---Michael Acklin   

    Late again. This time I got a passin’fair excuse. I was training my computer. That’s right, training my computer. It’s got to where I can’t write clearly enough to read, and typing is so slow, a letter at a time, that I sometimes forget whatever I was going to say well before the place in the sentence where I thought I was going to say it. Add to this the degraded performance of my space bar and any letter within half an inch of same and you get my production rate of about 6 words a minute. , which brings us back to that training thing. What, after all, can a man of such stumbling syllables expect from a box of transistors, resistors, and capacitors? What indeed? I’d thought for some time of hiring a typist and dictating the whole thing, but the last and only attempt in this direction ended badly, the youngster’s need for academic perfection lending an unfortunately pedantic stench to the whole effort. Comes now a software called Dragon Naturally Speaking, a package employing voice recognition to take dictation a paragraph at a time without argument. So what’s the training thing about? It’s a process wherein I read to my computer (yup) and it thereby learns to recognize my voice and turn it into text. The more I read to it, the more accurately it’ll report what it hears.
This little bit of a column is, I hope, the last one that I’ll peck out a letter at a time. It took something like six hours to assemble. If things go as planned, my next one will be full-length and maybe even make some sort of sense. That part will still be up to me. Watch this space. Me and my laptop are in training already.The dog is looking at me funny, unsure exactly who I’m talking to, and I’m feeling a bit foolish about it myself, though I’ve gotten used to that feeling long ago. Onward, per Oat Willie, through the fog.
 
"Reality is merely an illusion,
albeit a very persistent one."
                                 Albert Einstein