Off Topic: On Writing

By trade I am a journalist and writer. In mind, I am a voracious reader and marketer. One thing I like doing, is reading articles where people wonder how something can possibly make money. I like solving puzzles and marketing and human behavior in general, holds the puzzles I find the most interesting.

So with that lengthy and fairly unnecessary introduction, I want to talk about writing. I love writing, especially writing with pad and pen, the sounds of the scratching of the ball point as it catches on the paper, the sound of a finished page and turning a new one.Its not that I hate typing on a keyboard, but I do get tired of it. Which has lead to a series of misadventures.

Last year at HostingCon, the media room was opened to the exhibit hall, which was nice, but the main problem was noise. The noise level was so loud that all of my voice recorder files were unintelligible to the transcribers.It didn’t help that the man sitting next time me on the plane spilled his drink on my notes either. I had a notebook full of soggy pages and about 16 hours of interviews that no one could decipher. So if you add all of that to me looking into opportunities for easing my writing burden you can come to one conclusion: Papa needs a new recorder.

I decided to splurge so I got an ICD-MX20 with transcribing software in hopes that I can take the fast tract to literary poignancy…. Yeah I hadn’t thought about two problems.

The one that most people guess when it comes to transcribing software can be summed up in the following: “Google milks the goat of if not real time date in obesity in half hour hour a day he tops.” I REALLY wish I knew what I said to make the software type this out cause you really can’t make stuff like that up. So the software has a few bugs, no big deal really I am sure if I work with it longer it will eventually work out the second problem is something quite extraordinary.

I talk to myself quite often. Its how I formulate my articles and how I go about general inquiry into Web Hosting. This article in fact was discussed with myself over making some coffee and a bowl of raisin bran. So you would think simple turning a record on and copying what I say would be second nature, but its not. As soon as I turn this puppy on my mind goes blank. I noticed I say “um” and “uh” a ton. Listening to the recordings sounds like a babbling idiot. What was structured thought ends up coming out in a series of random pauses, stutterings, and a mad dash to remember dates, specific numbers, and etc. I almost want to say, “Behold the wreck that is my train of thought.”

Honestly, the files on this sucker right now is like a 7 hour long blooper reel. I may just send it off to Mitch and see if he can take out the best parts and use them for sound bites for his podcast.