staring at screenafterscreenfilled with text. editing stuff. feeling important. divining a new respect for those editors of the etude magazine, esp the q&a sections. today i scanned and textified most of the november, 1915, issue. when i started the project i used the ocr software built in to windows, which is free and useful for a scanning a page or two here and/or there… but when i dove in to the old magazines project i decided i might as well take it seriously if i was going to bother doing it at all. so i bought some ass-pensive OCR software and scanned not just selected pages but full issues (minus the music) and the project has slowly caught on among the music-searching populace. it is still too hit-or-miss in some ways, with a lot of content referring to past or future editions of the magazine which i either don‘t have or have not scanned. but, again, from the “if i‘m gonna bother doing it i might as well do it right“ department i do a twice-over on the scanned stories, editing obvious ocr errors and catching as catch can the not-so-obvious errors. once in a while a hilarious (to me) ocr error arises. macdowell and gottschalk, i read, were both born in 3868! wow. and a massive concert in boston featured a chorus and orchestra of 0000 people! that‘s nobody with 4 zeros! those are not the funniest ones but they‘re the ones i can think of at the moment. the best one yet is the corn-poser. this error never shows up with the ass-pensive ocr suite but with the free windows ocr it showed up all the time, almost any time the word “composer“ or “composition“ came up the software turned it into “corn poser“ and “corn position“, yielding some hilarity when a woman composer was quoted as saying “i showed him the corn position and he liked it very much!“ since upgrading the ocr engine the errors are more prosaic, with the u-with-an-umlat ( i can‘t seem to generate that character on this keyboard) constantly coming up as “ii“, and the frequently used “Mme.“ coming up as “Mi
le“. blahblahblah…
i have been up at 9am every day for the last couple of weeks. yesterday i did more before noon than i usually do in a full day, not that i was memorably productive. friday is my no-computer day, at least for the daylight hours. i feel confident and calm when the first 10 or so hours of my day do not include gaping into a computer screen.
i looked into beds today. big beds. BIG beds. california king! why not… they are a lot cheaper than i expected, and i got room. i also contemplate moving the baby grand piano from florida into my living room. that would be an adjustment, though i know it could and would work if the piano did, in fact, arrive at my doorstep, though it would be a bit like turning my apartment into a studio.
a real piano would be neat, though. i have 2 Roland digital pianii at the moment, which are convenient and i would hate to give up both of them for the sake of one acoustic baby grand. more blahblahblaaaaah.
i saw some pictures of my apartment in 1998 and 1999, when there was virtually nothing there. i got nostalgic, in a way. how can one be nostalgic for a place they still occupy? i was nostalgic not to go back to that time but just to have a fuller appreciation for having room in which to think. i think mental flights fill the physical space around a person.
