I am taking part in Project Gutenberg’s Distributed Proofreading project. For the first round you get a page of scanned from the original work and the corresponding page from the OCR software. You then check the OCR text to make sure it is correct, making changes to reflect the proofing guidelines. It’s pretty simple and a lot of fun.

The book I’m working on this morning is Queechy by Elizabeth Wetherell. I’m not 100% sure when it was written, but it obviously takes place before the American Civil War. The page on am working on now contains a discussion between a young American girl and an older British man. They are speaking of how the British have abolished slavery but the Americans have not. The man says that Americans are prejudiced, and then says the following:

” Why,” said Mr. Stackpole,–” in their absurd opposition to all
the old and tried forms of things, and rancourous dislike of those
who uphold them; and in their pertinacity on every point where
they might be set right, and impatience of hearing the truth.”

Reading that passage, I think that perhaps half of that is still true and the other half is quite the opposite now. It’s funny how things change, and how they stay the same.

I had a bad day yesterday. After my initial triumph of getting my template to work in MT things went sharply down hill. I added MTAmazon to my template, but it wasn’t updating my wish list right. Then I was trying to reorganize my website into directories, following some instructions for my menu given to me early by quanta, and that wasn’t going right. He kept telling me about half of what I was supposed to be doing, expecting to some how magically know the rest. There were 100 little things like that all day.

So, in the evening we decide to go see a Russian art movie called Russian Ark. (Is it just me, or does that poster remind you of Titanic?) On they way to the theater, I apologize to quanta for being grouchy. He said he hadn’t noticed. What the heck? I had a horrible day. I asked if I was always so grouchy, and he said I pretty much was. Ouch! Talk about a wake up call. I like to think I live mindfully, but I obviously don’t. I guess it is time to make some changes, but I don’t know where to being.

As for the movie. Well… it was a Russian art film. It was technical stunning, the whole idea of one continuous shot for the whole movie. The idea, a tour through the Hermitage with some disembodied man and a 19th century French aristocrat, was a bit lacking. To top it off, there weren’t enough subtitles. I get the feeling that some of the scenes would have been much more interesting if we knew what the extras were saying.