Common Thoughts

Miles manages to sleep on whatever you happen to be doing at the moment.  As of March 15th, he’s been doing this sort of thing for 18 years.

Upon upgrading to Mac OS 10.6 (or perhaps applying the latest software upgrade to Rosetta Stone), the voice recognition feature of Rosetta Stone 3 stopped working correctly.  The program either indicated an error without any input or gave an error as soon as the user began speaking.  The microphone calibration feature demonstrated a distinct and highly variable delay between the time a sound was produced and the time the software sound meter moved.  In other programs, the USB microphone (Plantronics DSP-500) worked perfectly.  After numerous fruitless contacts with the Rosetta Stone support where they repeatedly asked questions I had already answered, I searched the web.  Finding no answers via Google, I purchased a new USB microphone (Logitech  Clear Chat Pro USB) and it worked well in all programs.  Although I found no root cause, the most likely issue lies in an inherent conflict between the Plantronics microphone and Rosetta.

Common Thoughts has been written and produced by Robert G. Buice, Jr.  since 1999.  The site has existed in other forms using the brand “common” since the middle 1990’s. Following massive problems with the hosting provider Spacetrend, the site went off-line for a few years starting in 2006 until domain names could be freed up and moved to a new provider.  Much of the original content as well as that of The Commonplace Review and other sites was lost.  I would not recommend Spacetrend as a hosting provider; the company’s actions seemed to me to be either incompetent or unethical.  After the hassle of freeing up my domain names and moving them to another provider, I experimented with various software platforms until, after much procrastination, settled on Wordpress.  The topics covered in Common Thoughts will cover a wide range, but will likely orbit a core set of themes involving art, literature, science, and spirituality.  I fully expect wild non-sequiturs.