Archive for March, 2002

Voice (Mis)Recognition

Today I downloaded Microsoft’s Speech SDK v5.1. All 68 MegaBytes of it. I wanted to see how accurate it’s voice recognition could be. After all, talking into my script-writing program would surely be faster than my fairly hopeless typing.
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Milligan’s Autograph

Some people collect autographs as a passion. Others casually get autographs from famous people they meet (athletes leaving the field, an actor in a coffee shop, that kind of thing), keep them for a while, then throw them away. From a fairly early age I realised that autographs meant nothing to me. I just didn’t “get” it – and I still don’t. What’s the big deal about getting someone famous to sign a piece of paper? Perhaps my contempt of autographs was just part of my contempt for fame. I’ve rarely been “awed” by seeing a famous person. But there is an exception. One day I did ask someone for their autograph: Spike Milligan.
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