From one of my favorite blogs apparently a thingy called “Anthology Builder” for your own bespoke book (limited, of course, to the short stories they can publish). A post about this here.

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.

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…

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?

to those who have turkeys and cranberries, oh how I wish I was with you. I’ll be going to two celebrations – one was a sort of office party, which happened yesterday (Thursday for me) and one tomorrow, which is PCV-based. Yesterday’s “bird day” (as they call Thanksgiving in the office due to previous year’s handprint turkey construction paper project) involved a sort of potluck. Stacey organized it but about 3 of us brought potluck spirit and food and the other dozen or so combined money to buy lots of meat and rice and veggies. Thus, we had meat and rice hooshor (empanada-like), carrot salad, pizza, pigs in blankets, boiled horse, boiled veggies, candy, and rice soup with horse meat. Guess which dishes the foreigners brought?

There was a bit of tippling as per any Mongolian celebration but mostly I sat at my desk after lunch feeling immensely sleepy. I collected the bones to take back to Daisy, the dog I’m dogsitting, so that hopefully she won’t eat my linoleum/wood molding/plumbing/door insulation/her poop (which is our past history).

Before tomorrow’s meal preview, I’m going to talk about the past week’s…I got to eat horse meat chili – which was amazing (chili packet from home, you know), zatarain’s red beans and rice from a box (drool), and an apple tart (homemade and “test” pie leftover from last night’s apple pie prep for Saturday). As a result I’m feeling pretty happy – sometimes I feel like I eat random food here to satisfy a craving that well, won’t be satisfied with local food – and that craving’s not around now. I guess this is our version of holiday food here…

Other random bits – it’s much warmer today than it’s been for the past few weeks – I’d say maybe upper 40s – but also it’s become incredibly windy overnight. Every so often I look up over the edge of my computer screen and see clouds of dust blowing across and obscuring buildings. I can also see nearby white ger roofs and stove flaps rippling vigorously. I’m working on coding the qual. data from a project here to improve analysis and it’s slow going – lots of answers given in the free response, and many free response questions. Bleh.

Ok, the big event: thanksgiving 2008. We’re making the following:
Chickens
Stuffing
Mashed Potatoes
Pumpkin soup
Green bean casserole
Corn casserole
Gravy
Pumpkin pie
Apple pie
Kahlua
various items I don’t recall

I’m in charge of Kahlua, pumpkin pie, and corn casserole, and the Kahlua’s done, the pumpkin’s pulped, and the casserole is pending. We’re making everything with maybe 4 burners and 2 overgrown toaster ovens so it should be interesting. By the way making pumpkin puree sucks with said toaster oven and a vodka-cum-kahlua bottle used as a smasher. The chickens will be bought today and likely killed tonight, as we’re not sure where we could store two live chickens overnight…I helped Jen with making pie crust and I’m pleased at the outcome – I think I’m better at crusts than biscuits or bread, as the pigs in blankets turned out a little crispy rather than fluffy. I can’t seem to make rolled and cut biscuits to “work”. Jen says she can make good biscuits though so I’m going to watch her closely tomorrow to see what I’m doing wrong. Maybe we’ll even have White Russians (with UHT milk). I’m totally looking forward to this food, but definitely missing sausage for the stuffing and pecans. Eh, well, Bonnie says we can have another holiday dinner when I get there! I definitely miss having dinner with friends and getting up at 6am to start and all…but maybe if people are around when I cook the dinner they can eat it too – a turkey for two is a tad excessive

If only there was a sci-fi/fantasy warehouse out here in Khovd…