Beau's Tech Blog

Ultra thin cell phone Is anyone actually happy about their cell phone service? As a T-Mobile user, all I can say is that I am complaining less than I was before. I hold very little loyalty to any one company and I think most people feel the same way. Other than T-Mobile, I have used Sprint and Verizon. Customer service is almost as bad as the computer industry. I have paid fees ranging from $30 to $110 per month for various plans and I have lived in three cities ranging from a farm town to the state capitol. I have yet to discover a happy fit. In my quest for the best provider in my area I decided to review my own needs. I wanted email on the go. I also decided a camera would be useful since it would always be with me. I like having a PDA, so something that c

Microsoft Vista Speech Wreck These Microsoft demonstrations are always a great piece of history to store and watch years later. Unfortunately, I recall speech recognition back in the mid-90's and it wasn't much different than it is today. I'm sure there have been many improvements along the way, but when it comes right down to it, the stuff just isn't very useful yet. I remember the first time I ever installed ViaVoice from IBM back in 1995. I thought it would be so cool if I could just talk and it would type. I even ended up with a $3017 dollar Pentium 100 IBM Aptiva from Radio Shack (convinced my dad this was necesary) to use ViaVoice on. The first sentence I spoke ,the example sentence from the manual, came