its subway and streetcars before anybody dreamed of having automobiles… and it’s still there today.

I was recently introduced to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which is available to watch free on hulu.com.

That’s all I’m saying on the matter.

We’ve started creating a lot of video tutorials at work, and we thought speech transcription software like MacSpeech Dictate (built on the supposedly phenomenal Dragon NaturallySpeaking engine) would help us prepare scripts.

I gave the software three long samples of my voice, and then imported a collection of lengthy documents it supposedly used to analyze my writing style.  In the end, I even slowed down my speaking to probably around 60 or 70 words per minute – a speed an ordinary typist could probably keep up with just fine, and an advanced typist would find boring.

I tried reading this simple test sentence:

This video is a tutorial for web developers who want to create new applications in our web space, or install applications they’ve downloaded from the web.

This is what came out – I swear I’m not making this up:

This is a program of us look like he’s our lips excreting around each or install outrage at a gallop away.

A coworker swears Dragon is both reliable and accurate, though when he tried to demonstrate that on his own computer he got no better results than I did.  I’m underwhelmed.