Now I'm not whining here (at least not too much). But it is making me think. I'm thinking about how to accomplish programming without doing it myself. Have I been too hands-on, and not enough of a manager? I'm thinking about walking a block to the video store rather than driving to one that I tend to favor more. Have I been fussy, unwilling to take a five-minute walk that would do me a world of good? I'm thinking about how to write, without having the use of two hands. I'm thinking about how to keep my priorities when writing Graffiti and typing are off-limits.

Am I thinking outside the box? I think I am. Slowly. Mostly because I'm really not sure where the box is. That makes it hard to tell where the outside of the box is. I'm healing, trying to stay emotionally upbeat, and trying to do my job. Lots of people have it way worse than I do and I try to remember to be thankful for the flexibility in my job each and every day.

Well, this injury will be healing over the next bunch of weeks. But meanwhile, there are some factors in this situation of mine that do relate to the PalmPilot. And I bet you thought I'd never make the connection!

For the first week, I was barely able to move. Everything hurt. Standing up and sitting down were difficult because when the arm moved, the pain was intense. But I needed to make many calls and arrangements. The fact that I could get my Address Book to open with a single button press, and scroll down with physical buttons on the unit meant that I could get to phone numbers and use my PalmPilot with my right hand alone. That was a big help.

Once I could move around more easily, I could sit in front of my computer. But I still could only peck about with one hand. Given the quantity of words I need to turn out (email messages, columns like this, correspondence, proposal letters, and the like), one handed typing wasn't gonna cut it.

I bought a product called NaturallySpeaking from a company called Dragon Systems. This is a continuous speech recognition program. It's fussy, but it works.

To use the program, first you must train it. This involves long sessions of reading while the program records your vocal patterns. Boring but necessary. Once trained, you speak into a microphone and words (hopefully the right ones) show up on-screen.

There are three modes of interaction with NaturallySpeaking: dictating into the NaturallySpeaking word processor, dictating directly into Microsoft Word, and dictating directly as simulated typed-in text in any Windows program. For the most part, I use the NaturallySpeaking word processor. That's how this article is being written.

But the typed in text mode works really well in electronic mail and in the Pilot Desktop. For example, in my Eudora mail program, when I click in the subject field and say "my new article", the NaturallySpeaking engine actually sends character by character input as if it was being typed directly into the subject field.

I live my life around my to do list. It's sad, but true. Not being able to type into the Pilot Desktop (and using Graffiti is way out!) prevented me from keeping track of my to do items. As you might imagine, with a broken arm, it's even more important to keep track of the items that need to be completed.