Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
Steno-inspired home-made Scratch-based chording keyboard. Ugly but exciting! I'd love to rig a proper steno-compatible version along these lines, but it would be a bit more complicated, since each finger needs to be capable of at least three distinct positions (two if you want to eschew the number bar, but I'd like to keep it) and thumbs need to be capable of keying as well, so the circuit-closer needs to be somewhere else. Still, my dream of a cheap, hackable, wearable steno machine might not be so far off as all that. I've had a blog entry on the subject brewing in me over the past couple of days. I'll try to get it written after I've finished my transcripts for the day.
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01:10:25 PM,Wednesday 28 November 2007
"the perforation" came out "the perve regulation".
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07:16:10 PM,Tuesday 27 November 2007
Eeeeeh!_
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10:12:36 AM,Tuesday 27 November 2007
I am pleasantly drunk on good scrumpy and have eaten a marvelous dinner of borscht and roasted blue potatoes. What a life this is!
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07:01:43 PM,Saturday 24 November 2007
One of my chickens was partially eaten by a dog, and I had to kill her. And I ate her. And she was delicious.
Thanks, Neil. Now I'm all homesick.
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12:11:28 PM,Wednesday 21 November 2007
"These cisterns" came out "thesis terns".
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09:13:23 AM,Wednesday 21 November 2007
Bach's Double on gut-strung lutes. Ridiculously pretty.
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10:36:39 AM,Tuesday 20 November 2007
Chaotic Neutral, tend towards Good.
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09:32:49 PM,Monday 19 November 2007
NSFW! So, so very NSFW. But awesome.
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11:22:15 AM,Sunday 18 November 2007
This is a wonderful article on homeopathy. Says just what it needs to, and very well.
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08:21:07 PM,Thursday 15 November 2007
Me: "So Mauritius is across the street from Grease--"
Her: "Your geography is terrible."
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12:22:49 PM,Thursday 15 November 2007
"Typifies a great Mughal tomb more than the Taj" came out "Typifies a great Mughal tumor than the Taj".
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12:15:16 PM,Wednesday 14 November 2007
I'm so far behind in NaNo that I'm pretty sure I'm not gonna win this month -- but I'm not gonna give up either. I've written every day except the 2nd, even if it's just been a sentence or a page. 1,667 is the daily word count to aim for if you want 50,000 by the 30th; I've been averaging between 300 and 600, which puts me acres behind where I ought to be. I don't know my exact word count, because the last several days I've been on the road without my steno machine and have written it all down in longhand, which I've yet to transcribe. The writing is execrable and all the characters sound like me, very drunk in a smoking jacket, trying to be bitchy. I seem to spend more time talking about the Colophon's filtration systems (haven't gotten the chance to use the word "hystrichosphere" yet, but I'm getting there) than anything to do with the actual, you know, plot, and when I do actually get to the characters it's to delve into some irrelevant detail in their backstory: Drowsy Numbnuts joined the army on a dare; Geoffrey Partridge was raised by a Cornishman in Wales and feels a clot for speaking only English; Suzette is in fact a Gloucestershire Old Spots. All what the discerning reader wants most to know, right? Glargh. I can read a 300-page book in a single sitting. I can't seem to write more than a few hundred words before I start rolling my eyes and praying for deliverance. But I ain't giving up! I've filled up the wonderful notebook Sola made for me last January. I'll transcribe what's in it and get me another one to write in on the subway. So far the story's nothing like I want it to be, but it's helping me figure out a few things that belong in the proper version, and it's got me twitching my atrophied prose muscles, so it's not wasted. I'll see it out 'til the 30th. Trudge, trudge.
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10:51:30 PM,Monday 12 November 2007
So K. and I just ordered in a lovely dinner from Hunan Balcony (chicken and broccoli, veggie fried rice, and spring rolls), and opened our fortune cookies to find:
"The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything."
(Hers. She looked at me and said, "Ve are nihilists. Ve believe in nozink.")
