In One Ear

Since my early experiments with speech recognition I had been looking out for a decent head set. I was really pleased when I discovered some Logitech headphones at a knockdown price in our local Staples store.  I took them home and plugged them in and started talking.  And they didn't work very well. 

The sound was indistinct and the recognition was very poor.  I spent a while fiddling with the settings and re-training but it was nowhere near as good as it used to be.  At this point I decided that I might have bought a duff device so I did a little investigating.

Rather surprisingly, results seemed to be equally bad with the headset microphone switched off or even unplugged.  After some investigation I discovered the speech recognition software was still using the microphone inside the computer.  It seems that it doesn't always automatically select the headset microphone.

However, now I've managed to make the switch must handle the speech recognition works an awful lot better.

A tip, you can disable and enable sound devices by going to Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound and clicking Manage audio devices.  This opens up the Sound dialogue. When you disable a device it rather annoyingly vanishes from the list of devices. You can get a device back again, so you can re-enable it, by right clicking in the device window and selecting show disabled devices from the context menu that appears.

Goodbye to Jane

Today we said goodbye to Jane Evison. The name might not be familiar, but if you've ever been to one of the degree ceremonies at Hull you will have seen her handiwork in action. Over the years she has worked behind the scenes to make everything seem as effortless as possible. She is a great person to work with, although she doesn't suffer fools particularly gladly, which makes her getting on well with me especially surprising.

We had a leaving do for her this afternoon, she said some thank-you's and rather surprised both myself and James, the other graduands marshal, by giving us both a bunch of flowers each. Thanks a bunch (literally) - although I now have to explain to number one wife why I'm being given flowers....

Good luck in the future Jane, have fun.

Science Graduation Ceremony

Today I did my final routine for this set of ceremonies. These were some students from our department, who I'd actually taught, which was nice. As a celebration I took the big camera and the fancy lens and tried to get a photograph of everyone at once. The light could have been better, but the results do seem to be recognisable. Although I can't find myself in the pictures anywhere....

Front of house graduands

Stage graduands

Marshal's eye view of the Vice Chancellors speech

After the ceremony

The weather was a bit dull and blustery, but a good time was had by all.

There are a few more pictures on my Flickr Account. Click on any of the above images to go there.

Degrees of Success

I was Graduands Marshal at three degree ceremonies today. Wore the hat, did the intro and got everyone down and into the right place. Great fun, if hard work. All the audiences were terrific and everyone played their part just right, even the nervous graduands who were all splendid. Well done to you all. I'm doing my final intro tomorrow for our Computer Science students, which will be quite an occasion. I might even try out a new joke...

We only had one Honorary Graduate, but he was great. Sir Michael Alan Willcocks, KCB accepted his degree with an excellent and self deprecating speech. Most speakers at degree ceremonies try to pass on some wisdom to the audience, and Sir Michael was no exception. He said something which I think is actually excellent advice. He said that if you have a problem, rather than worrying about it you should try to do something about it. If you can't do anything about it, it is not a problem - it is a fact.

I am Legend (and very depressed)

Went out to the movies tonight, I am Legend. We left the house with the intention of seeing the St. Trinians movie,  but we thought that something a little less lightweight might hit the spot better.

I am Legend is not lightweight. It is actually a zombie flick. I'm not saying that it is based on the video game "Resident Evil", all I'm saying is that the producer, the director, the writer and Will Smith must have played the game quite a lot. And got killed a lot.

The premise (the last man left alive is not alone) is quite an interesting one, but it has been done before. The whole film is basically a long downward spiral, with an uplifting bit at the end to stop the audience from all diving under busses after they leave the cinema.

And finally, a note to world leaders, when someone called Dr. Crippen invents a virus that purports to kill cancer, I think we should be very careful about letting her use it on real people.....