Stuff to ramble on today...

• Christmas
• Birthday Prospects
• Stories

Well, I saw that Aleron Bane had put a blog post on DeviantArt (But not here...?) about his Christmas haul, and I figured, why not do the same? Not trying to tease or anything, in fact I'm a tad bit jealous of my brothers, but hey, I have other priorities. The biggest stuff I got includes a multi-effect pedal for my electric guitar (You can see my Ultimate Guitar profile for a pic, if you want), and Dragon Dictate software. I got other stuff too, but not much of it is worth mentioning. I think the biggest thing that was unwrapped this Christmas, was a Nintendo 3 DS, which both of my little brothers got. I'd be lying if I said I didn't want one too, but it wasn't something that I wanted so badly that I was going to get upset over not getting one. I still have my birthday coming up in a few days, so there's always a chance I could get one then. I have to admit the thing is pretty darn cool, but I'm still a little iffy on the whole 3 dimensional aspect. It is nice to be able to use 3-D games, but in my opinion 3D should be something that stays in the movie theaters. The issue for me is that the screen has to be at a specific distance from your eyes in order for it to work properly, otherwise the image becomes blurry or completely distorted. It's also rather hard on my eyes and I can't play it for more than a couple hours at a time.  And to be honest the three-dimensional stuff doesn't really add a whole lot to gameplay.

Now I don't mean to hate on this, the 3 DS is pretty cool. But those of the reasons why it wasn't high enough on my wish list for me to end up getting one. My big gift was the Dragon Dictate software, which I'm actually using to write this blog post. It basically takes whatever I say, and types it.  Now, I did have to train the software to recognize my voice specifically, as well is prove that I'm part of an academic institution in order to be able to use it. This is because it's an academic version and is cheaper than the normal version, it's still $200 though. The voice training didn't take long at all, but I'd be willing to have it take longer if it were tiny bit more accurate. It's a lot more accurate than any other program I've used, but there's still a lot of misheard words and other typos that really probably shouldn't be happening. I do though appreciate the fact that you can add your own vocabulary to the program. It's especially nice for people who write fan fiction like myself, so that we can add character names to the program's vocabulary. Another small gripe about the program, is that the correct function doesn't always work as it should. For example, right now in bloggers writing system it doesn't go back and highlight what is being corrected, this means that instead of replacing the text that was put in by the program, it simply adds a repeated occurrence of the corrected version. This can be easily fixed by hand, but it would be nice if it didn't happen in the 1st place.

I was a little bit disappointed that I didn't get any video games for Christmas, but again there's always my birthday which is actually tomorrow. Although with the fact that I now use an Xbox 360 instead of our family's Wii, doesn't help that fact. You see when I 1st bought the Xbox 360, my parents told me that they would not buy me any video games for it because it was something I bought with my own money. Plus they just don't like the fact that I have another video game console in the house.

I'm just a mentioned this real quick, I am in fact working on my 2 stories that are active. Right now work is happening on Pure Chaos, and work will soon resume on Transformations Galore. I also still have to finish working on my 1st commission from deviant art. I want to apologize to you, Ryu Dragonclaw, for taking so long to get this out. I'd throw excuses but it's really just the same old thing you've heard over and over again. Like I've said before, I like  to be proud of my work, so I'd rather take my time and publish something that's good then get it out quickly.