Trying to be useful
I've had a bad sore throat and cough for the past 10 days. I tried to ignore it last week and go to work anyway (apologies to my coworkers if I infected any of you), since I had a ton of stuff to do regarding our TAP program. Apparently that was a poor strategy because I'm not any better 10 days later. We went to Tucson last weekend to visit my husband's family and I spent most of the weekend in a Dayquil-induced haze, spewing clouds of cough drop fumes on everyone. I finally got some prescriptions from the doctor yesterday but unfortunately they seem to be making my symptoms worse, not better. I hate being sick and having all these "to-dos" rattling around in my head.
The worst part is, I am missing an excellent class this week, and am really disappointed. I signed up for EIG's Voice User Interface (VUI) course to learn some fundamentals about building speech applications, so I can better understand what I'm asking our TAP partners to do. Fortunately I went to class on Monday and got a lot of the basics on speech recognition, terminology, and planning an app. And the training materials are really comprehensive. But the instructors are great, and I'm missing a lot of those "tidbits" you only get by being there. I hope to attend tomorrow and Friday's sessions, at least.
My new Tablet PC came in *very* handy for note-taking. I just imported the course material files into OneNote, and then could "write" on the pages, just like I would have on the hardcopies. The handwriting conversion to text doesn't work very well if you don't write in a straight line. I'll probably just keep the notes in my handwriting.
So not much to report on the TAP front, except that we're slowly confirming our participant list as we receive legal documents and make sure the applications and industries span the wide range that we want for the program. Plans are dropping into place slowly but surely for the Kickoff training event in late October. I hope to have the complete list of partners by mid-next week, though that depends a lot on some legal agreement negotiations, as well as some other factors outside of my control.
Thanks for leaving comments here! I'm so glad there are people reading this, despite my lack of pontifications on deep technical subjects.
