Taipei?

 Speech recognition software these days is ubiquitous, so much so that we tend not to give it a second thought. Anyone who has ever been aggravated by a seemingly endless phone tree knows we encounter it sometimes more often than we’d like. For those of us who predate today’s incarnation though, it can seem miraculous. I remember an acquaintance in the 90s telling me about his new speech recognition software and how he was spending an hour or two each evening training it to recognize his voice and speech patterns. In the end, after all the investment of time and effort, as well as money, he ended up with something that was amazing (for the time period). He was the only one who could use it, since it only was trained for his voice, and more often than not, it had at least one error per phrase, but he could talk to his computer. Science fiction become fact. Things have come a long way since then (i.e. Google’s voice search), with myriad improvements in recent years. There is a point to this anecdote. I usually do have one, even if I take time and a roundabout way of getting to it. I was doing one of the aforementioned Google voice searches in preparation for this post, and ended up with lots of information about the capital of Taiwan (Taipei). While I’m sure that’ll make for fascinating reading at another time, what I wanted was a site that would refresh my memory about the qualities of a kind of personality (Type A). As advanced as it’s become, speech recognition still has a few unavoidable errors. 

I, and many of you, my friends, share some of the characteristics of the Type A personality. We tend to be driven, perfectionists who are not very understanding or accepting of what we think of as excuses. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, except for the fact that the people we tend to be hardest on are ourselves. We’re more likely to be understanding and accepting of others’ reasons, excuses, and shortcomings than we are of our own. This has been on my mind because of the days I’ve missed posting here. When I started this blog, I committed to writing something each day. Having missed a number of consecutive days, I’ve been stressing over making time to write. My reasons for missing a few days are valid and would be acceptable to me for anyone else in my situation. Because the shortcoming is my own though, I’m frustrated and impatient with myself. And, yes, I’m still making an effort at taking my own advice. This is why I’m constantly reminding you to be kind to yourself. Try not to always hold yourself to higher standards than you would expect of others. It’s okay to be who you are, but when you fall short of your own expectations, try to be as understanding and accepting as you are with others. Don’t spend time beating yourself up over things you cannot change. Life itself does plenty of that without your help, so make a special effort to be good to you.