Month: September 2002

Distributed Proofreading

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

As you may be aware, Project Gutenberg is an effort to provide free ASCII copies of out-of-copyright works. Run by volunteers, they hunt down out-of-copyright works, scan them, apply OCR, and proofread them (OCR isn’t perfect, after all).

Project Gutenberg started in 1971 — long before the web — and it becomes more modern as technology advances. It used to be that proofreading was done “by hand”. However, there’s now a Distributed Proofreading effort:

This site provides a web-based method of easing the proofreading work associated with the creation of Project Gutenberg E-Texts. By breaking the work into individual pages many proofreaders can be working on the same book at the same time. This significantly speeds up the proofreading/E-Text creation process.

When a proofer elects to proofread a page for a particular project, the text and image file are displayed on a single webpage. This allows the text file to be easily reviewed and compared to the image file, thus assisting the proofreading of the text file. The edited text file is then submitted back to the site via the same webpage that it was edited on. […]

So, now anyone can become a volunteer proofreader. And, I’m considering helping out. Sure, I may not have time to go through many pages, but those would be pages that someone else wouldn’t have to proofread.

Picture Day

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

Today was “picture day” at work, where a photographer came in and took our pictures (separately, and as a group), supposedly for the website or something. But, I had to wear a suit today, so that was a bit of a bummer.

During the small talk that photographers seem to do, I asked him whether he was using an F5 (I saw its Nikon badge, so that helped narrow it down). However, it turns out that he was using a digital camera! Granted, this was no ordinary digicam, but Nikon’s D1X, a digital SLR. At $6,000 for the body alone (lenses are extra), the D1X is a very capable camera.

Interestingly enough, the D1X doesn’t have a huge resolution. It “only” has 5.33 Megapixels, and there are other 5 Megapixel cameras available from Nikon at less than a fifth of the price. Of course, the big difference is in confiigurability and picture quality. And, in many ways, I can relate to that sentiment. I’m also starting to look over digital cameras and, though I don’t typically need ultra-high resolution, I would like optimum picture quality.

Anyhow, the photographer had the camera setup with wireless triggers for external flash-stands (the flash hotshoe on the camera just had a box with an antenna). It was really quite a fascinating setup. And, I had wanted to talk to him more about his equipment, but when I came back after I thought all the photographs were completed, he had already left.

Seinfeld Trailer

Ashley Bischoff5 Comments

As mentioned on MetaFilter, I really enjoyed the trailer for the new Seinfeld movie (QuickTime required). The trailer has no actual scenes from the movie, as far as I can tell, but it heartily makes fun of one-liners from trailers (“in a land that time forgot…”).

Part of the discussion on MetaFilter is whether the voiceover artist in the trailer is the actual voiceover artist, or wether it’s dubbed onto an actor. Though I suspect that it’s an actor, I’m not sure, and I would be interested in finding out.

Gala Apples

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

The other day, I shopped around for apples at Sam’s Club. Apples in general are fairly low-calorie — a entire apple only has about as many calories as a Rice Krispies bar (80 Calories vs 90 Calories). So, I figured on having half an apple with my breakfast sandwich, and the other half with lunch.

Anyhow, I bought some Gala apples. I don't know if I'd call it the “best apple I ever had in my life”, but it was still tasty. It had good overall apple flavor, and a crisp texture. I was especially pleased that it didn’t suffer from the thick and bitter skin that can plague Red Delicious applies.