"My computer always beats me in chess, until I pull the plug."
(Mine. "In bed?" I added. I was confused.)
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08:56:19 PM,Sunday 11 November 2007
There's a sign posted on one of the dryers downstairs that reads:
UoT
NO
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08:37:24 PM,Sunday 11 November 2007
A sensitive author named Pavel
once dwelt in a Muscovite hovel.
To the French Grenadiers
he yelled, "Go shake your ears!
I'm trying to work on my novel!"
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12:08:35 PM,Thursday 8 November 2007
The Peanut Butter BLT: One and a half thumbs down, I'm afraid. Would have been an excellent BLT without the peanut butter. Would have been an excellent peanut butter sandwich without the bacon, lettuce, and tomato. The combination? Not so much.
My new brass Jew's Harp: Utter love. I feel guilty about having spent $45 on it, but it's in E, so I can play along with the Albrechtsberger concerti, and it's so shiny and well balanced and utterly without rattle or flaw. My old steel trump in C (which I bought in Towson five years ago) broke its tongue off a month or so back, and I was missing it terribly, so I picked this one up at the tiny junky music store today. Yee! Sorry for the lousy picture, but ain't it glorious?
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06:59:10 PM,Wednesday 7 November 2007
"What do you mean by separate" came out "What do you mean bicep rat?"
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01:56:01 PM,Wednesday 7 November 2007
I wrote 34,587 words today!
Unfortunately they were all other people's words. Sigh. At least I got paid for 'em (by the hour; if I got paid by the word I would be less resentful of professors who fancy themselves amateur auctioneers).
I wrote 1,084 of my own. I'm now 2,915 words behind, plus 1,667 tacked on for tomorrow. Trudge, trudge.
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09:31:37 PM,Tuesday 6 November 2007
"normal basilica" came out "norm Alba silica"
NaNo is helping my career already, though. On Friday I entered the name of my ship, the Colophon, into my main dictionary. Today the word came up in class, (not capitalized, natch; I only put the capped version in my NaNo dictionary.) and translated perfectly. W00t!
You know, I've been thinking about the whole CCP fiasco, and I'm pretty okay with it, but I realized what the whole experience reminded me of. When I was in sixth grade, I used to get nosebleeds. They weren't too big a deal, but they distracted me from my schoolwork, so my doctor said I should get my nose cauterized. The first time was with silver nitrate. They numbed me up with some kind of topical anesthetic that dripped onto my tongue and tasted awful, but it still hurt more than anything I've endured before or since. The actual procedure was over like nothing -- one quick touch of the stick in each nostril -- but the chemical burn kept stinging for quite some time afterwards. Still, I remember hopping off the table and feeling brave and proud that I'd gotten through it with a minimum of whinging.
Problem was, it didn't take. Still as many nosebleeds as ever. So they went for the electric cattle-prod. This one didn't hurt. They'd numbed me up like the time before, and when the doctor zapped me, I felt a horrible buzzing and smelled some horrible smoke, but there wasn't any pain. My body, however, freaked out. I started jerking all over the place and yelling and generally being a giant thrashing mess, all the while thinking to myself, "What's wrong with you? This isn't so bad! What the hell's your problem?" I remember my mom pleading with me to hold still and the doctor finally giving up in frustration (and what felt like disgust) and saying, "Well, I couldn't finish, but she's too hysterical. That'll just have to be enough."
I left in disgrace, feeling like I'd betrayed myself and squandered all that I'd won in the previous battle, when it actually freaking hurt. But my body wouldn't listen. The autonomic nervous system is a vexing creature. I'm lucky that it's only screwed up my life those two times (though, incidentally, the second cautery worked; I haven't had a nosebleed since), and I'm even luckier that I haven't so far had to rely on it to keep me alive. But I wish I could take a correspondence course through Bene Gesserit U. or something.
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02:33:04 PM,Tuesday 6 November 2007
