An explanation for my period of silence

You may have noticed that my blogs and Facebook have been mostly silent since mid-January. I'd like to explain this.

A few things have been going on in my life lately. First I had a minor, at least for me, accident on my road bike on January 25. My front wheel lost traction in a turn and I ended up sliding down the road at 20 miles per hour, losing a bit of skin on my right side, cracking two ribs in doing something to my left hand and thumb that is still a bit of a mystery: I see a new doctor on Thursday to try to figure that out. At this point, the ribs are healed, the skin is fine, and I have learned how to use speech to text software on the computer so I'm able to communicate again. In a few days I'll do a blog post that has more details on the accident.

Just so you know, this accident and injuries have not dampened my spirits one iota. In fact, I have considered using computer dictation software for over a decade but never had the compelling event to force it. I also bought a new MacBook Air on the morning of the 25th before the bike accident and am greatly enjoying learning my new Mac as well as all of the speech capabilities of Siri on my iPhone 4S. It is the first time in ages that I've been able to just spend my time learning my tools. Two key tools to me have been the trackpad gestures on the Mac and the Dragon Express computer dictation software. I'll be doing a few more blog entries about those in the future.

Please bear with minor errors in grammar and editing in my blog for the next month or so. Careful editing requires significant keyboard gestures, so you are getting these blogs pretty much as I have dictated them.