Wireless is wonderful.   I can now venture anywhere in my house or in the front yard with either my Mac PowerBook or my tablet PC and I remain on the Internet.   For months, I would wake up early in the morning, sit on my couch, and work on my Mac on the Bombay Company coffee table that my parents gave me.  

But as time went on, I began looking for a better arrangement for doing my work at home.   What I wanted was to set up a home office in the family room, where we currently keep our piano and our television.   The room would make a good office because it's separated from the rest of the house (which means it's quiet) and because the room where my two dogs live.   To make the family room, a home office we would have had to have moved the television into our living room.   Jean didn't want to do that.

So for the last few weeks, our dining room has been my office.   Some aspects of the room were nice: Jean was kind enough to share a shelf for me to store books and other work materials.   But I was constantly moving computers off the table onto shelves or chairs, and I was always worried that the girls would pull something down.

This morning I was working on the computer.   When I stood up to get another cup of coffee, I didn't realize that a cord was wrapped around my leg.   My tablet computer came crashing down.   The damage wasn't too bad: there was one crack, in some of the plastic molding on the tablet.

Jean realized my frustration and while I was putting my computer back together, she began setting up a card table in our bedroom.   And so now I write this from my new office in the corner of my room.   It's a nice little set up right next to the bookshelf in the signal strength from the wireless network seems to be pretty good here.   What's even better is that this room seems to be quite enough that I'm able to use my headset to dictate this text.   I've recently upgraded to Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 8, after reading an enthusiastic endorsement of the product in the New York Times.   David Pogue is the editor of the Circuits column, and he writes all of his columns and all of his books by dictating in Dragon.

I had tried working with Dragon NaturallySpeaking a few years ago, with both versions five and six, but the program never seem to learn my speech patterns well enough for me to embrace the product for regular use.   I have to say this new version is working very well.   It's one of the reasons I think I'm going to be a will keep my journal going, because as anyone knows who knows me, I can talk a lot faster than I write.

Thank you, Jean, for taking the time to put this space together for me.