Cruella De Vil has never looked better.

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The trip to Japan has been rebooked for late November, so no Kyoto cherry blossoms for us this year, but I know precisely how lovely Kansai is in Autumn, so we will certainly not be disappointed.

Unfortunately, this leaves me burned out and cranky, with no real alternative recovery plan. I have the usual three-free-nights offers in Vegas, but I don’t want casinos and crowds. California is finally warming up and drying up, so I could give my cameras some exercise at Point Lobos and other places, but there’s an air of been-there-done-that to all the nearby sightseeing opportunities, and they’re basically solo activities, where the Japan trip was built around sharing the experience with my sister.

Meanwhile, my 2002 Lexus had crossed the 280,000 mile mark, and despite its excellent health and promise of a long remaining lifetime, faced increasingly expensive service trips.

So I replaced it.

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Reading Gruber‘s opinions on Android is like reading a vegan review of roast beef. It’s clear that the mere thought of eating it makes him want to puke.

As far as I’m concerned, refurbished 1st-gen iPads are still about $200 over the price I’m willing to pay for such limited-by-design functionality, and I’m waiting to see if the Xoom and other Android tablets do better before I spend any money there. I haven’t bought into either ecosystem for a phone, either; my aging Blackberry handles work email effectively, and honestly does a better job as a phone.

Yeah, I got nothin’.

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.]

Call me when I can do this on an iPad…

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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.

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.

1. 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.
2. JPEG just sucks for OCR; I really wouldn't want to proof a series that was only available as JPEGs.
3. 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!
4. 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.
5. 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.