Spice Bazaar

Aya Sofia

As usual, if you need the login/password, just send me an email.

We had a wonderful time, the sun and relaxation really recharged Hiske and I, and now we’re back to work. I had my two (potentially last) interviews the day after I returned, and so now I’m writing, writing, writing. We also returned to a slightly emptier (but roomier!) house, as Jay has moved on to France for his year-long study abroad.

Here’s a few teaser-photos:

Mirador Santa Luzia

Sintra - Pena Palace

Lisbon - Wantering around Alfalma

High-Quality Digital Recorder
I had no audio-recorder of any kind before I began this process, so I started doing a bit of research on the Internet and by talking with colleagues. Everyone told me not to skimp on the quality of the recorder, since you don’t know what kind of control you’ll have over your interview environment and some recorders are better at dealing with ambient noises than others.

I went ahead an purchased a Sony ICDUX70 Digital Voice Recorder for $60.00 online, and was very happy with it. It records directly to mp3, holds 12+ hours on the highest quality setting, and has a USB port for downloading with no special software required (works great on my Mac).

I’ve had two interviews in noisy areas, one was at a bar with not-so-quiet music and not-so-quiet guests, and was impressed by how audible the interviews came out.

Take Lots of Notes
Hey, you’re recording this with your fancy new digital recorder, so no use in taking copious notes, right? Wrong. Whenever your interviewee references a new name (organization or individual), acronym, or jargon, write it down. At the end of their response (or the end of the interview if you don’t want to break the flow), go over those names/terms and make sure you’ve got them right. Humans are agreeable creatures, and sometimes I find myself thinking that I’ve understood a term or reference, only to find out that I’m not 100% sure during the transcription process. This step saves a lot of time and prevents you from having to write a potentially embarrassing follow up email.

Voice Recognition Software
Here’s where I got a bit creative. Speech-recognition software has come a long way since my last encounter with it back in 2000, but it still can’t accurately understand a voice that it hasn’t been trained to recognize. So, if you’re hoping that you can just run your recorded interview through a computer and receive a relatively accurate transcript, you may have to wait another decade.

That doesn’t mean that it can’t be pretty useful, though. I already had a copy of MacSpeech Dictate (equivilent of Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows), and I invested about 30 minutes of training-time before the software could do a pretty good job at understanding what I was saying. This kind of software isn’t cheap ($99-199), and it works better with some voices than others (for example, accented speakers). I really would recommend playing around with a demo or an internet copy to see if this will work for you in the long run, before investing in something which may not be that useful for your specific situation.

Here’s my process:

• Spend some time training your voice software (and yourself) until you get to a point where it can understand a good deal of a practice text.
• Copy mp3 interviews onto your computer.
• Fire up an mp3 player capable of adjusting the play rate without changing the pitch (QuickTime will do), and set it to half speed playback.
• Plug in your headphones and make sure you can clearly hear your recording.
• Start your voice software.
• Playback your interview and speak out-loud what you hear through your headphones. This takes a bit of practice but at half-speed playback it’s not too big of a challenge. Don’t worry too much about errors, your job is to get as many of the words as possible into a text-editor.
• Close your voice software, and go back and format the messy document you’ve made as best you can.
• Now play back your interview again (possibly at normal speed), and edit your transcript as you normally would, pausing after each sentence and rewinding during difficult moments.

This process is far from perfect, but I’ve found that listen-and-repeat method can usually get a good chunk of the data into text format which I can then edit. Editing an incomplete transcript, of course, is always easier than doing the whole thing from scratch. I’ve been able to use this method to get transcribing down to a 4:1 or sometimes 3:1 ratio of transcription-time to interview time, which isn’t too bad.

Anyhow, thanks a lot mom, we’re both enjoying our gifts, and my feet are warm and fuzzy in their new socks

Click for some unwrapping photos:

.

Could be fun to run this against future interview transcriptions to see what pops up.

Back in August I caught these “Streetview Cars” driving around my neighborhood, and I actually posed with my absentee ballot. Alas, they haven’t yet published/uploaded pictures of my street, so I don’t yet know if my voting-from-abroad moment was captured or not.

Regardless, here’s a few links to some panoramas of my everyday experience:

• My school at the Oudezijds Achterburgwal
• View of/from a cafe which I’m sometimes at after classes.
• View of/from a favorite cafe – I was just here the other day (with Susan, who’s visiting)
• My Neighborhood – or as close as I can get to my house at the moment
• Elandsgracht – part of my daily commute to school or to downtown
• AHF – where I used to be at all the time, but haven’t stopped by in a while
• Kinkerstraat – always on this street, “Gary’s Deli” is also where Hiske and I spend time studying.

Maybe I’ll find some more later

We figured it’d be exactly like seeing a movie in Union City

I’m pleased to say it wasn’t nearly as bad as we were told. We originally wanted to see Babel, but since the movie has multiple languages in it we were told it would be tricky to watch (the subtitles would be in Dutch, not English). We decided on Al Gore’s An Inconveinient Truth instead.
Tickets were €16 (about $20), so they’re similar to prices at home. We already looked like tourists because of the whole subtitles-thing, so I asked “Do you guys sell popcorn here?”. I got a funny look and an “umm, no”. We rushed to the movie, which was great, and it didn’t involve any rude behavior. Horray.

After the movie, we noticed that Dutch movie-going is a much different experience than that in America.

Everything here is compact and old, so the theaters, lobby, and hallways were small and had some history to them. Instead of a kiosk selling expensive soda and popcorn, the cramped lobby had a full bar with sofas, chairs, and tables. You can get relatively inexpensive beer, spirits, snacks, or even food, and are encouraged to take your beer bottle or martini glass with you into the theater. The cinema also shows classic films (like Taxi Driver) after midnight on some nights.
It seemed like most customers showed up early for their show and had a drink to warm up from the cold, saw the movie, and then spent some time socializing and talking about the film. There were absolutely zero children, not even a group of rowdy teenagers, so prominent at U.S. theaters. I wish I could take pictures because the atmosphere is totally different than the cold, modern megaplexes back home.

I do miss the popcorn though :/

So I finally got internet access (a neighbor was nice enough to let me install a wireless access point), but I found that I could not use my Vonage Softphone to make calls back to the states. This is the third network I’ve been on here where it would not work.

The thing they all have in common is that KPN (dutch telco) is their ISP. Looks like KPN doesn’t like their users using VOIP to make cheap/free long distance calls, so they block SIP. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that they’re idiots. The block configured on the DSL modem/router which is not password protected. The option is pretty hidden though, you have to telnet into the modem to change it (it’s not in the web-interface).

So, if you have KPN and a Speed Touch 500-series DSL modem (Thomson or Alcatel), here’s how to hack it (mine says it’s a 546, but this should work for 510 or 530 models too):

• Telnet to 10.0.0.138 (modem’s address)
• Login as “root” or “Administrator” (both work on mine). It should not prompt you for a password.
• At the => prompt, type “nat unbind application=SIP port=5060″
• type “config save” to make the changes permanent
• type “system reboot” to restart the modem.

This worked great and allowed me to use Vonage with KPN. It took me forever to figure out how to get it working, but after I did I searched for that command and found that this seems to be the fix for a whole lot of providers who block this same way (BT, Telstra, and others).

Blocking SIP may kill iChat and other video/voice/chat programs as well, so it’s not a very nice thing to do.  Bad KPN!