It sounds like there are some good points such as the re-addition of Outlook instead of Entourage – this would make it easier for me to share calendars with PC Outlook folks, as well as give me easier access to things like Microsoft One-Note – something I’ve been using more and more lately.  To be honest I like the concept of One-Note but working with it online really sucks the big one, so making this smoother would be great.

But then there are the not-so-good points – I’d have to switch everything over from Entourage to Outlook and cross my fingers that nothing got lost.  Now let me tell you that I’m very dependent on my calendar and everything scheduled in it, and if stuff got screwed up I’d be hooped!  A bit scary.  And really, I love Entourage, I never seem to have had any of the issues that other folks are talking about, it’s been great for me, so I’m reluctant to give it up and have to get used to Outlook all over again.  I also hear that simple little things like the Resend email option is gone, and I use that all the time.

Also, there is the addition of the “Ribbon” in Word/Excel – so instead of having the cool detachable formatting bar that can hang around outside the window I’m working in, or that I can even close completely if I want to, now I’ve got all of the formatting bit and bobs parked at the top of my working window and hogging all the window space.

And the worst part yet, I can’t even get access to Outlook unless I buy the bigger Business package, it doesn’t come with the Home/Student version anymore.  Ever lame!  Who came up with that silly idea?

So as you can see I’m a bit stuck between wanting my One-Note experience to improve and having to risk a complete move of all my precious info to Outlook.  At this point, I’m leaning towards staying with what I’ve already got.

What are your opinions on the matter?  Have you made the switch?  Good or bad results?  Do tell…

Aha! It’s true!

Here is an historical account:

“Location: Blair Atholl (Perth and Kinross) – Glen Tilt, north of the town
Type: Vampire
Date / Time: Early twentieth century?
Further Comments: Two poachers shacking up in a bothy reported being attacked by a creature that attacked and drank blood from one of them. The pair managed to fight the creature off, and it flew away. The story is very similar to the vampire tale that happened at Fealaar, Aberdeenshire.”

Or I also found a great article about Vampires in Scotland with a bunch of cool topics:

• MacDracula?
• The Vampire of Glamis Castle – The Vampire Monk
• The Baobahn Sith (pronounced Baa’-van-shee), Scotland’s version of it’s own vampire also known as a White Woman
• and more nifty stories

I love it! I’m one of those strange folks that think Vampires are interesting, so the fact that some of these legends tie in with my own history is awesome!

And, it just so happens that I had recently created a wee little Count Dracula for my sister Shendah’s birthday (from one vampire lover to another):

It’s full of cool tips and fun bits as well, and you can sign up on the sidebar on the right.

And, when you sign up for the newsletter you also get access to our free Super Efficiency E-books – sweet!

Enjoy!

I’d always heard in the past about PodPress, but apparently it’s not working so great anymore, there seems to be some debate as to whether it’s supported anymore, so I decided not to go there.  And, in the description for Blubrry it says that it’s basically designed as an upgrade to PodPress, so that sounds much better to me.

So turns out it was super easy to install and once we’ve got most of his shows up on there we’re going to submit it all to iTunes – the plugin supports all of this and makes it really easy to do.

What are some other podcasting plugins that work great?

FYI you’ll need some coding savvy to do this one, and you should already have a child theme set up.  If you haven’t set up your child theme yet, read this post to learn how to create your own child theme.

Now here are the rest of the instructions:

1. Open your child theme version of Single.php in your editor of choice and near the bottom of the page add this (add it right above the line that says <?php get_footer(); ?> ):

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

2. If you haven’t already, create a functions.php file for your theme and add this to it:

<?php
add_filter(‘body_class’, ‘blacklist_body_class’, 20, 2);
function blacklist_body_class($wp_classes, $extra_classes) {
if( is_single() || is_page() ) :
// List of the classes to remove from the WP generated classes
$blacklist = array(‘singular’);
// Filter the body classes
foreach( $blacklist as $val ) {
if (!in_array($val, $wp_classes)) : continue;
else:
foreach($wp_classes as $key => $value) {
if ($value == $val) unset($wp_classes[$key]);
}
endif;
}
endif;   // Add the extra classes back untouched
return array_merge($wp_classes, (array) $extra_classes);
}

3. Add a few css adjustments to your style.css file:

.nav-previous {
float: left !important;
}
#respond {
margin: 0 auto 1.625em;
padding: 1.625em;
position: relative;
width: 88.9%;
}
.commentlist {
width: 78.9%;
}
/* adjust author bio */
.singular #author-info {
margin: 2.2em 0 0;
padding: 20px 5.4%;
width: 550px;
}

Voila!  Now your site should display a sidebar properly on individual post pages.  Yay!

Because of my failed attempts at using MacSpeech Scribe I resorted to trying Verbal Ink instead.  They are 100% US based, all native English speakers, and the results that they produce are excellent.

Formatting of the document was great, everything was completely accurate, and even though I had submitted my audio as a Single Speaker, they still properly broke out the couple of extra speakers that made small comments within the recording that I hadn’t realized were there.  Sweet!

Their prices are very reasonable and in the end they have a much better turnaround time than I could do myself.

I would indeed recommend Verbal Ink for transcription services.

Dragon Dictate is not really for transcription, but it’s super cool in many  other ways.  All you have to do is go through an initial training session with your voice and then you can get Dragon Dictate to do a whole bunch of things for you on your computer.

Simple commands like “Open Microsoft Word” or Open *whatever your program name is* are pretty cool, and then once your program of choice is open you can do all sorts of things there too.  Word can work as a type of transcription in that you speak to the computer and it types what you’re saying.  You can actually say stuff like “New paragraph”, you can select a piece of text and replace it with something else, and you can even speak your punctuation and it will all show up properly.

All in all it was far simpler to use than I had expected, far more accurate, and I’ll bet there is lots more that I can do with it than I realize.  And hey, if I happen to break my hands one day by accident, I can still get some work done!

It sounded pretty simple but it turns out it wasn’t the best, and here’s why:

1. Only one speaker can be in the recording at a time
2. You have to spend quite a bit of time at the beginning to “train” the system to recognize the speaker’s voice
3. No punctuation is included in the output
4. My entire computer system slows down significantly while the program is running, enough that I just have to walk away

In the end I ended up with not being able to do much on my computer while the program was running which I really didn’t like, I’m the multi-tasking queen.  And, the result was one gigantic block of text with absolutely no punctuation, so I’d have to spend time going back over the whole thing with the recording so that I could add paragraph breaks and punctuation accordingly, and so I could make corrections that the system simply wasn’t able to get right.

So all in all, it actually created more work for me, and that’s definitely not what I’m aiming for!

But, luckily they offer a 30-day money back guarantee, so that was the one good point.

I was very moved by it, it seemed like she was talking about me to a tee, so I thought I’d share it again here so that everyone else can enjoy: