Did not think I would ever sleep last night. even started thinking I might never wake up again. Chest was pounding like a fucking bass drum, I was both sweating and had the chills. Shoulder kept getting sore but that’s been a thing for a while, since I started carrying the Getaway Bag with more and more weight inside. Today the Getaway Bag snapped, the other side of the strap finally giving in the same as the first side gave out some months ago. Eventually i got to sleep, and felt fine in the A.M. rising before 11, even.
I did not realize how far behind I had fallen on receipts scanning. I did a few dozen receipts a couple of weeks ago but failed to notice the huge stack of receipts underneath that relatively small batch. some of them go back to 2014, including the great White House Sub Sandwich place at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. Scanned all these but haven’t posted yet. Feeling a positive Zen stride, like I did last week when scanning “The Power Broker”, a book of 1200 pages in which the skewering of Robert Moses is relentless.
I find something profoundly calming about scanning … until, of course, the scanner goes apeshit and starts devouring pages like they are leaves of lettuce. But for the most part a well-tended ADF scanner is a joy, as it devours paper, sentencing masses of parchment to the recycle bin.
Compared to its print brethren “The Power Broker” is so much more eminently readable as a fully searchable PDF. The print book feels like a cinder block, and is just too thick to be comfortably read and handled. The fact that the content of the book is such a light read makes no recompense for how unwieldy the printed product is. I even scanned the ~200 pages of bibliographic citations and the book’s index. At 300dpi and the book being in perfect condition (before I dismembered it, that is) I would bet cash money that every last page was OCR-converted to digital format without a single error. I was almost sorry to finish the job, though I got a laugh out of the title of a chapter, I think it was around page 900. The title was something like “POINT OF NO RETURN”, which was the point I felt I had reached after scanning about 75% of this thing. I did take a break at page 618, when the scanner commenced its aforementioned eating the pages like lettuce leaves. But I straightened out the affected pages and resumed the project a week later, my Zen stride back intact.
Tonight I think I’ll scan a couple of old music books I’ve had lying around. They are old enough for use on my web sites without copyright problems, and I would be interested in making them fully searchable, and fully deposited into a recycle bin.
Thinking, too, about making quality DVDs of public domain classical piano music PDF files. I bought a couple such DVDs off eBay last year and could not believe how lame they were. Major composers were half-assedly represented with a handful of their available piano scores, while others were essentially not represented at all. I could print up some dozens of copies of DVDs with capably curated libraries of public domain piano music and have them ready to ship for the occasional customer. I think PDF libraries like this will become more in-demand as pianos and their sheet music readers continue toward all-digital. I don’t know what the scene is like among classical pianists these days but I would be surprised if the move from printed scores to digital screens has moved too far forward since 10 years ago. It’s a developing market.
I feel like staying productive today so enough of this nonsense.Signing off from the ghetto coffee shop.
