Otter's Rock

I have long been a fan of Project Gutenberg, which scans books that are in the public domain, OCRs them, proofreads them, formats them, and puts them up for free as ebooks. That is a lot of labor, that a lot of people do for free, and in fact I have done some of that labor; I started proofreading for them through Distributed Proofreaders back in 2003. (I've been on there so long that my user name there is "Beatrice" and not Beatrice_Otter.") Now, over the course of that time there have been many years where I didn't do any proofreading at all; but I keep circling back to it. When I want to do something that is useful, and which has a concrete result where I can see exactly what I've accomplished, and which I can do from my computer, PGDP is great.

However, I've often bemoaned that when there's a tricky passage, I never know if I got it right, because I can't check and see if the next proofreader or formatter corrected things (they do three rounds of proofreading and two rounds of formatting per work, for quality control). I knew there had to be a way to do it! But I couldn't find it. I could find lists of pages I'd worked on, but nothing that would show me what the pages looked like after the next round of proofing or formatting was done. It's a bit frustrating!

But I have finally, after 22 years of working there, found the page that will SHOW ME what changes more senior proofers and/or formatters made, so I can see what I need to do differently. If you go to the "My Projects" page there is a link in the corner that says "Review Work" that will take you to a page that will show you links to every change that got made to work you did. I am linking the page here so that if I ever forget how to get to that page, I will have a link to it.

That particular frustration aside, I do recommend PGDP, they have a very slick system, it's great. And obviously, if you're looking for ebooks of works that should be in the public domain, Project Gutenberg is the place to start.

Or at least, that's what I thought until recently! Someone on the Yuletide discord mentioned Standard Ebooks, which is a group that takes Project Gutenberg ebooks and formats them nicely, to the standards of a major publishing company, and then puts them up for free. They are much nicer than PG ebooks; PG ebooks can best be described as "serviceable." They are very accurate! ... just not always nice to look at, and the formatting guidelines were created back in the early 2000s and are bare-bones at best. However, Standard is a much newer group, and also, they're smaller; PG has over 75k ebooks and Standard has 1200. (On the other hand, since Standard has focused on the great classics, the sorts of books that are most likely to be still in demand today, and PGDP has all the classics plus a lot of other stuff, chances are that Standard will have what you're looking for.) So now my advice for older books would be to check out Standard first, and if they don't have it, go to Gutenberg.

Another great resource for public domain ebooks is Librivox. They do crowdsourced audiobooks of public domain books, and I have thought about volunteering there because I do have a recording setup, but also, recording an entire book is a LOT more of a time commitment than proofreading a few pages, and also, the books that I would be most interested in already have versions available on Librivox.

And if you, too, are interested in doing crowdsourced data work and bringing old things to a more usable form, but if Gutenberg isn't speaking to you, check out the Smithsonian! The Smithsonian has a website where people can transcribe old records in the collections of a wide variety of museums. And they have things sorted by theme so you can choose to work with materials related to the African American experience, women's experience, Native American experience, art and design, natural history, and a variety of other categories. Although for most of the stuff here you need to be able to read bad cursive handwriting. (Anyone who tells you that everybody in the 19th Century had good handwriting is a filthy liar.)

Got a call from my brother at 4:30 asking if I could throw some things in the car and drive the 2.5 hours to his place immediately and maybe stay for a couple of days but at least get there NOW. Because his wife went into the doctor's office, and they kept her and scheduled surgery for tonight and they have four kids under the age of 7 and obviously he can't both be there for his wife AND at home with the kids at the same time, and all of his normal babysitters were unavailable at such short notice.

So here I am at my brother's house having just gotten the kids in bed. Surgery is scheduled for 10:30PM; I'm not even 100% sure what it's for, but it must be serious if they didn't let her go home and scheduled surgery for that same night after normal business hours. Tomorrow's stuff is all stuff I can do online, and the only thing I have scheduled for Friday is something I can cancel, so my plans for the rest of the week are all up in the air.

