Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
Simon Prebble learned how to pronounce Sidhe! <3 <3 <3
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03:22:12 PM,Monday 1 January 2007
Went to an abbreviated but hella charming English performance of the Taymor Magic Flute, visited K.'s mom and beasts, ate salmon quiche and ice cream with Nutella, listened to Red Elvises, Decemberists, Pulp, Sesame Street Disco, going to the Bronx for a party. Happy.
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07:39:41 PM,Sunday 31 December 2006
Thanks to a supremely helpful penguin in #python, Bozzy has reached its latest and most useful stage. It now does just about everything I want a program like it to do. I'm not even sure if I want to make it able to import word lists by name; it adds an extra step to the process, and since this program is all about speed and efficiency, maybe just making sure that the list is named wordlist.txt is the sensible way to do it. Now I just need to comment it up a bit (for the good of the Open Source movement, donchaknow), put in a couple of failsafes, and maybe see if I can compile it to an .exe for the benefit of pythonophobes. But it works!
My brother's on vacation, so the source won't be up on the page for a while, but I can email it to whoever's interested.
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09:23:22 PM,Saturday 23 December 2006
Going over the new additions to my steno dictionary occasionally makes for interesting reading. Sometimes the entries, read vertically down the list, combine to form what sounds like a very not right sort of children's game. Last week it was:
Travolta
Travolta
Travolta
trichomonas
(I'll stick with duck-duck-goose, thanks)
and this week I get:
Tupac
Tupac
Turkish
tu-tu
two times
Tyra
Uhura
Ungerman
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04:40:52 PM,Wednesday 20 December 2006
A member of K.'s family (of my family too now, I'm lucky enough to say) is very sick, and no one knows what's going to happen. I'll be thinking of him a lot.
Last day of school for me until January. I hope I can bang out a test or two.
Last night it occurred to me that before the 20th century, human calculators were seen as talented but limited, and their services were held in a sort of esteem. Then they were replaced by menial workers with mechanical calculators and their cachet dropped. Then mechanical calculators grew so strange and complicated that their operators began to find unprecedented new things to do with them. There are still plenty of mindless number crunchers in the world, but the field as a whole is one that can satisfy the mind of a thinking man.
I can see something of the sort happening in stenography. Pen stenographers needed a certain acuity and quickness that the steno machine partially obviated; so it got demoted to a secretarial job. Now that steno machines talk to computers, I can sense a host of applications for them beyond the simple transcription of speech. Getting something down on paper rapidly that can be deciphered later by a human is simple; getting something down rapidly that can be instantly understood by a computer is proportionally more difficult the more unpredictable the vocabulary, the wider its field of application. It's both quantitatively and qualitatively different from the former case, but so much more interesting.
Also, Sherlock Holmes + Lovecraft = oh, hell yes. Via Penny Arcade.
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09:33:04 AM,Wednesday 20 December 2006
Tonight: latkes with applesauce, chocolate gelt, and my girlfriend's awesome borscht.
Tomorrow: scrambled eggs, lox, and possibly blintzes.
I'm livin' the dream!
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11:48:30 PM,Saturday 16 December 2006
Lorenzo Da Ponte (ne Emmanuele Conegliano) also traded briefly under the name Lesbonico Pegasio. I've loved the guy since I was ten, but that just... beggars description.
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10:46:24 PM,Thursday 14 December 2006
Work on Bozzy continues apace, though I'm kind of stymied by the second item on my original features list. My brother gave me the very good idea of using an .ini file to save one's place at the end of a session and find it again at the beginning of the next one. So I've got the program outputting to the .ini just fine, but I can't figure out how to use it to find its place in the loop; when I run through the lines of the wordlist file and tell it to do something as soon as it finds the word equal to bozzy.ini (using various combinations of for, while, and if), it either finds the word, processes it, circumvents the loop, and closes the file, or it burns itself out running through iterations and never getting anywhere. I can't use seek() to remember its place, 'cause the length of the list is likely to change between sessions; I'll be culling it as my work dictionary increases. So I dunno. The current kludge, I figure, is just to crop the list manually after every session, but I do wish I could figure out how to do it automatically.
I did write a surprisingly simple script to compile words in various free wordlists that aren't already in a given steno dictionary, though, so I've got a nice preliminary list containing 300 words of the 5,000 most common to start on, and once I've got the hang of that, another list of 19,000 words to steno the living sludge out of.
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04:58:35 PM,Wednesday 13 December 2006
Eh, so I found out officially today that I passed a 180 Lit last Monday that I was pretty sure I had passed right after I transcribed it, so woo, but of course, I didn't pass the 180 Lit that I took the Wednesday after or the one I just took tonight, so it's all a bit frustrating. Flurgh. It's just these two more Lits I wanna pass so I can call that CART chick and start interning. But I'm really not anywhere near ordinary conversational speed in realtime. I'm still only marginally faster (the same speed in some things, and even slightly slower in others) than qwerty at work, though it is markedly easier on the wrists. Most of this isn't even a dictionary problem, though I hope when I start using Bozzy to build my dictionary it'll incidentally help with my accuracy and stroke-recall. I'm simply not quick enough. K. and I were watching Carl Sagain the other day and I said to her, "You know, I should totally steno to this sometime. I think I might actually be able to get all of it." Which shows you where I'm at in terms of actual conversational speed. Too slow! Just too damn slow.
