A Siege of Herons

On the blog again...

It's been a while since my last post. I have been busy with other things, mainly in an attempt to bring myself back from the brink of political news burnout. It's tough sometimes knowing how much info there is about this (mis)administration and also how few actually pay it any mind. And not just the bug eaters and snake handlers of the fundamentalist christian crowd, either.

Anyway, in case anyone is wondering, I've been devoting some of my time recently to the following pursuits:

• Project Gutenberg began in 1971 with the notion of making public domain (copyright has expired) works available in a digital format. The first work transmitted in this manner was 'The Declaration of Independence.' Since that time, over 12,000 eBooks have been created and made freely available. In 2000, Distributed Proofreaders was founded to aid in the preparation and creation of new eBooks for posting on the Project Gutenberg site. A while back I joined up to help in proofing OCR text taken from scanned page images. It's something I have found I enjoy immensely. To date, I have personally proofread 826 pages of text from a number of different books and magazines. They also have a ranking system, in the spirit of friendly competition, and I am currently ranked 640 out of 13,751. I encourage anyone who thinks they might be interested to check out these sites, and feel free to contact me for my take on doing this kind of thing. I have considered creating a "Team Democrat," and likely would if I knew at least a couple other people who'd be interested in signing on for something like this.
  
• In the distant past I was once upon a time a seventh grade student. In my school, certain students (of which I was one such) were allowed to begin studying a foreign language in eighth grade. I had really wanted to learn Latin, but unfortunately the Latin teacher at my school had just retired and wasn't getting replaced. So I had to choose between French and Spanish. The latter has never had any appeal to me, so I picked French. I went on to take five years of the language by the time I graduated from high school. Sadly, there was no one with whom I could practice the language (this was before the Internet exploded into American homes, by about five years to be exact), so my language skills have atrophied. Regardless, this isn't so much about French, as about my recent rekindled interest in learning Latin. I've managed to pick up a few books here or there on the language, and also have been getting others from Textkit, which provides pdf files of public domain Latin and Greek textbooks and readers. I downloaded everything there in a fit of downloading insanity, even though only a couple of the books are of any interest to an absolute beginner. I think I might try to locate a partner to work on learning the language with. Anyone reading this who might be interested, feel free to say hi and introduce yourself.
  

So there you have it, my wild and (un)crazy free time for the past couple of weeks. I'll post more later maybe, if I can rid myself of this headache. Ugh.

A Siege of Herons

posted by A Siege of Herons @ 2:37:00 PM