ETA: they're putting in a stent for kidney stones. So, minor in the sense that it's not dangerous and she'll recover quickly, but not minor in that she's in a lot of pain.

Tonight was a bit more exciting than I would have liked. I was in the living room when the lamp started flickering and popping and there was a burning-electrics smell. I turned off the power strip that fed it and was just wondering whether it was the lamp or the power strip when there was a loud popping and burning smell from the kitchen (where the lights weren't even ON). Then I went out to look at the breaker box, but none of the breakers had been tripped. Then there was a loud noise in the garage where the breaker box was, and a burning smell, and smoke started coming from the fixture. (But I wasn't sure it was coming from the fixture; it could have been coming out of the ceiling).

So I called the fire department.

And found out that my flashlight's batteries are dead.

Fire department got there pretty quickly, and after poking around and looking in the attic they're pretty sure the popping sounds and smells were all from light bulbs and fluorescent ballasts being blown out by a highly localized power surge that only affected me and the next door neighbors. (But not the church just across the parking lot.) They said it was probably ok to turn the main power to the house back on, but when we did only half the house had functioning power. And also, they called the PUD to come investigate. Then they left.

I didn't turn the lights back on and I stayed outside with my cat, thank you very much.

PUD guy shows up, he lives nearby and didn't have his work truck or his tools, I explained what happened. He said, "they told you you could turn the power back on?" in scandalized tones. (Me: hah. I was right to be skeptical!)

He has now gone to get his tools. I am currently at my office with my cat.

My first call in the morning: the electrician.

Twenty years ago, my parents bought a (new to them) house, and the kitchen was atrocious, so they ripped it out.

My Dad is an amateur woodworker, so he was going to build new cabinets. But he was busy, so they put in some temporary stuff, including two old entertainment centers, two beehives stacked on top of each other for open shelves, a slab of MDO plywood for a counter, and various other makeshifts.

In 2020, he put actual countertop in, having given up on the whole idea of making cabinets. The entertainment centers officially became permanent. (The tops are the right height for counters, and the drawers are very sturdy, and they're nice looking pieces and it's not like we have any other use for them!)

He got a book on kitchen design for Christmas and now he is talking about taking the radical step of installing the light fixtures they bought twenty years ago and never got around to installing. (They've been using lamps for light.)

Well, I mean, you wouldn't want to be hasty about anything, right?

(My Dad, I should mention, is the one I inherited my autism from, and he has all the executive dysfunction that implies.)

You can use a toilet plunger on a clogged shower drain!

In retrospect, this seems obvious, but I've only seen or heard of plungers being used on toilets. (Probably because toilets are the most likely thing to become plugged up.) I have a shower which doesn't drain well and frequently gets stopped up no matter how carefully I keep hair from going down the drain, and usually I just poor Drano down it, but I saw a video from Ask This Old House about unclogging drains and they talked about using a plunger with a bathtub as one option, so I tried it and it worked! That tub has never drained so quickly!

This morning bright and early I called in to the local computer repair and told them about my problem. They say sure, they can fix it, but they are swamped and it will take at least a week and a half until they can even open it up to see what the problem might be, and then who knows how long before they can fix the problem. And, from how I described the problem, that it probably wasn't the install of the antivirus software, but rather an underlying issue, and that there's no telling how long it would take to find and fix it.

Me: in a week and a half I'm going on vacation. Where I will be at home, in the same town as the computer guy who sold me the laptop in the first place, who is a very good IT guy and also a guy who gets a TON of business from my Dad and will therefore probably jump me to the head of the line. And, if it is an underlying issue, might give me a discount on fixing it since he was the one who sold it to me.

So that's what I'm doing.

