Oct 02 2008
I think it’d be super cool if goodreads integrated worldcat links to their book listings so you could find them at your local library online. Or for me, even cooler if it would tell me when the book was available for checkout/if it was available in ebook form. Hmm.
Sep 25 2008
Man, I want one of these Books for Obama things. It combines two spiffy favorite things of mine: politics and books. Apparently if you donate $250, you get this cool totebag and with ten signed books donated by various authors who support Obama.
Sep 09 2008
…mostly because now, through harnessing the power of wikipedia and google, I can read up on various vices - such as sci-fi/fantasy authors, battlestar galactica, and esoteric bands. I don’t even *like* TV.
A current favorite is John Scalzi’s blog. Excepts such as referring to tickle-me Elmo’s as “…watch the thing giggle and writhe when you poke it and you can’t help but think that this is what methadone for pedophiles looks like.” and his not-so-nice call for liberals: “I know it’s a lot to ask at the moment, but could you possibly please stop publicly losing your shit all over the goddamn place? Honestly, it’s embarrassing.” His books are damn good too.
Wikipedia combined with Last.fm, I now know more pop culture trivia than ever - as long as the band broke up by the mid-90s.
Also until now, I had never read seriously Asimov, but thanks to Wikipedia I know a lot more about him, too. Ugh. And then recently I saw a post somewhere about memorializing not only the creator of Superman’s house but also a prolific comic book letterer…must…stop…before losing all social skills….
Oh, wait. I’m in Mongolia.
Aug 24 2008
Despite all the random tech postings, I actually still reside in Mongolia and it’s high time I actually talk about that for once.
The weather’s cooling down for real now - overnight I close my apartment window and use my fleece blanket, and yesterday I actually was a little chilled in pants and a long-sleeved shirt. The weather here, though, tends to have this downward trend made up of dips and peaks, so I hope to get a little bit more warm weather a time or two before it settles into Fall.
The days definitely aren’t as long as they were a few weeks ago. Light starts fading about 8pm and it’s full dark by around 9pm now. The fruits and vegetables still remain pricey, though, and oranges and bell peppers haven’t come back yet. Thus lots of apples and onions for me.
Yesterday we had a birthday/welcome back party for Khovd volunteers. It was really tasty - instant falafel and latkes were fried, yogurt-garlic-dill sauce was made, and chickpeas were boiled and smushed for hummus. Add to that fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, homemade wheat pita bread, peanut butter-chocolate cake, and several melons and you got what here definitely is a feast. We even had leftovers - I suppose that’s what happens when you end up having only two guys at site, one of whom never eats, compared to the four originally.
We watched women’s volleyball and basketball, which was cool, and generally picked on each other, which was of course fun 
Lately at work I’ve been starting to get into other interesting things - like helping improve the quality of service at the adolescent reproductive health center in Khovd. I haven’t done anything concrete yet; more reading up and thinking, but I’m looking forward to this as I find I continue to like working with young people. One of the stranger difficulties was finding STI/RH statistics for ages 15-24 in the aimag - my counterpart and I went to the health department to talk to the statistician (doctor; everyone’s a doctor) and he pretty much said he didn’t have them and go talk to the adolescent health center. The thing is, their numbers focus more on their internal intake and testing results, not the whole aimag, and I was curious to see how much of an impact the center has, if any, on those overall numbers, so it wasn’t quite what I was looking for - and they were all on vacation besides. This also reinforced for me the idea that mystery shopper-style assessments for accessibility will be a good tool for checking things out.
Anyway, after then walking to the regional hospital, talking to random people (though technically I didn’t talk; my counterpart did most of the talking based), and looking for the RH one-point service center people (also on vacation), we went back to the office, somewhat bewildered. My counterpart saved the day though by calling different people on vacation (eh, well) until we found someone who actually had the information - and we’re going to go by Monday to pick it up. Yay!
