Local radio station KPLU did a piece on Carrie Fisher‘s Wishful Drinking show at the Seattle Rep.
They include some good bits from the live show.
Archive for April, 2009
Carrie Fisher on KPLU
Thursday, April 16th, 2009Acrobat OCR sucks ass, FineReader all the way
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009So I’ve been experimenting with kindleizing some antique books, and have found that the free OCR software that came with my scanner (FineReader sprint) works 100x better than the OCR built into Acrobat.
Not only does Acrobat do a terrible job at recognition, it’s editing workflow is worthless. It’s the kind of experience that makes me wonder if I’m missing some fundamental “don’t suck” setting.
Acrobat:
From the very moment that Tom
help the government of Ngombia ‘L.__!: ~.._.i’I
the jungle-separated provinces of _-~__”"1E-li
-a task that has stumped the
United States-he is beset by JD.1_11
to defeat the project.
AbbyFine:
From the very moment that Tom Swift Jr. agrees to help the government of Ngombia build a highway to link the jungle-separated provinces of the new African nation —a task that has stumped the best engineers in the United States—he is beset by mysterious attacks aimed to defeat the project.
The “best” part is, when I ask Acrobat to identify questionable OCR bits, it says it didn’t have any problems at all, so it’s impossible to fix the errors Acrobat has. Thank goodness they offered a free trial version.
Amazon Rank Fiasco
Monday, April 13th, 2009It seems some homophobe is in control of the censorship desk at Amazon, and has decided that any title with a Gay-ish theme is unworthy of having an Amazon Rank; but naughy hetero titles are still just fine. Naturally, the spokeslime for Amazon is telling a tall tale, to protect their homophobic friend, but hopefully once Jeff Bezos wakes up this morning, he’ll get around to publicly firing and shaming the appropriate party.
UPDATE: Amazon has been making the rounds with a bogus story, blaming some anonymous french worker over the Easter weekend. Never mind that there’s ZERO chance of someone in a French office on Easter doing anything but the most critical tasks, it wouldn’t explain the official policy statements sent to authors over the last few months, nor how any system could classify pro-gay books with “sexuality”, but wouldn’t similarly tag anti-gay books, much less leaves the Ron Jeremey autobiography untouched.
Nope, this was a deliberate action by someone at Amazon. Maybe not authorized, but definetly deliberate, and someone is definetly deliberately making the problem worse spreading horseshit around, instead of soap.
ESL spam
Thursday, April 9th, 2009“we have a special Eastern gift for you”
Dreamhost Rocks
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009Sometimes loyalty pays off. I won’t say the road hasn’t had some bumps along the way, but dreamhost really did a good job recently, when they switched me to unlimited storage and bandwidth for life, just because they only gave me 24 hours notice of a end-user-transparent server switch.
It makes me think I should start doing some more music and video projects….
Oh Frabtabulous Day!
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009One of my favorite features of the original Tivo was the ability to capture the live TV buffer when recording a show already in progress. I remember well, the extreme disappointment when I saw something funny while watching live TV on my Series 3/HD, and hit record, and lost it. =(
Well it turns out there’s a trick that you can use to still capture the live TV buffer with new Tivos, so long as you don’t accidentally change channels first…
Go into Find Programs-> Record By Time or Channel -> Setup Manual Recording
Enter the begining of the live TV buffer, and a point in the future, and presto-chango, you’ve got your live TV saved =)
lil Beirut
Monday, April 6th, 2009According to the Seattle PD, I live in a neighborhood they are now calling “Little Beirut” because of all the drug violence.
Wishful Drinking is Fun
Monday, April 6th, 2009I made it out this weekend to see Carrie Fisher‘s Wishful Drinking.
It was a really amusing show, and I ended up wishing I’d spent the extra dough for a front row seat, in hopes that she’d have called on me, but still totally worth going, for any seat in the house.
It will be interesting, listening to the audiobook version next, since alot of the stage show dealt with images on the screen behind her, or props that came down from the ceiling. It seems I really missed out though, as her mom came to opening night.
Quite the experience. She told a few stories about her time with Paul Simon, something I knew but hadn’t ever really processed into an awareness that some of my fave songs might have something to do with Carrie.