I have a good friend in this city who has ADHD (making her thrive on
complexity). We both think fast and type fast.

Once upon a time we were each on our respective computers (she didn’t live
here yet), and were having an online conversation.

Well, actually, we were having three conversations. We had two instant
messenger clients open, plus were volleying emails fro and to. Here’s the
funny part. The ICQ conversation was a flirt betwixt the two of us. The
Yahoo! IM conversation was a philosophical debate on the merits of a line
of software. And the email conversation was a sad one, talking about a
friend who’d had some trouble in her life.

We’d talked in this way for some time before I spotted the strangeness of
having three simultaneous *and different* conversations with the same
human.

So, curious as always, I started swapping my responses from one medium to
the other. The ICQ conversation was answered by email. The email went to
Yahoo! IM. Our erstwhile smooth conversations suddenly ground to a halt.

We laughed about the absurdity and intensity of what we’d been doing.

Gawd, I love technology.

-Elaine

I am playing with the demo version of TextAloudMP3, which reads text on your computer to you aloud (or saves it as MP3). I’ve picked up a British male voice, since that’s the calmest sounding computer voice I’ve been able to find.

NextUp.com - The Power of Spoken Audio

But here’s the cool part — while testing it, I set it to reading me some of my own lezzie pornographic poetry.

Nice. Very, very funny.

-Elaine