Today has been calm - I’m working on this Yogurt French Bread recipe (which seems more like a sourdough) that needed me to make starter to sit for at least 12 hours. I forgot to add the yogurt after I had made the dough and had to squish back in a cup of yogurt (which was messy by hand; got yogurt all over myself), then had to go to the store to buy more flour. Bleh. Regardless, it’s rising now and I hope to punch it down and bake in an hour or so. It better be damn tasty for all this effort.
As a side note for bread, I think here especially I need to be a little more patient with rising - instead of waiting to it to get to being doubled, I tend to focus on the actual time it says it’ll take and go along. But the brioche I made a bit back was really spectacular because I gave it time…so I’m going to work on being better about that. Of course, when it’s wintertime and the special challenges of attempting to make dough rise in a 40-degree apartment starts, all bets are off.
Oh! and it looks like I will indeed be going to Thailand next year. My 50k frequent flyer miles are enough for a free RT inter-asia ticket, and I’m going to play that up, as it seems like Delta’s mile usage in the US is getting pretty crappy (up to 60k for just a domestic RT?? bah!).
The 1001 nights LaTeX conversion is going well, and I actually found a full-color scan of the original that I’m going to use to make sure I have similar layout. I also found a neat site that covers historical illustrations of the book, including quite a few works that are by now in the public domain, so I’m going to add some illustrations to it too. The only big deviation, I believe, will be the use of margin notes versus footnotes - but that’s easily changed. I’m excited even though it only Volume 1 and who knows if I’ll get to Volumes 2-9.
Finally: Biden? Hmm. I’m curious to see how this pans out - wish I could see/hear the Democratic convention…
Aug 19 2008
After hand-formatting the first 50 pages or so of the Project Gutenberg version of “1001 Nights” I came across this neat project called Gutenmark that takes the plaintext and converts it into either html or LaTex-formatted documents for easier reading. I’m downloading LaTex now to edit said document, as that’s more more print-style layout and then I can export to PDF where I can read it happily. He has an awesome reformatting of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland where he reformatted and re-inserted the original (public domain) illustrations (other texts he’s reformatted are here).
Here’s the comparison, with the top being the modified version in Sumatra PDF and the bottom being being the plaintext viewed in Firefox (click it to enlarge):
I was talking (complaining) to Bonnie about this - and about the essence of the Gutenberg project, which seems to be preservation of the written product with ultimate forward compatibility, hence plaintext. However, the text alone isn’t the true product - the layout, the formatting, the illustrations is the true product that should be preserved. You lose so much context and enjoyment if you can even get yourself through a plaintext version of the book. Layouts are designed for humans, while I think the plaintext was designed for machines. Accessibility, at least in public health-land, can be described as “the right services for the right people at the right time.” I think that perhaps for Project Gutenberg, accessibility’s right time is the future and right people are computers. I mean, it’s cool that they started this in the late 70’s with hand-transcribing texts(!) on mainframes, but the average person isn’t going to really enjoy these materials - they’ll check out Google Books and book scans, which I beef about further down…
That being said, as this is for humans to read, why doesn’t Project Gutenberg also create a nicely-formatted PDF version for download? They already support a more readable format for pocketpc-like devices, and they’ve sort of started this by having html versions, but in a pdf reader, where you can set it up to view facing pages like a real book, only a PDF will really do. It could be a final step in their review project they do with Distributed Proofreaders. Plus, it’s a great opportunity to overshadow the book-scanning projects of Google Books and what-not. The book scans aren’t “clean” for individual reading (both in font crispness and general page quality), though I think they have their place in a very purist preservation sense. These newly digitized and proofed copies give you an electronic basis for producing a pdf, and are much easier on the eyes - that’s why, I suppose, when I get a e-book copy from a publisher it’s not a scanned copy of the printed book! Plus adding in the original (if publicly available) illustrations would give some new life to these older books and increase readership. And the Gutenmark program usage is truly painless - it took about 10 seconds to do the 1001 nights first volume, which is about 600 pages A5.
The goal to me is this intermediate point on the continuum of fully digital (plaintext) and fully analog (book scans): human readbility and appeal. Throw in “now” and you have my take on what the accessibility should be. We want these books read, right?