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07:20:42 PM,Monday 11 December 2006
Also, my sweet brother has created a page for Bozzy, though the latest version isn't up yet, as I've only just now emailed it to him.
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12:01:43 AM,Sunday 10 December 2006
Yes! With help from Moss and A Byte of Python, the first working version of Bozzy is complete! It successfully displays words from a word list, accepts steno input, and couples them into an rtf/cre file. This is very exciting.
Next to implement:
* Quitting part-way through a session. For some reason plain steno wouldn't trigger the break even as a raw string (to do with the brackets? dunno), but when I defined "quit" in my steno dictionary, it worked perfectly, so hey.
* Marking user's place in a word list, not only so can you end a session and pick up from where you left off, but so you can manipulate the word list with an external find/replace utility (by comparing it to entries added in the field and removing them so that they don't come up again in Bozzy) and still be able to resume from the right spot at the beginning of the next session. Yes! Finally!
* Giving user the option to save and move on, save and enter another stroke for the same word, or delete the stroke and enter another one in its place. Yay! This is actually both a functional and useful program now, provided that one remembers to delete already-entered words in the wordlist before starting a session. Might possibly want to implement a "skip" option too, but that's for another day. That was easy.
* Naming rtf files and steno entries according to dynamic time and date.
* Choosing word list by filename. I don't think I want to do this after all.
* Commenting. It's a very simple program, but I did what I could to explain without belaboring.
* GUI
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12:48:25 PM,Wednesday 6 December 2006
Is there anything that bear can't do? {dreamy sigh}
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(6)
08:08:17 AM,Wednesday 6 December 2006
We need some sort of absorbent strop. Every night after dinner I wash the knives and then I dry them off by swiping them across the paper towel roll so I can put them into the knife block without rusting them, and it makes that cool "sheeng!" noise, but that only reminds me that they're getting duller and duller each time we use them and we don't have a whetstone or anything, but if I had some sort of absorbent strop made out of chamois or something tacked to the windowsill that I could stretch out and go "sheeng-sheeng-sheeng" across and sharpen the knives while simultaneously drying them-- that would be awesome.
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(1)
12:40:04 AM,Tuesday 5 December 2006
We are eating homoerotic kettle corn (available at liberal-minded grocery stores everywhere), and damn, is it good. From the back of the bag: "This is the story of Ike and Sam, a match made in heaven. It begins with a very old, very stubborn kettle-- the creator of ALL kettlecorn: Ike. He had been working his magic, popping corn, for a good 5,000 years, when suddenly he saw something amazing. He couldn't believe his eyes, but right before him was something he had only dared to dream of... the ultimate kernel: Sam. Never in all his years had Ike seen such a round, plump, and wholesome kernel. Ike had to have him. He needed to take that mouth watering morsel under his lid and use him to give all future kettlecorn something to aspire to: SHEER KERNEL PERFECTION!"
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(12)
02:51:10 PM,Sunday 3 December 2006
Passed one 200 WPM Jury Charge right before Thanksgiving (the teacher was dreaming of his turkey and, I think, dictated quite a bit more measuredly than usual) but otherwise have come up a loss. I'm getting closer, little by little (failed a test tonight, though not by all that much), but my progress has demonstrably slowed, grr. So I've cranked the stenologometer up to 200 a little prematurely (considering I've still got four tests below and three tests at 200 still to pass) by way of consolation.
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(3)
11:30:06 PM,Wednesday 29 November 2006
Another obnoxious conflict: "modicum" with "mod couple". Just you wait-- my next show will be all about a pair of aging swingers showing off their psychedelic loft space.
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(7)
03:14:14 PM,Wednesday 29 November 2006
My parents just left. It was so lovely to have them, though my poor dad's hip was giving him a lot of trouble. I hope after the plane ride home he can get it loosened up again. The girl was a saint, as ever, and I think all were grinning pretty nearly straight through. I bought my dad a MuVo2FM and loaded it up with good stuff, and my mom and I went to MoMa together (my favorite thing there: Grayson Perry's Map of an Englishman). Took a few days off work, too, which felt pretty nice. I miss 'em already, but I'm glad they got to see this place.
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01:47:39 PM,Tuesday 28 November 2006
Mozart Webradio.
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01:40:40 PM,Tuesday 28 November 2006
"required too proper lace innocences
wax fledge sore sympathy
gyre trial in a cripple
one boards of the caution
a hue I would have"
Is it just me, or are my 200 jury charges coming out a bit... Victorian Dada?
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07:01:21 PM,Monday 27 November 2006
I think this sums up just about everything there is to know about the dark reaches of my psyche in one easy illustration. Via pharyngula.
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02:00:14 PM,Friday 24 November 2006
