“All of our research says even the guys that were taking it for free are saying, ‘You know what? For 99 cents a song, I’m in.’”
— Randy Lennox, CEO, Universal Music Canada"Run for the foothills!"
I honestly don’t know what to think about the Foothill College email newsletter leading off with a reassurance from the Santa Clara County Health Officer that there is currently no health threat from nuclear fallout here.
It is of course so artlessly phrased as to imply that Japan is now full of radioactive mutants wading knee-deep in the stuff.
[Update: Geiger counters have sold out in Paris. No, seriously.]
Disaster porn
We hates it.
Worse than we hates the mindless anti-nuke activists going “see? see?” and the morons from Left, Right, Center, and Alpha Centauri grinding their favorite axe and babbling about why Japan “deserved” this. Not that I plan to forget who signed their names to hatred that would shame a paid union agitator, I’m just busy reviling the news media hysteria peddlers at the moment.
Revisiting Louie
Nearly three years ago, I had my first real success at reading Japanese prose written for a native audience. Getting through 30 pages of the first Rune Soldier Louie novel was a big accomplishment, given that I had to look up more than 600 new vocabulary words by painstakingly writing the kanji on my DS Lite or looking them up in printed dictionaries. It took nearly a month, an hour or two at a time.
That was before the demise of my group reading class, and my Japanese hasn’t improved very much since then. I’ve been treading water while waiting for Ooma to grow out of the startup lifestyle, and, yeah, that ain’t happened yet. My new scripts made it possible to read a complete novel in a reasonable time, but while the Rune Soldier novels have been scanned in, no one has gotten around to OCRing them. So I’m doing it.
- A ~1200x1800 PNG is adequate for Japanese OCR with Abbyy Finereader Pro (Windows only; the shiny new Mac App Store version does not include Japanese), but not great. It flags almost all of its possible errors, but there are maybe a dozen kanji per page that have to be checked, and the low resolution results in a number of small-kana errors and random guesswork.
- JPEG just sucks for OCR; I really wouldn't want to proof a series that was only available as JPEGs.
- The scans for some series that haven't been OCRd are only ~800x1200; even as PNG, those can't be fun to OCR. Time to build a DIY Bookscanner!
- My scripts currently don't handle oddball furigana well; in Rune Soldier, a number of ordinary words are given phonetically-written English readings, some quite long, and they create layout problems in pLaTeX.
- I need to figure out how to tell pLaTeX to break lines more aggressively; the small page size and tight margins of the Kindle means that a sloppy line break can leave an entire character offscreen; rare, but annoying.
That said, I successfully OCRd and proofed those same thirty pages that I read three years ago, ran them through my scripts, and read the story. It took about two hours to prep, and another two hours to read. I found some more errors that need correcting, but the first pass was perfectly readable.
I’ve also formatted and re-read Nishimura’s Ame no Naka ni Shinu, and the Kino stories Kioku no Kuni and Watashi no Kuni. I’m going to hold off on OCRing the rest of Rune Soldier 1 for a while, though, and focus on reading what I’ve got, which includes the second Kino novel and Tsutsui’s well-known Toki o Kakeru Shoujo. Oh, and I just remembered that copy of Kanjousen Pete typed in; that one’s already prepped for formatting.
"Oh, joy, Tuf and Tuf again. I can hardly wait."
George R. R. Martin’s Tuf Voyaging remains sadly out of print, but some small quantity of a relatively recent small-press edition are available directly from the author, autographed.
I made sure to place my order before mentioning this on my blog, just in case. My two paperback copies of the book are both starting to lose pages, and it’s an old favorite.
"I feel obliged to point out that a rather large carnivorous dinosaur has appeared in the corridor behind you, and is presently attempting to sneak up on us. He is not doing a very good job of it."
-- Haviland Tuf, Ecological Engineer
Ouch! Massive quake and tsunami hit Japan
Magnitude 8.9 off the coast near Sendai, with many significant aftershocks. USGS reports that there was a 7.2 magnitude quake in the same area two days ago, which had three 6+ magnitude aftershocks.
[Update: Brickmuppet has some disturbing details; coastal trains just “missing”, a city of 77,000 wiped off the map, etc. So far the best news I’ve seen is that the nuclear power plant that didn’t have enough coolant for a safe shutdown has been resupplied by air by the US Air Force (no, Hillary was talking out of her ass again).]
[Update: The American Red Cross doesn’t have a targeted donation page up yet for this disaster, but as reported by Reuters and elsewhere, they’ve set up an instant text-message donation system, and of course their standard international donation fund will be used to help out in Japan and elsewhere. I don’t see a way to contribute directly to the Japanese Red Cross on their site, but I’m sure we’ll find something when we arrive in Kyoto in two weeks.]
[Update: Wikipedia, Google Crisis Response pages]
[Update: Amazon is processing Red Cross payments through a prominently-displayed button on their home page. Amazon Japan has a letter on their home page redirecting to the Japan Red Cross donation site, which is currently a bit flaky.]
Dear Wisconsin Democrats,
This is not “what democracy looks like”, this is what a temper tantrum looks like. If you wanted democracy, you should have spent the last three weeks hounding your senators to stop hiding out in hotels and go back to their jobs.