The issue is, my work laptop is terrible. It's old and sloooooooow and that's why I've been using my personal laptop to do everything work related since the lockdown started. And my work laptop is, um, not suited for things like video editing and teleconferencing. (Neither of which I had to do before covid. I mean, it was slow and annoying, but perfectly capable of things like writing stuff in Word and posting stuff on Facebook and sending emails.) So if I can just get through this week, Sunday afternoon I am getting in my car and driving to my parents' place and I'm doing the Monday-Thursday work from there, where I can borrow laptops that actually have enough speed and power to do the stuff I need in a reasonable time. (My parents, being professional photographers, have really robust computers.)

But to get through this week ... the online pre-recorded worship service gets filmed in chunks which I then edit together, and there's no way around that. My work laptop does not have a card reader to read the camera's SD card. My old personal laptop, which still works but is Windows 7, has a cardreader but no video editing software (and good luck finding it for Win7 at this point). So I will be transferring the files to a thumb drive using the old personal Win 7 machine, and then putting them on the work laptop and editing it there. I am currently trying a trial run to see if this is going to work at all or if I need to come up with something else.

When I was ten, my Dad and I built a telescope with our own two hands. And I don't mean from a kit. I mean, we BUILT that sucker, starting with grinding the mirror. (Yes, you can indeed grind your own telescope mirror. It takes for-freaking-ever, but you can do it.) (If you want to know how, google "how to build a Dobsonian telescope" and "how to grind a telescope mirror" and that should enlighten you.) Anyway, we spent a summer gathering with other amateur telescope makers in town to spend hours grinding a concave mirror by hand, while John Dobson advised and taught astronomy. Then we sent it off to be "silvered" while Dad built the mount out of plywood, a cardboard tube used for pouring cement pillars, a record (for use to help it rotate side-to-side smoothly), and some strips of laminate counter and teflon tape (to help it rotate up-and-down smoothly). We bought the eyepiece (to look into it) and the sight (to help find stuff) and we spent our summers after that going out mountains in the middle of the Oregon desert to gather with other amateur astronomers and spend our nights watching the skies. Our telescope was respectably on the small side of medium at ten inches; the majority of telescopes at these star parties were 10-16 inches. (Some were smaller, at 8 inches; there were always a few ginormous 40 inch behemoths that required a ladder unless the object you were looking at was right on the horizon--Dobsonian telescopes, you look in the top end, not through the bottom.)

I'm home at my parents' place on vacation, and Dad got out the telescope to look at the comet. Unfortunately, the sight broke, but he was able to find it anyway.

So, the Dems in the Senate have unveiled their financial stimulus plan, and one of the cornerstones is eliminating LARGE swathes of student debt. Just saying "poof! You don't owe money any more, or you owe less! Go forth and spend that money on food and rent." And ALSO, for debt that isn't cancelled, have the government pay everyone's federal student loan payment each month, until three months after the end of the emergency declaration. It would also suspend all involuntary debt collections and wage garnishment for borrowers who have defaulted and institute a 90 day “grace period” at the end of the program, during which missed payments will not result in fees or penalties, including negative credit reporting.

Now, obviously, the Dems control the House, and the Republicans control the Senate (although hopefully that will change come November PLEASE GOD, PLEASE.) So contacting your Senators to have them vote for this is great, but it is even more important to contact your representative in the House.

And Americans for Financial reform has a handy-dandy widget to help you email them!  It's quick, it's easy, it takes only a few minutes!  Please do so!

I usually keep my house cool because I like snuggling under a thick blanket and because it saves energy.  But today, my cat Stella is sleeping on the blanket I keep in the living room to snuggle under, so I have been sitting here with a sweater over my feet feeling slightly cold and trying to muster up the executive function to get up and dig another blanket out of the hall closet.

Then I realized: I am sitting on a blanket right now.  The one that I always keep on the couch to keep Stella from damaging the upholstery when she kneads.  I can just flip the edge of it over my feet and be fine.

Wow, if I had noticed this an hour ago, I would have had a MUCH more pleasant afternoon.