Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
So my copy of Open Write arrived yesterday. I discovered that my Gemini had the wrong chip in it, so I'm writing this on the Stentura I borrowed from work. I have thirty days to try it out. If it proves to work, I'll keep it and downgrade (it's an old program) my Gemini. If not, I'll have to figure out how to make DigitalCAT play nice with Vim. So far it seems to be doing what I want it to, but a lot more testing of variables will be required. I ordered a book on Vim, and I'm very excited there. I've compensated somewhat for the Stentura's lack of a wide asterisk key by means of a bit of moldable gum eraser. One of my very long term goals is to write or be a spur to writing some form of open source steno software, but for now this is probably my cheapest and most flexible bet. I've decided to call the project Stim, for obvious reasons, and I'll try to put some sort of page up detailing my progress as I learn the text editor and figure out the scripts and dictionary entries I'll need in order to make this a viable symbiosis.
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10:28:02 PM,Friday 18 May 2007
New resume up.
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03:28:21 AM,Wednesday 9 May 2007
My mom's watching the news on PBS in the other room. I just heard some pundit say, in a forceful, earnest tone, "We have already won the war in Iraq. We just haven't won the peace." What does one say in response to that statement?
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08:21:38 PM,Tuesday 8 May 2007
Am in Missoula. Missing the girl, but enjoying the old folks and being at leisure. Spent a night on the floor of the Salt Lake City airport. Have seen:
* a young mother bearing a thyrsus tattoo embellished with ivy and Greek calligraphy
* a friendly epidemiologist who informed me that if we can hold off a flu pandemic for two more years we'll have a vaccine dispersal system efficient enough to prevent another 1918
* two flattened squirrels
* the Great Salt Lake from above (never gets old)
* my father very happy to have been given Zabar's pastrami, sauerkraut, and rye bread (never mind his grand 80th birthday party-- pictures forthcoming-- most of which I CARTed, though I could never get him to look at the @#$%& screen)
* one of my favorite Missoula bookstores supplanted by a coffee shop bearing an ixthus fish. Not that that signifies, necessarily; I just miss the books.
* Dandelions! Forgot how much I missed dandelions.
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04:48:34 PM,Tuesday 8 May 2007
Unite and unite and let us all unite
for summer is icumen today
and whither we are going
we all will unite
in the merry morning of May
It does invite the question, though: with what other substance could you gild a thing, anyway?
Also, 364 days after I moved into my current apartment, the building manager decided to fix the intercom. I can order pizza now!
Also, I'm a horrible, horrible sister. I had it on Google calendar staring at me all day, I talked to my mom and I was like, "I gotta call Robert!", I came home and told K., "I gotta call Robert!" and then I slumped into a stupor of Jules Verne and animated astronomic orbitation, and didn't call my brother on his own @#^& birthday. Oh, the shame of it. Forgive me, Robert! I'll call you tonight. Hope it was a glorious one.
I'm leaving for Missoula in five days. w00t!
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11:48:08 AM,Tuesday 1 May 2007
I've replaced the stenologometer with a meter showing the number of words I need to add to my dictionary. The first phase uses Alan Beale's 6of12 word list (from Kevin's Word List Page), and contains 15,493 entries that BozzyCompare tells me are not in my current dictionary (which stands at 49,306; 31,991 of those are from NYCI's stock dictionary, though I've made a lot of changes). After I've got those squared away (using Bozzy, natch), I'll start on his 2of12 list, which currently contains 11,290 entries that appear neither in my current dic nor in 6of12. None of this includes the dictionary-building I'll do while at work or interning (which means that I'll probably appear farther along on the meter than I'll actually be on the 6of12 list), but it all supplements the whole. So:
Phase one goal: 64,799
Phase two goal: 76,089
Long-term goal: 100,000
(Just 'cause it's such a nice round number, though it'll probably owe more to inflected than lemmatized words at that point, for ease of stroking rather than accurate translation. That's down the line, anyway; I'm more than happy coming back for endings or having DigitalCAT deduce them for me at this point.)
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04:45:47 PM,Saturday 28 April 2007
Last night K. and I devised what may be the hardest tongue twister known to man:
Dick the Dik-Dik's Styptic Dipstick Diptych.
Go on, say it. Then say it again. I dare you.
(K. wanted to add Cryptic, Septic, Glyptic, and Coptic (Coptic, I tell you!) but agreed that their inclusion made it rather easier)
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08:00:52 AM,Tuesday 24 April 2007
Jesus, Sisyphus, and Ali Baba walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, "Evening, boys-- what'll you have?" And they say, "Oh, the usual."
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10:17:29 PM,Tuesday 17 April 2007
The internet is stupid. My Gigabeat arrived yesterday, and so I'm trying to fix my mp3 tags before loading 'em on. Now, I am also stupid, I readily admit; when I first ripped the largest part of my CDs I put them all in one directory and had Exact Audio Copy set to overwrite. D'oh. So that means whenever FreeDB identified a track title as Allegro, it overwrote any other Allegro there, and when I had finally ripped my entire library up to that point I sat down and discovered that there was precisely one Allegro.mp3 in the directory, and about a hundred albums with missing tracks where Allegros ought to have been. Like I said, stupid. Another stupid thing I did was put all my operas into one album. Seeing "Semiramide 1", "Semiramide 2", and "Semiramide 3" in the album tag annoyed me for some reason, so I renamed them all "Semiramide" and just made a playlist to keep the tracks in order. Now, of course, the playlist is long gone, and I'm trying to figure out how to separate them out into their proper albums again. There's always looking them up (though I can't even remember the conductor on a lot of these) and entering them each in manually, but I was gonna try some of those newfangled auto-tagger devices and let them do all the grunt work for me. Ha! I've tried four to date, and they've all been bloody useless. Three have been unable to identify more than a couple of the tracks, 'cause the only Semiramide they've got in their database (Musicbrainz, if you're curious) is a recording that isn't mine, and the times don't line up. One identified it as having been composed by Giuseppe Verdi. Gosh, thanks. So my stupid from years gone by + the internet's brand-new cutting-edge stupid = one big nasty morass of steaming stupid. Grrr.
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01:57:28 PM,Saturday 14 April 2007
Oh for #$@&'s sake. "SERF" is a conflict with "ZEPHYR". Got to ponder this one.
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02:16:51 PM,Friday 13 April 2007
Via Cheap and Sleazy.
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12:01:53 PM,Thursday 12 April 2007
Well, I finally brought in my poor old iRiver H10 (which bricked back in November. I've been making do with a 128mb MuVo. The horror!) to portatronics, who said there was nothing they could do but offer me $40 and take it for scrap. Not so bad a deal, sez I. That combined with the remains of a birthday Amazon gift certificate got me a 40GB Gigabeat for $200 off its original list price. Silly name, and I'm undecided about those crossbars, but it runs Rockbox and sports its share of loyal adherents. I think I caught just the right wave of obsolescence this time. Now to retag my mp3s before it gets here. It's extra good timing 'cause I wound up getting a wide strip of heavy-duty velcro this weekend and converted it into a reusable analogue of my silly blue painter's tape ensemble down there. Works so well I even used it while shadowing CART at NYU yesterday, and it's especially good for dummy-stenoing on the train without having to drag out the tripod.
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(2)
09:53:10 PM,Tuesday 10 April 2007
