Sunday, December 16, 2012

16 December 2012

Last night I slept very well, and so this morning I was able to get up and take my walk. I wore my light jacket and went partway up highway 12 and then back. Some of the time, I even unzipped my jacket.

This morning, David's SpeakEasy Media System finally arrived! We unpacked it and set it up, and we are VERY impressed with it. It does exactly what they promised that it would do, and it's going to be so nice for David to have it. Now, he'll be able to read many online articles (or rather, have them read to him), such as news articles, encyclopedia articles, and weather. He'll be able to check his e-mail and respond to messages (that part still has a wrinkle to be worked out). He can put a letter or other document or an open book on the scanner, and the system will scan it and then read it to him. We actually tested this out, and it was amazingly accurate and did the whole process without any extra action required on part at all! The whole system is driven by menus. By using the up and down arrows, he can hear the options that are available, and then he can choose the one he wants by pressing the Return key. This is really going to be wonderful for him!

We ate lunch at Il Pentolino today, and we each had our usual dishes.

I had a Berlitz teachers' meeting at 2:00 today, and it actually proved to be quite interesting. The best part was that management seems to really "get" that we teachers want more work, and they are trying to make it happen and increase the efficiency of teacher usage. This is heartening news, even though not everything they are trying will work as well as they hope.

After the meeting, I made my monthly trip to the pharmacy to get all our prescriptions filled, then got cat food and cat litter, and then went on to the market to do the weekly grocery shopping.

This evening, I moved the other Mac onto my desk and loaded the new version of Hauptwerk on it. I'll use the 2 Macs together to make more organ music, although it may be a while until I get to that.

Later this evening, we're going over to Moshe and Bob's new apartment. They now live on the 12th floor of one of the 3 tallest buildings in town (20 stories!). The buildings are located near the big kikar (where I go on my walks). We're going to be taking care of their cats for 2 or 3 days sometime in the next couple of weeks while they are away, so they're going to show us what needs to be done.

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