Beholden to dry, yeastless factuality

2004-09-04 - 9:54 p.m.

Today I discovered a new way to waste my time. And thank goodness, 'cause you know I didn't have nearly enough of those! Anyway, I found Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders. Project Gutenberg is apparently a project meant to "preserve history one page at a time," or make sure that everything that was ever printed ends up inputed into a computer. So they find old books that are no longer under copyright protection, scan them in, and then run them through some OCR software (software that looks at picture files and turns them into text files). That's where the proofreaders come in. As a proofreader you get a copy of the picture they fed into the OCR software and a copy of the text file it spat out, and you have to make sure they are the same. Yup, that's how I've been wasting my time.

Some of it, anyway. I also did some yardwork today, started reading Life of Pi, took my parents out to dinner at the Olive Garden, and watched "Laws of Attraction." In the yard I basically cleaned up all the fallen tree bits left over from yesterday's windy spell. I thought Life of Pi was about a guy trapped on a boat with a tiger; I'm 85 pages in and there're tigers around, but no sign of a boat. At the Olive Garden they're having their never-ending pasta bowl so I got that and ended up overindulging a tad. I really shouldn't've had seconds. But we were celebrating. And "Laws of Attraction" wasn't nearly as good as it could've been. Among...other flaws...the part that really irked me was when the lead guy tells the lead girl that he doesn't care about his career, he just cares about her even though mere minutes before he publicly screwed her over to save his career. And she believed him. Although, hello, it's Pierce Brosnan--I wouldn't be in too much of a rush to kick him out of my bed either.